We need housing
When COVID-19 hit, everyone was scared. We weren’t completely sure how the infection was transmitted, or even what all the symptoms were. We did know that chronic medical conditions and older age put you at risk, and that the disease was highly contagious.
And so, the grand experiment of social distancing and shelter-in-place began. Our homes, while always important for our health in a background sense, became the quarantine fortresses that helped us keep a pandemic at bay. Now, imagine you have no home. Or perhaps your ability to stay in a home is dependent on a minimum wage job, and that job has ended. Now, you have no fortress, and your exposure to a potentially deadly disease is extremely difficult to mitigate.
This vulnerable position is the case that the nearly 1,200 people without homes in Solano County found themselves in March. This number increases by hundreds or thousands if the housing insecure (those spending large chunks of their paychecks on poorly affordable housing) are included. COVID-19 has laid bare many inequities in our country, and limited access to affordable housing is no exception. For years, the City of Vallejo and Solano County have been woefully behind in affordable housing development, and the gap between the need for housing and the number of available units only continues to grow.
This is where Vallejo City Councilmember Hakeem
Brown has emerged as a leader. He has been actively working to understand the issues and seeking innovative ways to address them. He participates in the citywide homelessness roundtable to engage on-the-ground organizations to better understand the current landscape for our people without homes in Vallejo.
So, when Project Room
Key — a state-funded initiative to house people who are unhoused in hotels who were at higher risk for COVID — started, he was able to act as a connector between the city and local service providers to expand the availability of medical care at the site. Understanding the need for longerterm solutions, he reached out to local community leaders and churches to pursue creative housing strategies like tiny houses on underutilized properties to expand capacity and affordability of producing transitional housing. He also proposed a budget amendment for the 2020-2021 budget to provide grants for homelessness service providers and directly allocate funding toward rapid transitional housing.
As a policy maker, Hakeem Brown has pushed for major changes in the city’s housing policy, including passing rent stabilization to help hundreds of seniors and families stay in their homes. He also advocated for the city to develop a comprehensive housing strategy to address Vallejo’s housing crisis and Vallejo’s failure to meet regional housing goals. He pushed to include local youth and community advocates in the conversation and acted as the council lead on youth/millennial focus groups.