A plan to end homelessness, as new tiny homes in Boyes Hot Springs

Two major hurdles in the effort to serve unsheltered residents came together last week, united with a single, ambitious goal: To end homelessness in Sonoma Valley.

The nonprofit Homeless Action Sonoma placed 18 tiny homes on its Boyes Hot Springs property on May 2, and the Sonoma City Council endorsed a three-year action plan designed to end homelessness on May 3 — a proposal that requires over a million dollars in new spending.

“We're in this critical moment. We’re either going to come together around the plan and implement the plan, or we're going to kind of continue to be doing our own things,” said Andrew Hening, a city consultant focused on unsheltered services. “It's just a matter of how do we actually align all of those irons in the fire and make sure that those efforts are supported.”

Over the past year, Hening helped craft the three-year plan after studying the city’s homeless service providers and unhoused residents. It calls for $3.6 million in annual spending, which is nearly double the current operating capacity of the Valley’s homeless services at $1.7 million.

“On one hand, that's a very large number. And on the other hand, I think that's actually an achievable number,” Hening said.

The plan calls for $260,000 in additional funds from the city — which leaves a $900,000 shortfall. Hening hypothesized that homeless service providers could “more effectively leverage state and federal grant and funding opportunities,” according to his presentation.

Mayor Sandra Lowe was hopeful the county might provide additional support.

“I say this a lot that Sonoma Valley, and pardon me Supervisor (Susan) Gorin I mean it it in some potentially kind way, the Sonoma Mission Inn and a lot of the things in the Valley are the ATM for the county,” she said. “There's a lot of money coming out of this Valley coming and we need to bring some of that back to the Valley."

No full-proof plan

The ambitious plan to functionally end homelessness has its skeptics within the Valley’s homeless service organizations.

CEO of Sonoma Overnight Support Kathy King has seen food insecurity skyrocket in Sonoma Valley over the past year as inflation and the rising cost of living squeeze low-income families. She said the plan’s spending did not address the funding concerns faced by the Valley’s homeless service providers.

“You go to page 40 and see who's going to pay for what. And it's like we just have to come up with our own money from private funds,” King said. “There's no funds allocated for the providers, and that puts the burden back on the providers like FISH (Friends In Sonoma Helping), HAS and us.”

The first year of the plan would fund and launch new positions and initiatives, including hiring a homeless city coordinator, recruiting three case managers, leveraging housing vouchers with landlords and convening weekly meetings to discuss residents on a “by name list” that is tracking the progress of unhoused clients.

Year two would monitor the growth of those investments and tweak strategies to optimize their approach. And in the final year of the plan, the new system would be evaluated by the baseline of year one, which would be used for planning the next three year plan for addressing homelessness.

While King and Annie Falandes, the founder of HAS, are hopeful about the plans and the support of the city council, they remain concerned about its financial feasibility.

“I think it’s overly ambitious,” Falandes said. “Unless the city and the county double down and give more money, his theory is that it will solve our own problem. And it probably will solve our problem, but the burden is still on providers.”

Chronically homeless

Hening’s findings showed the Valley has two predominant groups of unhoused people whose needs differ substantially — the chronically unhoused and the short-term unhoused.

“Some communities don't understand this dynamic and it leads to investments or systems of care that are not effective in really solving either,” Hening said.

Chronically unhoused residents represent about one-third of the Valley’s homeless population, roughly 80 people at any given time. Those in this group often deal with some combination of mental illness, physical disability and substance abuse that can be exacerbated and reinforced by homelessness.

The action plan calls to leverage the new tiny homes operated by HAS for chronically unhoused residents of Sonoma Valley as part of a “housing first” model, in which residents get a stable place to live, then receive services and support to become independent.

Falandes said the tiny homes represent a significant development as the first dedicated overnight homeless shelter in the Valley since the Sonoma Alliance Church’s winter shelter was shut down in 2018 following public outcry.

“It’s a dream come true … We need the permanent facility,” Falandes said.

The city’s action plan calls for increased collaboration with the county’s homelessness services, which can provide resources, job-training and rapid rehousing that is not available in Sonoma Valley.

“I do feel like, especially in today’s leadership, the county is really being seen as a much stronger partner for local communities,” Hening said. “The Valley is sort of removed from what I describe as the kind of ‘transformational social services’ that are available in different parts of the county … Think of workforce services or benefits advocacy, or job training, things like that. Those are difficult for people to access (in the Valley).”

Hening is staking much of the action plan on better collaboration with the county to use homeless service hubs in Santa Rosa and Petaluma — which have the resources to address chronic and short-term homelessness.

Unhoused short-term

Short-term unhoused residents are often the victims of sudden job loss, injury, divorce or domestic violence. These residents can find new housing for themselves given adequate resources, but they also run the risk of becoming chronically homeless if they cannot establish a lower cost of living.

Hening said that most unhoused residents in Sonoma Valley were not active in the county’s coordinated entry system, which helps to funnel applicants toward resources, housing vouchers or other services.

“When local providers started the Sonoma Valley (by name list) meeting, just 2% of people on the (list) were in (the county’s Homeless Management Information System). Fortunately, thanks to this new forum for coordination, within a few short months, that number jumped to 41%,” the presentation stated.

Hening also identified local landlords as a potential community partner that has yet to fully be realized.

“One approach that can be very, very effective is to better work with the local landlord community; to try to place housing vouchers or other kinds of resources,” Hening said. “We've been in this double whammy situation of people who are not really enrolled in that system, and thus, they're not eligible for the benefits or possible benefits. And then if they get the benefits, there's no local capacity to actually find placement opportunities.”

Contact Chase Hunter at chase.hunter@sonomanews.com and follow @Chase_HunterB on Twitter.