Below is an expanded list of points we'd like to make together about the county's presentation. Our list of points is long because the document is full of errors in emphasis, facts, and logic. Please review the presentation itself if you have time (attached) and think of your own concerns. Connecting with the below points when you speak where appropriate will make our points more memorable and clearer.
- There isn't only one goal of Sonoma County's homeless system of care worth mentioning ("the goal of the homeless system of care is to end
homelessness"). It is a system of care: it doesn't in the least exist only "to end homelessness." Mostly, our system of care provides necessary health and welfare to the indigent, and helps prevents unconstitutional abuse by government and others. This is not a shocking or dastardly fact that contradicts the spirit of Housing First: our emergency shelters and all other programs leading to housing place the safety and care of the individuals in their care far above housing as a priority.. Budget has nothing to do with it. Comparing and contrasting the care and housing budgets, or commingling the budgets, or trying to cut corners on charity to build houses is ludicrous.
Government uses housing needs as a battering ram against those in camps and the streets, providing an excuse for scattering and other poor tools of homelessness management. Government must stop asserting that the needs of the indigent may be ignored because spending money on them would use money we need for housing.
- Government cannot ignore the needs of the indigent simply because they can't or won't go into emergency shelters. This is yet another government document on the subject that doesn't acknowledge a key fact, one that several supervisors mentioned at their last discussion of encampments: many people cannot and should not enter emergency shelters. Why are we still ignoring this fact? Why won't government include this population in its strategic vision? Why are they scattered and lost instead?
Buried in this discrimination is a tendency to think too much about how worthy homeless people are for housing programs, how acceptable their behavior is, how obedient and reliable they are. There's a strong sense that one must be worthy to sign up for and wait for housing. But as the Sonoma County Commission on Human Rights recently discussed, government must first provide our homeless friends their basic human rights. Government may sort out who is worthy for what housing program, or express concern when homeless people aren't progressing the way they'd like– but that's a separate process from providing them life's basics and leaving them unmolested.
- None of the high costs of the scatterings of encampments are even mentioned, let alone discussed, despite the county having just undergone an extraordinarily expensive set of evictions in rapid order. We will repeat these costs and risks, if the CDC recommendation is allowed to stand, and keep ignoring them.
- It doesn't discuss a single advantage to encampments or transitional villages except to say in passing that some residents "feel safe" in encampments. In fact, public health, the police, and any service provider who has had a hard time finding their clients can attest to the increased safety and stability of even the bad encampments we've had recently over a scattered population.
- The final section uses phrases like feedback loop, consolidated leadership, multi-agency, response to data, and flexibility to promise a bright future ahead– after a report that simply denigrates encampments. None of these phrases are explained or justified.
- This is an attempt to effectively deny the existence of a suffering community. Current policy remains a rout of our rights, an unreasoned, cruel approach with our friends and families. We are being force-fed evictions like geese, while an insane, misplaced emphasis on permanent housing lets us stay blind to cruelty, scattering, and open oppression.
- Attacking living outside as unacceptable is deceptive and beside the point, when 1) government scatters the disabled enthusiastically, at any and all times of the year, to justify spending money on "permanent" housing, and 2) government doesn't discuss providing insulated tents or insulated inexpensive sheds in sanctioned villages for the estimated 400 in encampments now.
Officials lump all "living outside" lifestyles together as unacceptable in this and other Housing First documents. This false statement is then used to justify a procedure of putting pressure on street and camp people to go into emergency shelters, whether it's right for them (and others) or not. This government talks down "living outside" as unacceptable ("not meant for human habitation"), while pretending living outside is optional for homeless people. They condemn it nonsensically, and then make the experience far riskier and more painful through evictions.
There are a few aspects of "living outside" that need to be considered before we figure out how acceptable it is. There's the nightmare of being 1) scattered 2) in winter 3) while sick, because someone doesn't want you where you are. Then there's an opposite experience outside, in an 4) insulated tent or shed, on your own piece of 5) earth, in a warm sleeping bag, watching a movie, knowing that 6) nobody is going to rip open your door, tell you to move everything you have now, and 7) throw you and your possessions out into whatever weather prevails, into 8) whatever neighborhood they allow you in. In other words, there are outdoor experiences that range from good to nightmarish, and government should acknowledge that.
Here is a sentence from the report, used to make "encampments" (of any kind, apparently) look unhelpful: "The number of people living in conditions not meant for human habitation would not be reduced by permitting such camps." Let's reword this and see if it makes as much sense to the reader: "We shouldn't have sanctioned villages because the same number of people will still be outside." We have made many efforts to explain the advantages of transitional villages to the CDC and the Board. Stability can be obtained out of doors. it is wrong to equate "tent" and "transitional villages" to "not fit for human habitation". Especially when we know that for many, that is the best they will get, Housing First miracles or no. It is a circular, tangential argument.
- Local police will acknowledge off-the-record what police in areas with transitional villages often state, that homeless people in groups are much easier and cheaper to police. The local police are afraid to reveal this common opinion among themselves due to politics. Yet anyone standing in even unsanctioned encampments day after day can testify how relatively easy they are, simply by observing that a whole local police unit devoted to homelessness rarely feels the need to be present more than one to three brief times a day, no matter how large the encampment. Emergency police calls to the Roseland camps were relatively rare, partially because the "first responders" are friends and leaders who break up fights, distract the angry, negotiate, respond to theft and overdose situations, and protect the elderly.
- Worrying about how hard it might be to wind down transitional villages some day is another feint. One has such a concern about almost any social welfare project.. If we build housing, transitional villages will empty. If we don't build adequate housing, we will still need the villages. It's that simple. This is yet another straw man argument of the opposition of transitional villages.
- The report says that transitional villages may be poor at getting a challenged population into permanent housing. That assertion then allows the report to declare that transitional villages are a waste of money. But sanctioned encampments are designed first to satisfy goals of safety and stability, not as some optimal path to the tiny, clawed-after pool of permanent housing. They provide stability to a highly unstable population. Well-designed and managed transitional villages can provide health, safety, and useful services at a very reasonable cost; these are all essential steps to stability for any housing search. It would be strange if many of them were particularly good at foisting candidates for permanent housing opportunities. Some villages, focused say on the elderly, the immediately employable, or veterans, might be great funnels into permanent housing. The narrowness of the analysis of the report makes this assertion of high expense deceptive, yet another irrelevant, missed mark.
This is another example of housing used as a cudgel to discourage a foundation of basic care. Most of the MIS this board should be looking at to evaluate transitional villages should have nothing to do with a person's eventual housing, or some "competitor" program housing, but with the cost of quality of care, and quality of life.
- Transitional villages are completely different from "large encampments", and the report continually blends the two as "encampments", "permitted encampments", camps, and other phrases. Among other evidence of carelessness with the principles involved, neither "transitional" nor "village" are used in the report (the village concept is key to any successful encampment strategy; the term is endemic in research.)
Transitional villages can also have a variety of implementations, to handle a widely heterogenous population with widely-varying risks. Key for all transitional villages, though, are bathroom facilities, clean water, trash service, adequate security fencing, an application requirement, and the ability to evict villagers. One version of a funded transitional village is as an outside, more spacious, relatively private emergency shelter. Some villages can be much less expensive than a shelter resident counterpart; others might be as much or more, depending on the resident profiles and community goals.
- Government must allow people a place to live unmolested. People cannot be punished for being poor while waiting for permanent housing to suddenly appear from impending Housing First miracles. It is the simplest of points. It is incredible to me that government still wiggles on the end of this hook, in and out of court, denying our Constitutional right to avoid cruel and unusual punishment at every turn.
- The CDC's statistical permanent housing measures are a manipulation and a set of mirages. Temporary stays at Palms, one of the most exalted of the "permanent housing" options, gives them months of shelter before being sent back on the streets. One friend at the Palms is already having eviction nightmares, worrying about what will happen in a little over a year. Other mere delays of homelessness make up the majority of "permanent housing" by Catholic Charity's measure. The only housing that should truly be labeled permanent is incredibly expensive new housing or astronomical rent subsidies in perpetuity, both of which are vanishingly rare. Yet these statistics are used as a bludgeon against transitional villages.
- Camp Michela, which the report makes an effort to hold up as an important failure, should never be thought of as a model village or a failure, for many reasons too involved to go into here.
– small tiny-home villages can leverage recent permitting changes to offer tremendous, cost-effective, permanent solutions for many. Not only are they not being aggressively evaluated as a cost-effective solution, neither they nor inexpensive huts are even mentioned in this report.
- the "navigation center" at the hardware store, an abuse of the term, was a terrible waste of funds. An equivalent amount could've generated a year of services support far beyond basic services, with an insulated tuff sheds tossed in for each person evicted from the encampment in late April. Instead, the county's program was developed without the input from either volunteer or village resident, and suffered from astounding lack of common sense. The failure of bad management and strategy is being set at the feet of the homeless population itself, who never asked for the navigation center, and rarely used it.
- No discussion of the systematic, documented neglect by current practices of the disabled, many on federal assistance, who comprise at least a large minority of our friends on the streets.
- Focusing on achieving the vanishingly rare "functional zero" level of homelessness, when our homelessness problem is far worse than the average county, allows government to justify the abuse homeless people and pretend a fiction about ending homelessness, with talk about flexibility and responsiveness and best practices and feedback loops. There is virtually no true permanent housing available, no matter how flexible a supervisor is getting. Ironically, that focus is being used to reject safe, healthy transitional villages as part of the Housing First solution.
- The statistics used are a manipulation. Evaluating success in both housing and care of the homeless is much more complicated and nuanced and perplexing than is presented.
- No homeless advocates were consulted to prepare this report, and apparently no homeless people were, either. Involving select stakeholders is not good government in action; in social services, it is a recipe for failure.
TITLE: The Sonoma County Homeless System of
Care: Best Practices for
Maximizing Exits from Homelessness into Permanent Stable Housing
TO: Board
of Supervisors and Board of Commissioners
Staff Name and Phone Number
Geoffrey Ross, 565-7508 June 5, 2018
Executive Summary:
In this presentation, the Commission will provide
local and national guidance regarding sanctioned encampments, in the context of
the Sonoma County homeless system of care. While the work of the County and
City Homeless System Redesign Ad Hoc Committees is not yet complete, the
Commission will also offer a preview of the recommendations that are in
development.
Discussion: Sanctioned Encampments
Earlier
this month, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH)
published a timely brief summarizing the experiences of communities nationwide
that have tried sanctioned homeless encampments as a strategy to address
homelessness
Titled Caution is Needed When Considering
“Sanctioned Encampments” or “Safe Zones,” the brief’s findings provide a
useful framework for exploring the feasibility and utility of sanctioned homeless encampments as a
model to address homelessness in Sonoma
County. Following national best practices, analysis of this model should
be seen against a preliminary set
of assumptions: the goal of the homeless system of care is to end
homelessness—both for individuals and for the community as a whole. Therefore,
the success of any service model can be measured by the number (or percentage)
or people exiting that intervention into permanent housing, and the investment
required to achieve this goal.
The
attached USICH brief makes four key points. Each point is quoted below and
accompanied by the local experience with that content.
1. Creating these
environments may make it look and feel like the community is taking action to
end homelessness on the surface—but, by themselves, they have little impact on
reducing homelessness.
People living in a permitted encampment would still be
homeless. Tents by their nature are not suitable for human habitation, nor can
they provide ADA accessibility for people with physical disabilities.
Permitting camping in one or more locations does nothing to change that fact:
even with adequate sanitation and running water, there would be exposure to
cold and rain, and participants would be unable to prepare food in sanitary
conditions. The number of people living in conditions not meant for human
habitation would not be reduced by permitting such camps.
2. Creating these
environments can be costly in money, staff time, and effort.
Some advocates for permitted encampments claim these
programs have had great success at getting homeless persons into permanent
housing, it seems without investigating actual results and costs of existing
programs. They also promote the idea that a “self-governing” model would be an
inexpensive bridge to housing.
The City of Seattle was the first in the country to
offer public land and funding to support permitted encampments. The encampments
were operated on a self-governance model with clean and sober program
requirements comparable to those promoted by local advocates. These were
supplemented with case management for an annual program cost of $755,500. In
June 2017 that city reported that of 759 persons served through the city’s six
permitted encampments, 121 (16%) exited to permanent housing destinations, for
a total investment of $8,888 per homeless episode ended.
|
Program
|
Annual Budget
|
Homeless
Episodes Ended
|
% of exits to
Permanent Housing
|
Costs per homeless Episode
Ended
|
|
Seattle Tent City
|
$755,500
|
121
|
16%
|
$8,555
|
|
COTS Mary Isaacs
|
$609,762
|
151
|
33%
|
$4,038
|
|
CAPSC Sloan House
|
$115,198
|
36
|
82%
|
$3,200
|
These costs are comparable to that of a large “high
barrier” (e.g., clean and sober) shelter. In FY 2016- 17, COTS operated the
Mary Isaak Center Emergency Shelter in Petaluma as a clean and sober facility,
on a budget of $609,762 for 100 beds that served 545 single adults in that
year. Of 461 persons exiting the shelter over the course of the year, 151 (33%)
went to permanent housing destinations. For each episode of homelessness that
was ended, the investment was $4,038.
Even a small high barrier shelter can exceed the
Seattle permitted encampments’ performance at lower cost. In FY 2016-17,
Community Action Partnership’s Sloan Women’s Shelter assisted 36 out of 44
women who exited the program (82%) to enter permanent housing on a budget of
$115,198. The cost of each episode of homelessness ended was just $3,200.
As the local system of care implements federal
mandates that prioritize limited resources to those with the highest needs, the
cost to end homeless episodes will rise. It should be noted here that high
barrier shelters, and self-governed clean and sober encampments, do not even
attempt to assist the most vulnerable persons, leaving them outside in the
elements.
3. These environments can prove
difficult to manage and maintain.
In Sonoma County, there is broad recognition by local
law enforcement agencies, social services agencies and local elected officials
that homeless people face substantial stigma and negative interaction with the
general public when living outside. Law enforcement agencies have welcomed the
re-introduction of street outreach programs to Sonoma County in recent years,
offering their agencies an alternative to simply “pushing people down the
road.” When encampments are small, engagement into the system of care is now
the primary intervention. For two years, the Commission did not take
enforcement action against a small encampment on its Roseland Village
property—warning the group regularly that when development timelines required,
the camp would be required to move. The HOST team set up its shower trailer on
the Roseland Village site twice a week, and worked to engage people into
services and out of homelessness.
Over two years, Commission staffers observed this
self-governed camp. This camp started out stricter than most local shelters,
but became increasingly dysfunctional and dangerous as the camp leaders
resolved their homelessness and moved on. In the year before the influx of
November 2017, the leadership of the HOST team prohibited outreach workers from
going inside this supposedly “model” encampment, due to illegal drug activity
taking place there.
Some encampment occupants have stated that they feel
safe in encampments with the supportive community there. These sentiments
should be taken seriously. But it is important to recognize the real public
safety threats when one is living outdoors. In the last month alone, there have
been three stabbings at the Joe Rodota Trail encampment. Within the County’s
homeless system of care, there are alternatives available that can offer
similar community networks and support, while also ensuring privacy and
security.
4. Although often proposed as
“temporary” approaches, these programs prove difficult to close once they open.
When encampments grow so large that they pose
significant threats to public health and public safety, as in the recent cases
of the Roseland Village and Joe Rodota Trail encampments, public officials have
a responsibility to close them. During these highly visible and sometimes
contentious camp closures, law enforcement is still focused on engaging
homeless people into the system of care, rather than imposing criminal charges
for living outside.
To address the Roseland Village encampment, the
Commission brought together service providers from across the County system,
along with non-profit providers, to create a “Housing Navigation Center” with
intensive health and human services resources as well as housing placement
workers. On May 22nd, the Board approved the addition of $100,000 to the
Commission’s contract with Catholic Charities for the Homeless Outreach Service
Team in order to allow the team to anchor the Navigation Center full-time for
the six weeks the Center was open, and for several weeks of intensive
engagement of participants even after the closure. The Commission set aside
another $100,000 of its HOME funds to assist Roseland Village occupants into
permanent housing, adding it to $90,000 that the County provided through its FY
2018-19 budget to the City of Santa Rosa, for rapid re-housing of people moving
from encampments. These costs do not include the costs of providing sanitation
facilities to minimize the public health risk, lease the former Roseland
Hardware Building and make tenant improvements so that it could function as the
Navigation Center, and maintain the lease in order to provide storage for any
person leaving the encampment who wished to utilize it, for 90 days.
It is due to these efforts that, when a motion for a
temporary restraining order was heard in federal court on April 5th, the County
of Sonoma and the Commission prevailed. The judge’s order denying the
restraining order stated that “...in this case, the record developed so far
suggests the government has made adequate shelter options available to
encampment residents.”
The difficulty of resolving the Roseland Village
encampment was complicated by advocates who claimed without basis that there
were not enough beds, and sometimes discouraged unsheltered people from
accepting assistance with the promise of a sanctioned encampment. Despite this
difficulty and a larger number of people moving to the Rodota Trail, 12 people
were permanently housed through this effort, and 63 people accepted temporary
housing.
The Sonoma County Homeless
System of Care
The USICH brief concludes with the question, Are we
doing all we can within our existing emergency shelter programs, and can we
also create more effective indoor shelter or crisis housing options, if needed?
Like all homeless systems of care across the United
States, Sonoma County’s homeless system of care is in the midst of
transformation, putting in place a Coordinated Entry system that prioritizes
our limited resources to the people who need them the most. The current program
standards for State and federal funding sources all require substantial
implementation of a “Housing First” strategy that quickly resolves homeless
episodes by lowering the barriers to entering shelters, placing people into
permanent housing, and wrapping services around them to ensure stability. In
Sonoma County, Coordinated Entry began for all homeless populations in
September 2017, and has expanded exponentially as agencies serving low income
populations, advocates, and homeless people themselves begin to understand the
value of this systems change. We have only begun, and there is much to improve
as we evaluate our progress and adjust our system of care.
Emergency shelters do not end homelessness, but they
improve the safety of people who are homeless by bringing them inside.
As emergency shelters adapt to the new requirements, people who are
experiencing homelessness will have increased access to resources to find
permanent housing. As an indicator of our progress to date, between 2016 and
2017 the percentage of people leaving all emergency shelters for permanent housing
increased from 20% to 27%. During the same period, the percentage of people who
retained their housing after a rapid re-housing placement increased from 86% to
90%.
The best investment of public dollars by far is in
developing permanent supportive housing. To fully meet the needs of vulnerable
populations countywide, it is estimated that we need six times the
amount of permanent supportive housing that is currently available. For the
last decade, every estimate of needed housing for homeless persons has
suggested that if we had enough permanent housing, we would need many fewer shelter
beds. We do need to invest in the current shelter system so that it
functions optimally. Beyond that, stewardship of our scarce funds requires that
every extra dollar go into permanent housing.
Homeless System Redesign
Together with the County and City Homeless System
Redesign Ad Hoc Committees, the Commission and City of Santa Rosa staff have
reviewed nine communities across the nation that have been able to achieve “functional
zero” for certain sub-groups among their homeless population.
“Functional Zero” is a concept developed by Community
Solutions (originators of the 100,000 Homes Campaign and other national
innovations) and adopted by HUD. “Functional zero” is reached when the number
of individuals experiencing homelessness within a community is less than the
average number of individuals being connected with permanent housing each
month. The nine successful communities share four critical features in their
systems of care:
.
(1)
A real-time feedback loop (e.g., clean, up-to-date data);
.
(2)
A consolidated leadership body representative of a multi-agency team, and
capable of making
fast decisions in response to data;
.
(3)
Flexible and aligned resources that can be shifted and reallocated in
response to changing
information; and
.
(4)
A menu of proven best practices, organized according to the types of
problems a community
may need to solve over time.
These concepts will be incorporated into the Ad Hoc
Committees’ developing shared recommendations to the Board and Council regarding
a new governing structure for the homeless system of care, designed to maximize
impact and reach functional zero. The Commission and the Ad Hoc hope to bring
the fully developed recommendation to the Board in the coming
