PD Editorial: A focused effort to reduce homelessness in Sonoma County

It will be several months before the results of Sonoma County’s annual homeless count are made public.

If recent history is any guide, there are fewer people sleeping in shelters, in cars or on the streets than there were a year ago. Sonoma County has made slow but steady progress since homelessness peaked at 4,539 people in the 2011 census.

But homelessness remains one of the county’s most visible, and most vexing, problems.

Many people whose lives were disrupted by the Great Recession have found jobs and homes. For those who are still homeless, a shortage of affordable housing has contributed to long waiting lists for shelter beds and other housing. With multiple programs scattered across the county, it can be challenging to get on, or stay on, waiting lists.

Even people motivated to get off the street often find it difficult to navigate the numerous agencies and myriad requirements of assistance programs for the homeless.

Here, again, Sonoma County appears to be headed in the right direction with the rollout of a program that will coordinate intake for housing programs through a single agency.

“Rather than having to go to multiple people, they go to one,” said Jennielynn Holmes of Catholic Charities, which will manage the county’s “front door” program.

The program, which showed great promise while operating on a pilot basis for the past two years, is expanding to cover the entire county with funding from a $250,000 federal grant.

With the expansion, Catholic Charities will add several mobile intake workers to seek out homeless people and offer them assistance as well as two people to work with the real estate community to identify potential housing options.

The agency also will be responsible for assessing applicants to ensure that the most vulnerable are given the highest priority.

During the coordinated intake project’s first year, Staff Writer J.D. Morris reported this week, it took an average of 57 days to find housing for the 1,285 people who sought help. The average wait for housing prior to the “front door program” was 196 days.

In 2016, the annual count found 2,906 homeless people in Sonoma County - about a third of them living in shelters or staying with friends, with the rest sleeping in cars, abandoned buildings, encampments or on the streets. More than half had been homeless for more than a year, about a third had spent at least one night in jail during the previous 12 months, and almost one in four was classified as chronically homeless.

The latter group includes many people with substance abuse and mental health problems that routinely tie up law enforcement resources and tax the criminal justice system.

Among the goals of the coordinated intake program is to get people off the streets, with efforts to address the causes of their homelessness beginning after they’re settled into housing.

This winter, with its succession of heavy rainstorms that left people huddling under highway overpasses, showed that Sonoma County doesn’t have enough emergency shelter space. But emergency shelters are a stopgap. A program that provides housing and support has a better chance of permanently reducing the number of people living on local streets.