Health crisis frees aid to fight homelessness
At an Oakland City Council meeting in December, Lara Tannenbaum, manager of the city’s community housing services, laid out a fiveyear plan to end homelessness. The plan’s price tag of $123 million annually caused me to gasp. Five months later, that actually sounds like a bargain.
Here’s why: In March, the $2 trillion Cares Act included $4 billion in emergency solutions grants for homelessness assistance. Oakland received about $2 million. Still, advocates for the homeless tell me billions more will be need
ed to house the vulnerable people living outdoors in Oakland and cities across the country — and to keep people who are housinginsecure from joining them on the street.
States and cities need more federal funding to effectively combat homelessness. It’s one thing the coronavirus hasn’t changed.
I saw Tannenbaum last week at the opening of Operation HomeBase, a trailer program constructed in the shadow of the Oakland Coliseum on Hegenberger Road in East Oakland. The 67 trailers will be used to isolate homeless seniors 65 and older, and homeless folks with underlying health conditions such as heart disease, asthma and diabetes — conditions that make the coronavirus infections more deadly.
The city estimates that, at minimum, 53% of homeless people in Oakland fall within groups identified as high risk by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Everything we’re doing now — the level of coordination, the level or reduced bureaucracy, the level of things we’re standing up — we could’ve done years ago,” Tannenbaum told me. She’s right. Unfortunately, it took a global pandemic for the federal government to loosen purse strings.
“The problem has been that Congress for decades has underfunded investments in affordable housing,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy for the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an organization working to expand the supply of lowincome housing. When lowincome people “don’t have an affordable place to live, they are at a very high risk of evictions and homelessness because it only takes one financial shock to push them over the edge.”
Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland said Congress should reprioritize financial resources.
“We’re way past time to do this,” Lee said. “This is an emergency upon an emergency, and we have to deal with the immediate emergency, and that’s get people housed and secured.
“We have to also see this as a moment to do some structural changes, and to make sure that we never go back to what it was.”
Before stayhome orders, about 300 people each month became newly homeless in Oakland, according to city data. As Mayor Libby Schaaf and others spoke during the Operation HomeBase news conference, I asked Oakland City Councilman Larry Reid what he thought about the billions released for homelessness.
“That tells you the richest country in this world had the ability to address the problems that cities across this country are faced with,” he said. “There is no reason why any of this should be going on. There’s no reason why people shouldn’t have a roof over their head and food to put in their stomachs.”
In January, Gov. Gavin Newsom delivered stateowned trailers to Oakland, part of his weeklong statewide homelessness tour. Almost four months later, the trailers were finally ready to be occupied. By Friday, four people had moved in.
The airconditioned trailers have showers and toilets, which make the trailers more homey than the Tuff Shed sites where people have been temporarily housed in storage sheds. That’s the good news. The bad news: Operation HomeBase’s capacity is only 134 people. In Oakland, more than 4,000 are homeless.
The operating budget is $1.8 million annually, and it cost $1.5 million to launch. Funding for the program came from the state’s emergency coronavirus funds and a $500,000 grant from Taube Philanthropies.
I’ve always been concerned for our unhoused neighbors, but now I’m also worried about the 4 million people in the state who have filed for unemployment since March. Sure, renters are protected by eviction moratoriums, but what happens when moratoriums are lifted and the jobless still can’t pay rent? Will they end up on the street?
“We can’t create a financial cliff for renters to fall off of,” Saadian said.
This is a dire time we’re living through, but Tannenbaum also sees projects like Operation HomeBase as an opportunity to address homelessness with money that wasn’t available just a few months ago. Again, she’s right.
“I have to see it as an opportunity or else it’s too much. It’s too depressing,” she said. “The fact that so many people are paying attention to this issue in a way that they haven’t before and things are moving in a way they haven’t before, it is an opportunity.”