Homeless slip through the cracks in state hotel program
Bay Area groups raise funds and operate their own sheltering project
With thousands of vulnerable Bay Area residents living on the streets, exposed to the coronavirus despite the state’s promise of hotel rooms as safe emergency shelter, local groups say they’ve been forced to step in where government efforts have fallen short.
In some cases, that has meant spending tens of thousands of dollars to shelter homeless residents who can’t get into state and county programs.
“We couldn’t wait on the county or city,” said Candice Elder, founder and executive director of The East Oakland Collective, which has placed 42 households in hotels in Oakland and Alameda. “We wanted to get ahead of the curve of a possible outbreak of COVID at the encampments … so we just decided to do a program on our own and to raise the money.”
Activists in the Bay Area say many people are falling through the cracks in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Project Roomkey, which encourages counties to lease hotel and motel rooms for their homeless residents and offers federal reimbursements for their efforts. The state program has sheltered more than 14,200 people so far.
But not everyone gets a room. Some people aren’t old enough or sick enough to qualify. Others get lost in a convoluted intake process or struggle to abide by the program’s rules.
Nearly 30,000 residents of the fivecounty Bay Area had nowhere to call home last year, and experts worry that number will grow this year thanks to the coronavirus-decimated economy.
At the same time, the virus poses an outsized threat to unhoused communities, where residents tend to be older and sicker than the general population, and often don’t have space or
resources to practice social distancing or good hygiene. And with Bay Area coronavirus infections and hospitalizations spiking as businesses reopen, activists are as worried as ever about those on the streets.
There are 15,679 rooms available under Project Roomkey — enough to house a tiny fraction of the state’s 151,000 homeless residents. Most of those rooms are prioritized for unhoused people for whom COVID-19 poses an extreme risk, such as people who are over 65 or have lung disease, a compromised immune system or another chronic illness.
About 85% of those rooms are full. The rest are reserved in case of a surge of unhoused residents who test positive for or have been exposed to the virus.
Using those hotel rooms hasn’t always gone smoothly. Plans to lease Berkeley’s La Quinta Inn fell apart just one day before dozens of residents were supposed to move in.
In Oakland, a fire — likely caused by a discarded cigarette — broke out in May at the Radisson Hotel, which houses homeless residents vulnerable to COVID-19. The fire burned one room, sent one resident to the hospital for smoke inhalation, and set off the building’s sprinklers, according to Oakland Fire Department Chief of Staff Michael Hunt. The resulting water damage displaced 50 people, who were moved to the nearby Quality Inn, and temporarily took much-needed rooms out of commission.
As of Thursday, Alameda County had 443 rooms for homeless residents vulnerable to COVID-19, 96% of which were full, according to the county. An additional 198 rooms — 29% full — were reserved for homeless coronavirus-positive people. The Board of Supervisors approved leases for three new hotels last week.
Project Roomkey wasn’t an option for 48-year-old LaShai Daniels, who moved into an Extended Stay hotel in Oakland in February after losing her Vallejo apartment last year. When the coronavirus hit a month later, she lost her temp job as a payroll specialist for Berkeley Unified School District and worried that she’d have to go back to living in her car.
“I felt like I didn’t fall into any of the categories that the government had started to set up for those going through the pandemic,” she said. “It was frustrating.”
Where the government didn’t step in, Oakland nonprofit Affect Real Change did — paying the bills for her room, as well as rooms for eight other households, said organizer Carroll Fife.
In Santa Clara County, officials as of June 29 had leased 678 hotel and motel rooms for homeless residents vulnerable to COVID-19.
About 77% were occupied, according to the county. An additional 68 rooms were leased for homeless residents who have or may have COVID-19.
To request a room, people are told to call the county’s COVID-19 housing hotline. But people who do say their calls go to voicemail, which can create an impossible game of phonetag. Homeless residents often call on borrowed cellphones. And if they have their own phone, they may have nowhere to charge it, as libraries, coffee shops and community centers are closed, so the battery dies and they miss their callback.
“Now I don’t even tell people to call,” said Shaunn Cartwright, an advocate who works with unhoused
communities in Santa Clara County. “You feel like you’re setting people up for failure by telling people to call the number.”
As of June 30, the housing hotline had fielded 4,091 calls in three months. In that time, the county had placed 837 homeless residents in group shelters and 800 in hotel rooms and other noncongregate shelters.
“We are confident that if someone meets criteria for (a) hotel/motel room, they can be placed into one quickly,” a representative wrote in an email.
In San Francisco, officials had leased 2,407 hotel rooms for vulnerable and virus-positive homeless residents,and filled 72% of them, according to state data from June 29.
Early in the pandemic,
Supervisor Dean Preston, fed up with how slowly the city was moving, began leasing rooms himself at Oasis Inn. He raised about $100,000 for the effort, including $10,000 from his own pocket. As of July 1, 15 families were still there. There’s enough money left to keep them housed for about another month, said Jen Snyder, Preston’s chief of staff.
Experts say hotel rooms can be a good option for quick emergency shelter, but they’re expensive — sometimes as much per month as an apartment. And the people and small organizations paying for them are quickly running out of money.
The East Oakland Collective, in partnership with other organizations, raised more than $120,000. But keeping the rooms — the organizations have 35 people in 20 rooms now — costs about $12,000 per week. And they’ve been running the program for seven weeks.
“We are down to the wire now,” Elder said. “We are down to a few-week buffer.”
“I felt like I didn’t fall into any of the categories that the government had started to set up for those going through the pandemic. It was frustrating.” — LaShai Daniels