Novato faces homeless issue
Housing, not sanctioned campgrounds, is the city’s best way to address homelessness during the pandemic, Novato officials said this week.
“Establishing a camp and saying, ‘This is where you should go,’ is saying, ‘Stay homeless and stay unsheltered in this location instead,’” police Sgt. Alan Bates, who heads the city’s homelessness response team, told the City Council on Tuesday. “The goal here is to get the people under a roof as quickly as possible. And the more resources and time we put into a sanctioned camp, the more that gets pulled away from the ‘housing first’ model.”
The council discussion followed months of attention on homelessness issues in the city, from a growing homeless encampment at Lee Gerner Park to a controversial and abandoned proposal to convert a 70-room hotel into homeless housing.
The county has adopted a “housing first” strategy meant to stabilize homeless residents by immediately placing them into housing and then connecting them to supportive services. But the pandemic has been a roadblock in some of these efforts, Bates told the council.
County officials say there isn’t enough supportive housing available for all homeless residents in the county. Meanwhile, emergency shelters offered by Homeward Bound of Marin have had to
reduce bed capacity by as much as half because of the pandemic.
“It’s not coincidental that Lee Gerner popped up the same time the pandemic did,” Novato police Chief Matthew McCaffrey told the council. “I think once we see the pandemic start to ebb a little bit, we’ll start to see services pick up, we’ll start to see some of these people housed.
“It’s not going to happen overnight, it’s not going to be a cure for this. But I think we’re going to see established services that we have in place working like they’re supposed to. And right now they’re not.”
There were 147 homeless residents in Novato in January 2019, according to the latest data available.