Annual count shows 22% drop in Sonoma County homeless numbers

A year after Sonoma County documented an alarming rise in local homelessness, especially among chronically unhoused people, new figures released Thursday showed a dramatic 22% drop in the number of homeless people.

Officials attributed the sharp reversal, in part, to a surge of spending on emergency housing, including former hotels repurposed during the pandemic to transition homeless people into permanent homes.

The reversal also includes the number of people who are chronically homeless — those who have been continuously homeless for one year or more and/or those who have become homeless on four or more occasions within the past three years.

Last year, that population was up by 43% over the previous count in 2020, to 726 people. This year, the point-in-time count in January showed it had decreased by 24%, to 550 people.

Overall, the number of homeless people in Sonoma County — both unsheltered, including in motor vehicles, and those living in emergency shelters or transitional housing — dropped from 2,893 to 2,266. That is the largest single-year drop since 2015, when there was a 27% drop.

“Last year’s news was not good,” said Chris Coursey, chair of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors. “This year, it’s kind of amazingly positive news.”

The findings were released two months after the county opened its first outdoor managed tent encampment at its government campus in Santa Rosa to relocate dozens of people living on the Joe Rodota Trail, long one of the biggest flash points in the county’s homelessness crisis.

According to the county’s new preliminary report, the number of people who are homeless and without any shelter decreased from 2,088 last year to 1,291 this year. Meanwhile, the number of people who were homeless but sheltered rose from 805 in 2022 to 975 this year.

The roughly 40 people living in trailers at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds were considered sheltered; as were another 55 people living at Los Guilicos Village, the tiny home village off Highway 12 across from Oakmont.

People living on the Joe Rodota Trail who moved to the county’s emergency tent encampment, about 65 individuals in all, were counted as unsheltered, because the count took place before they moved, said Dave Kiff, director of the county’s homelessness services division.

“’Sheltered’ means we're connecting with them, even if it's a really light touch or a much heavier touch where we'd like to give wraparound supportive services. We want to get you into housing, even if it's a tent, even if it's a pallet shelter at (Los Guilicos) Village,” Kiff said.

“Then we'll, to the extent you're willing, provide you with services. If you say, ‘No, I'm not ready,’ we're going to check back with you in a week. If you're still not ready, we're going to check back with you in a month. But at least we're connecting with you. Where before, when you're on the street, the connection is limited, if it's there at all,” he said.

Officials traced the improvements partly to cities and the county government working together more.

“The needle on crisis was not moving with respect to encampments, with respect to individuals that we were seeing who need to move from unsheltered to sheltered,” said Tina Rivera, the county’s director of human services, whose department includes the homelessness services division. “So the collaboration and the partnership between the cities and the county has really helped to move the needle and to decrease these numbers.”

Figures from January ground survey

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires annual point-in-time counts for those jurisdictions seeking federal funding related to homelessness.

The county Continuum of Care — a collaboration of county governments, nonprofits and other organizations that is meant to direct efforts to tackle homelessness — got about $4 million in federal funds this year. It also disbursed about $6 million in state and local funds.

This year’s Jan. 27 count made use of over 150 volunteers, outreach workers and paid guides, who fanned out over Sonoma County to count the population of homeless people.

In some key ways, the benchmark against which to measure this year’s results is the 2020 count, county officials said.

That’s because while the methodology was similar, the process of training and counting and reporting in 2022 was substantially altered by the pandemic, said Michael Gause, the county’s ending homelessness program manager. Among the differences: although people were still counted in person, pandemic-era constraints meant there were many fewer paid guides with experience of homelessness, and a lot of training and reporting of numbers was performed virtually and in a less organized fashion, Gause said.

“Last year was an anomaly,” he said.

This year’s numbers match up well with the pre-pandemic count in 2020, showing a 17% drop in overall homelessness. Because of the pandemic, there was no count performed in 2021.

Still, said Coursey, on this contentious and often intractable issue, the progress going forward will be marked by improvement over the 2023 baseline, not the pandemic-era peak.

“We know that’s what we’re being judged on,” he said. “We’re not spiking the football here.”

Other promising signs

Many findings will not be finalized until this summer, including breakdowns by geographic area and other demographic data.

But the preliminary report also included other results that officials said were promising. Those included:

• The number of homeless veterans, whom Gause said may have been overcounted last year, dropped from 191 to 110 this year.
• The number of homeless youth dropped from 530 to 294.
• The number of families experiencing homelessness rose from 48 in 2022 to 62 this year. However, almost all those families, a total of 207 people, were sheltered as opposed to unsheltered, up 22% from 2022.

The county’s strategic plan to address homelessness hinges in part on creating 1,000 permanent and permanent supportive housing units in five years. At the time of the 2022 count, there were 1,051 people in permanent supportive housing; this year there were 1,271, the report said.

Officials pointed to strides made in creating that type of housing as one reason for the improving numbers, as well as to other initiatives that came online between the 2022 and 2023 counts.

Overall, the number of beds available for homeless people increased 14% from 2022, going from 2,088 to 3,003, according to officials.

The new sites included:

• Three Project Homekey interim housing sites — state-funded but with additional county funding — in Rohnert Park, Petaluma and Santa Rosa. Three more sites, in Petaluma, Guerneville and Santa Rosa, are in various stages of development.
• New interim shelters in Sebastopol, Petaluma, Rohnert Park and Santa Rosa.

Officials also touted an emergency housing voucher program that has moved at least 200 people into housing.

Prior to 2022, the most recent peak of 2,996 homeless people was in 2018, after the 2017 fires destroyed more than 5,300 Sonoma County homes. Since 2011, the local homeless population has dropped from a high of 4,539.

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay