Santa Rosa to ponder its homelessness strategy

Santa Rosa is planning to do some soul searching today about how to best address its homelessness problem following some indications of a “disconnect” on the City Council over the best path forward.

The council is scheduled to take a hard look at several of its policies - including its “housing first” strategy and declaration of a homeless emergency - in an effort to find consensus on the solutions the city should pursue.

“I want to make sure we’re on the same page,” Mayor Chris Coursey said Monday.

The council meeting is shaping up to be almost exclusively about the city’s homelessness policies.

It begins at 3 p.m. with a study session featuring two experts on homelessness discussing “housing first,” an approach to addressing homelessness that emphasizes quickly providing stable, permanent housing combined with voluntary supportive services.

The experts are Erin Wixsten, an associate with Canadian consulting firm OrgCode, and Elaine de Coligny, executive director of EveryOne Home, an initiative working to coordinate services to end homelessness in Alameda County.

OrgCode’s president, Iain De Jong, spoke at a two-day conference on homeless solutions in January organized by the Santa Rosa Homeless Collective, a local consortium of homeless service providers and local government agencies in which Councilman Tom Schwedhelm has been active.

De Jong challenged some of the assumptions underlying Santa Rosa’s present housing strategy, such as expanding the number of shelter beds.

De Jong urged homeless services providers to stop trying to “fix people” and focus on providing permanent housing solutions.

Not long after the conference, Schwedhelm, Ernesto Olivares and John Sawyer expressed concern about city proposals to increase the number of shelter beds at Sam Jones Hall, the Santa Rosa Armory building or a former fire station on Parker Hill Drive.

Sawyer said he was more interested in solutions that ended homelessness than in “warehousing” people.

One of those was to possibly hire more caseworkers to better serve homeless people already in shelters to improve turnover in existing facilities.

That “disconnect,” as Coursey put it, caused him to call for a review of the city’s policies. Vice Mayor Jack Tibbetts, executive director of downtown service provider St. Vincent De Paul Society, asked for the “housing first” review.

Following that discussion, the council is scheduled to explore how that philosophy should inform the city’s homelessness strategy, the effectiveness of the three-member homelessness subcommittee and the continued declaration of a homeless emergency.

The August declaration of a homeless emergency has to be renewed monthly, and earlier this year Schwedhelm asked city staff whether that was the most effective use of time.

When and under what measure the city would be able to declare the homeless emergency over was a key concern during the initial debate about the wisdom of such a bold declaration.

Coursey said he doesn’t necessarily think the time has come to reverse the declaration, but he wants to hear what his colleagues think.

Whether the homelessness subcommittee - made up of Schwedhelm, Olivares and Julie Combs - is the appropriate way for the council to vet its policies is also something he wants to hear from colleagues on.

“My question to the council, I think, will be ‘Should we all be involved in this?’” Coursey said. “And we all are. But it comes through the subcommittee, and I’m wondering whether this is a necessary interim step before things get to the council.”

Subcommittees are a common way for larger legislative bodies to drill down on complicated policy issues, and they’ve worked well for issues such as long-range finance and cannabis regulation.

One facet of the homelessness problem that will not be discussed Tuesday is enforcement of existing or proposed new laws targeted at the homeless, something of particular interest to merchants in Railroad Square and those around the soon-to-be completed Old Courthouse Square.

Coursey said he saw the issue of law enforcement as separate from the issue of solving homelessness.