‘Rehousing wave’ spending for homeless motel shelters OK’d by Santa Cruz County

SANTA CRUZ >> The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors this week grappled with a familiar local debate: should homelessness funding prioritize providing immediate shelter options or aim instead to house individuals.

The immediate issue at hand Tuesday related to county plans for some 550 people living in temporary motel room space, funded with state and federal grants for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. Statewide, “Project Roomkey” motel room programs were designed primarily to move seniors and medically vulnerable people without shelter off the streets, so as to reduce the likelihood of infection. Others used the space as

temporary isolation areas after exposure, or to move out of congregate living situations. That funding may disappear as the pandemic begins to wind down.

Before the board Tuesday was a recommendation to approve some $8 million in primarily “rapid rehousing” contracts, spread to three different service providers, which would assist some 200 people. Officials shared news that the funding plan came on top of the Housing Authority of the County of Santa Cruz’s recent setaside of 75 long-term rental assistance vouchers for nonelderly disabled households participating in COVID-19 sheltering programs.

“I just might say, if people don’t think we’re doing a lot about housing, this is almost $10 million worth of programs to help those — and other emergency services,” board Chairman Bruce McPherson said. “So it’s quite a package.”

County Housing for Health division Director Robert Ratner told supervisors that in Alameda County, where he was previously employed, efforts to move people from emergency pandemic shelters into housing had begun earlier and already were successful in finding space for more than 400 people.

“If we do not move forward with this proposed package, which is fairly consistent with what federal and state technical assistance providers have recommended to communities throughout California, we’ll be in jeopardy of having a large number of people who are staying in COVID shelters without anywhere to go and we’ll see a significant increase, I would anticipate, in the number of unsheltered people in the fall when we do have not formal authority to continue our FEMA-supported sheltering efforts,” Ratner said.

Dissenting opinion

Approval of contracts with Housing Matters, Abode Services and the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County Inc. came in a 4-1 vote, over protest by Supervisor Manu Koenig.

“I believe we should be investing some of this money, rather than just spending it all, that there is still a huge gap in emergency shelter within our community and I do not believe that simply spending as much money as possible on rapid rehousing is going to yield the results that we’re after,” Koenig said.

Prior to the contracts’ approval, Koenig suggested halving the county’s “rehousing wave” contract spending plan and pouring the remainder into “failsafe” emergency shelter facilities, rather than “throwing money at the problem” in a search for scarce rental housing options. Koenig also suggested pairing the state and federal grant funding with the state’s Project Homekey initiative, which would pave the way to purchase and renovate existing motels into apartment units.

“I’d much rather be paying people who are building housing or for housing supply itself, rather than paying a bunch of people sitting behind desks, helping people look for housing that simply doesn’t exist,” Koenig said.

Ratner said a key goal of the county effort is to assist people, often elderly or with disabilities, in locating housing. The plan, he said, is “to make sure we’re not going to return people back to the streets from our COVID-19 sheltering efforts.”

Comparing past efforts

Koenig made reference to “significant frustration” in the community, on which he did not elaborate, about how approximately $10 million in 2019 homelessness state and federal grant funding was spent locally. Ratner said some of this newer federal Emergency Solutions Grant-Coronavirus Relief Act and state Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention Program dollars sent to Santa Cruz already had been set aside for emergency shelter costs and that the board’s recently adopted Housing for Healthy policy framework includes a focus on the rapid rehousing opportunities discussed this week.

County Human Services Director Randy Morris said that the bulk of the county’s previous homelessness grant funding was spent on emergency sheltering, hygiene facilities and outreach. He compared that effort to what was being proposed Tuesday.

“The preliminary results that we have from the use of that funding is we did not help a lot of people get into permanent housing and that funding is coming to an end, so we will be seeing some reductions in emergency shelter capacity,” Morris said.

Supervisor Ryan Coonerty said he agreed with Koenig in that Santa Cruz County is has a highly expensive housing market and commended county staff’s decision to spread the grant funding among three different organizations, in order to see which approaches are successful.

“We’ll need to see if this works as a model that can then be applied to our continuing crisis across this community,” Coonerty said.

Human Services officials will return to the board in August with an update on the rehousing efforts.