Advocates for homeless to stay at former Sutter hospital site

On Saturday, two days before the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day protest and teach-in event that they had been planning for months, organizers with Homeless Action got a call from Sonoma County officials.

The group was planning to set up a temporary camp on the 117-acre county-owned Chanate Road property, the former site of Sutter Medical Center. The goal was to call attention to the county’s decision not to use the former hospital as emergency housing for homeless people.

But officials told organizers that county regulations prohibited the camp.

Instead, the county offered the use of a building on the former hospital campus called The Rotunda, which was once used for prenatal classes.

The group considered rejecting the offer and pitching their tents anyway, said Adrienne Lauby of Homeless Action.

“We want to make a point, and it’s easier to make a point out in the solid rain than in a building,” she said. “But it’s also good not to upset people if it’s not necessary, and we have some people who are fragile and sick, and that factored into it.”

So Monday night, Lauby, a Cotati resident, and about 20 others, roughly a quarter of whom are homeless, gathered in The Rotunda.

Sleeping gear was pushed against the walls. Hot food was on a table and agendas for the teach-in, to be held Tuesday, lay around.

Protest signs read: “Inclusionary housing long overdue” and “Help I’m freezing! We need shelter now. Please don’t let me die this winter.”

Among the group was Migdalia Vasquez-Howard, 52, who works part-time at Costco in Rohnert Park - a disability prevents her from working more - and has lived in her car with her dogs since August. The soaring prices in the North Bay rental market have defeated her efforts to find an apartment, she said.

“I’ve tried and tried to find a place but they want three times the rent to move in, or they want perfect credit, which I don’t have because I’m on disability,” she said.

She makes too much to qualify for federal housing vouchers, she said, and too little to qualify for the income requirements landlords are seeking.

“I’ve cried; trust me, I’ve cried,” she said.

Outside the room, the large, mostly empty old hospital buildings stood dark, the focus of the group’s ire.

“I think it’s ethically wrong, when you have 2,000 people sleeping without shelter, to tear down usable buildings,” Lauby said. “Even if we collectively decide to demolish them, until then we should use them” as emergency housing.

The property, which Sutter vacated in 2014, is slated for an as-yet-undefined development, which county supervisors want to include affordable housing, commercial and retail space with walking trails and other amenities.

Supervisors in August signed off on a proposal to sell or lease the property. They also ruled out using the buildings temporarily.

“When we finally came down to it, it was prohibitively expensive to use even part of the building temporarily,” Supervisor Susan Gorin said Monday.

“As much as I was hopeful going into the process, that convinced me it was unlikely that groups or even a developer would be able to subdivide the hospital and use it,” Gorin said, referring to a consultant’s study that found extensive heating, electrical, plumbing and ventilation problems in the buildings.

“I understand that they want to use the hospital, but we could just not figure out how to make it work,” she said of Homeless Action.

Others at The Rotunda didn’t buy it.

“You could provide hundreds of people with a clean, warm place to live and the social services could have access to them to provide care to those who wanted it,” said Mike Mugridge of Rohnert Park, a real estate agent. “It’s a shame to waste the functionality of these buildings.”

Monday’s gathering, and Tuesday’s teach-in, are part of a broader effort to call attention to homelessness through advocacy and actions such as the establishment in September of Camp Michela on a West College Avenue property owned by the Sonoma County Water Agency.

The camp, now relocated to Roseland, was named for Michela Wooldridge, a homeless single mother who was slain just days before she was to receive a space at the Sam Jones Hall shelter in 2012.

That advocacy, led largely by Homeless Action, has helped push county and Santa Rosa officials to a series of actions. Those have included establishing safe-parking areas for homeless people to sleep in their vehicles, funding outreach teams, and, most significantly, launching a $110 million plan to create affordable housing for 2,000 chronically homeless people.

People at The Rotunda on Monday gave those efforts their due.

“It’s all positive. There are some really neat, innovative programs that the county has started or is supporting,” said Eric Straatsma of Windsor.

But more needs to be done, others said.

“We want to highlight that the county and Santa Rosa have done some good things, but that’s not enough. There’s still a lot that needs to be done,” said Gerry LaLonde-Berg, a county social worker.

On Monday, the question remained about whether the gathering had assumed a diminished profile by being moved inside. But Lauby said she hoped the opening of the facility for the group signaled a willingness by the county “to tolerate strong disagreement.”

“We’d like to stay on good terms, but we strongly disagree with their plans for the Chanate campus,” she said. “They basically have said come into their structure and their buildings, and we’re not changing what we’re saying.”

Staff Writer Jeremy Hay blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach him at 521-5212 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay