Millions won in latest homeless housing grants

Newsom announces the first recipients of new Homekey funds

San Mateo County won nearly $70 million in state funding for homeless housing Wednesday, making it the first Bay Area jurisdiction to benefit in the latest iteration of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s ambitious Homekey program.

The money will go toward two projects on the Peninsula. The county will use $55.3 million to build a 240-unit navigation center on a county-owned lot in Redwood City, which will provide homeless residents with temporary housing, support and help finding long-term homes. An additional $13.5 million will help the county buy the 44-unit Stone Villa Inn in San Mateo and turn it into homeless housing.

“It creates a path for us to take those people who are unhoused and to give them housing. And it’s a huge, huge, huge day of celebration,” said San Mateo County Board of Supervisors President David Canepa. “Having these Homekey dollars is really going to make a significant, significant dent in making sure that those that are unhoused are able to get housed.”

The county expects the new navigation facility, located near the Maple Street Correctional Center, will open in late 2022. The project will use modular units to create individual studio apartments where residents have their own bathrooms.

San Mateo County’s last count, conducted in 2019, found 1,512 people living in homelessness. Earlier this year, Redwood City counted 101 unhoused people living in 25 encampments in the city — nearly half of whom had said they became homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As part of a push to get people off the streets and out of crowded shelters during the pandemic, Newsom last year doled out $846 million in federal, state and philanthropic funds to finance 94 homeless housing projects. That first round of Homekey money was viewed as so successful by his administration that Newsom more than tripled the program in his last budget. Cities, counties and nonprofits will have access to $2.75 billion in Homekey funds over the next two years. Of that, $1.45 billion is available

now, with about $200 million reserved for Bay Area projects.

On Wednesday, the state announced awards for $105 million. Kern County and the city of Victorville also received funding.

“One of our primary objectives is always to act with urgency to address homelessness and housing needs by connecting people with affordable housing faster,” Gustavo Velasquez, director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development, wrote in a news release. “Homekey is well known for flipping hotels and motels and turning them into housing units for those experiencing homelessness. With this second round of Homekey, we will be seeing other project types — repurposing

things like multifamily buildings, creating modulars, and adding to mixedincome and mixed-population buildings. It’s this type of innovation that’s needed to end our housing crisis.”

During the first iteration of Homekey in 2020, the Bay Area scored money for 20 projects — from tiny homes in Mountain View to an art school dorm in Oakland to hotels in San Jose. San Mateo County bought two hotels in Redwood City using Homekey funds last year.

But taking advantage of this new program came with challenges, and some projects in the Bay Area have struggled. The city of San Jose clashed with state housing officials over the rents the city proposed charging in a hotel turned into homeless housing. Other projects have faced delays because of funding gaps or an inability to find a nonprofit developer interested in taking over the site.

Homekey emerged as the second part of a twopronged attack on homelessness. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, experts worried the virus would attack the state’s massive population of vulnerable, unhoused residents. In response, Newsom launched Project Roomkey — a statewide effort to move homeless people temporarily into hotel rooms. Homekey followed as a way to turn some of those hotels into long-term housing.

“Budgets are a statement of values, and with the California Comeback Plan, we have made it crystal clear — we will not let up on our commitment to doing everything in our power to address homelessness,” Newsom wrote. “Homekey continues to change lives for the better in communities all across California by placing individuals on a path to long-term stable housing with services.”