Homeless campers on Joe Rodota Trail in Santa Rosa get reprieve from eviction

A week ago, Amanda Friedman and dozens of other homeless residents in Santa Rosa were evicted from the homeless encampment behind the Dollar Tree Store in Roseland. In the process, Friedman said she lost almost everything she owned, including a camp tarp, cooking gear, camp stove, hygiene products and knickknacks.

On Friday, she and her husband and dog and dozens of others who relocated to a new makeshift camp along the nearby Joe Rodota Trail faced the prospect of a second eviction. They had been notified earlier in the week that their camp, numbering more than 40 tents on property owned and managed by the county’s Regional Parks Department, needed to be gone by 2 p.m. Friday.

Friedman wondered aloud if there were any churches in the area that were donating camping gear.

“I’m so burnt on having to beg for help,” she said.

But a reprieve came in the form of an email Friday morning after last-minute haggling between county officials and a representatives for the homeless campers.

“It is not contemplated that there will be enforcement of trespass or camping ordinances at this time,” Alegria De La Cruz, a chief deputy county counsel, wrote to a local attorney facilitating placement for campers.

De La Cruz’s email, sent to Santa Rosa attorney Alicia Roman, said county parks rangers would be conducting regular, weekly cleanup along the trail. Roman said she was pleased the county officials were backing off plans to remove tents and were only cleaning up garbage.

“I’m happy they are extending the time,” said Roman, who had asked De La Cruz for more time to find “reasonable accommodations” for campers along the trail.

The reprieve comes as local government officials struggle to house a population of chronically homeless people, many of whom have shifted from one Santa Rosa encampment to the next amid a nearly yearlong bid to close most of the settlements down. The campaign began last year at a large camp known as Homeless Hill at Farmers Lane and Bennett Valley Road. It extended to separate efforts to clear people living along the SMART tracks as the new commuter rail system launched service in late August.

Scores of homeless residents moved into areas of downtown, including underpasses along Highway 101. After the October wildfires and subsequent eviction of campers in the downtown underpasses, the population at the sanctioned Roseland camp swelled. It had been established on county land in 2015 to accommodate homeless residents who’d squatted on another vacant county parcel in protest of the local housing shortage.

Officials with the Sonoma County Community Development Commission, which is charged with creating more housing opportunities and addressing local homelessness, said Friday they are doing everything they can to get the campers into a shelter or motel, and ultimately into ?permanent housing.

The CDC has contracted with Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa to engage with campers and get them off the streets.

Felicity Gasser, a spokeswoman for the CDC, said such work is complicated, takes time and often requires multiple encounters with campers. She said the first step to finding permanent housing for those who are homeless is usually a shelter bed.

Permanently settling homeless people into housing “isn’t an instant process,” she said. But she insisted that there are enough shelter beds for everyone at the trail camp.

Jennifer, a homeless woman living along the trail, who asked that only her first name be used, said she was offered a bed at a local shelter but feared for her physical safety in such settings. On Thursday night, she slept in the field next to the trail campers.

“Yesterday I got my things stolen from me and got beat up,” she said. “But I can’t handle shelter people grabbing me inappropriately. ...What I’m trying to do is get into a room somewhere where I can shut the door.”

On Friday, county regional parks staff conducted garbage cleanup along the trail but did not remove any personal property, said Meda Freeman, a Regional Parks spokeswoman.

Freeman said parks staff will continue the routine practice of notifying the illegal campers that a cleanup will be conducted. She said campers will receive notices that personal property must be removed by a specified cleanup date, illegal camping is not allowed along the trail and that housing options are available to those who want them.

Some of the former residents of the Roseland encampment have been temporarily housed in motels, such as the Motel 6 Santa Rosa South on Cleveland Avenue.

Those accommodations were to end Friday, but have been extended into next week, said Jennielynn Holmes, director of shelter and housing for Catholic Charities.

“We’re continuing the case management, the process of finding them the right intervention,” Holmes said.

For now, that means getting people into a shelter and into a tracking and referral system that allows for faster placement into longer-term, permanent housing.

But Holmes said such housing, whether it’s a room or apartment subsidized by federal dollars or some other dedicated housing for the homeless, is in very short supply. More housing programs like the Palms Inn, the former Santa Rosa motel converted to single-room occupancy housing, are badly needed, she said.

Many of the residents of the former Roseland encampment said they would welcome an opportunity to get into a room at the Palms Inn.

“If we had opened a Palms Inn at any moment in time, we could fill it overnight,” Holmes said. “If we open five I feel confident we can fill them up.”

Just before the Roseland encampment was dismantled, there were an estimated more than 70 people still living there. Holmes said that since last week’s eviction, 25 of those people were sleeping in a shelter or a motel.

On Friday, three more campers received passes to go into a shelter and another six will be admitted on Monday, she said.

Roman, one of the attorneys representing Roseland camp residents, said many do not want to go into a shelter, and especially not Sam Jones Hall, the city’s option for temporary housing. She said efforts to find suitable accommodations for the campers have been chaotic and haphazard.

Partitions that had been promised to allow for greater privacy at local shelters only arrived Thursday at Sam Jones Hall and are only now being set up, she said.

“The shelter beds with the partition around them, they’re not there,” she said. “I’d like them to have those ready for folks to go and see.”

By and large, Roman said, most of the people along the trail would like to get into a room like the ones offered at Palms Inn. But no rooms are available there.

“They’re not offering the Palms, they’re not offering motels, it’s too expensive,” she said.

Holmes said five people could be getting permanent housing in the next couple of weeks, and that “a couple more units” were likely to soon become available at the Palms Inn. But more are needed.

“Where we as a system have to stay focused is creating long-term options that ultimately resolve people’s homelessness, such as interventions like the Palms Inn,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com.