Finding Grace: She lived in a Santa Rosa park for 3 years. Then, suddenly, she and her belongings were gone

For years, neighbors there say they’ve struggled with issues related to homeless people sleeping in the park, parking cars for days on end, and using drugs.

When Grace settled in three years ago, that all stopped.

Her space — she started out sleeping on the ground, then on a pad, before expanding to a six-person tent — was tidy and self-contained. She was quiet.

And she was determinedly protective of the neighborhood park she called home.

In a twist that was wholly unexpected, a homeless woman is widely credited by her neighbors for putting a stop to problems associated with homeless people.

"I think that she has helped kind of police the area. I thought it was one reason she had been allowed to stay,“ said Dona Moberly, 91, who has lived on Rowe Drive for nearly two decades.

Grace’s home backed up to Moberly’s fence. Their exchanges have been nothing but friendly, Moberly said.

“She has been very friendly. We were on a first-name basis after I met her,” she said.

Long before Grace arrived, Tracy Dorrance and her partner tried to be protectors of the space, cleaning up drug detritus and doing their best to make it a family park.

But the work felt like constantly rolling a boulder uphill, only to have it roll down again.

“It was really bad,” Dorrance said of the park’s up-and-down trajectory.

“I would clean up the park a lot,” she said. “You’d find needles, but mostly the orange caps that are supposed to be the stopper for the needle.”

Grace’s arrival changed things.

Standing a lean, fit 5 feet, 10 inches, Grace wasn’t afraid to confront people she thought were up to no good. Sometimes she, Dorrance and her partner would team up.

They called themselves “Charlie’s Angels.”

Vicky Kumpfer, another longtime neighbor, has seen Grace in action, working to keep troubling behavior from taking root in the park.

“She’s very foreboding,” Kumpfer said. “She has a strong voice. She’s a big, tall, Black woman and she just goes up there and says, ‘Not here.’”

And it’s worked.

Over the years that Grace lived in the small 2.4-acre park, there were calls for service about drugs and abandoned cars, but there were no calls about Grace.

Not about her tent, or her grill, or her cooler. Nothing.

In three years, Santa Rosa Police recorded not a single complaint related to Grace.

And yet, on April 3, Grace said she was served with an eviction notice. Two days later, while she was away, police removed her tent, sleeping bag, inflatable mattress, grill, cooler and everything else she had.

A new vigilance

Neighbors feared she was swept up in a rise of calls and complaints recorded in the days after the county homeless encampment opened on Ventura Avenue, two blocks north of the the park.

The controversial shelter was to be a temporary solution to yet another encampment that had taken root on the well-used Joe Rodota Trail — which for more than five years has been a tension point in the debate over how to address the county’s homeless community.

After a series of public meetings and debate about its viability and location, the shelter opened on March 21, and dozens of people were ushered into 87 tents on the county administration campus.

Drug and alcohol use is prohibited, there are quiet hours and a curfew, as well as 24-hour security. But people are free to come and go as they please, prompting new vigilance in the surrounding neighborhood.

“With the establishment of the County’s Emergency Shelter Site at 2550 Ventura Avenue, the City has received increased complaints regarding homeless-related activity in Steele Lane Park and areas surrounding the County’s site, which included increased tent and vehicle camping in and around the park,” a city of Santa Rosa spokesman told me in an email.

The city’s official stance is that Grace was offered services from the Homeless Outreach Services Team, but refused and “left on her own accord.”

Grace acknowledges she was warned, but says she had done nothing wrong, so she declined to move on her own.

Proof of this, perhaps, is that the only belongings she had with her that morning were a tin of drawing pencils, a sketchpad and her phone, all packed in a pastel-colored shoulder bag she carries with her.

“I wasn’t trying to be defiant,” Grace said.

Still, she has no interest in living in a sanctioned encampment — or any other shelter. She’s been homeless for years and has no use for shelters.

Her feelings on people living on the street are strong.

The majority aren’t there because they don’t have housing options, she contends.

“If they stopped getting high, most of them would have places to go,” Grace said. “It’s not a homeless problem. It’s a drug problem and it’s an alcohol problem. There are people wanting to be out there. They have been given chance after chance after chance.

“We have to stop tolerating that behavior,” she said.

But in some ways, Grace's choices are tolerated, too.

For more than two years Grace benefited from relaxed enforcement of homeless encampments because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Grace was well aware of these protections, but more than that, she said she proved her worth to the neighborhood.

She felt both protected and protective.

But in July 2022, the protections that had allowed Grace to stay in the park were rolled back, making her vulnerable to expulsion at any time.

And Grace, ever confident, is not one to make herself small. Her home — a six-person tent, grill and chair — sat directly behind the large brown sign with yellow letters at the main entrance of the park.

She was not hiding.

And still, no one complained.

“She attracts positive vibes,” Kumpfer said. “The whole neighborhood loves her.”

‘Well, what about her?’

Neighbors contend the timing of Grace’s eviction points to the county-sponsored shelter.

After the shelter opened, the park was becoming a magnet for people doing drugs, hanging out all day, despite Grace’s vigilance, Dorrance said.

Dorrance’s home faces the main entrance to the park, on the opposite side of a dead-end street separating the ball field at Steele Lane Elementary School and the park across the way.

In good times, T-ball and soccer games and practices fill the street with cars and the grass with activity.

Other times, things feel less family-friendly.

From her home, Dorrance can see most of the happenings in the small park.

“We started seeing more and more people showing up in the park doing drugs,” she said.

She and others said they can’t be sure these newcomers were residents of the county site, but the timing seemed to fit.

Neighbors believe Grace got swept up amid complaints about others’ behavior.

“Grace just seems like a sacrifice,” Dorrance said. “I was upset about it. I feel kind of sad for her. She has been no problem.”

But Dorrance and others recognize the problem as it now exists: Officials from the city and the county can’t respond to complaints about homeless activity in the park while turning a blind eye to Grace.

“You are trying to kick some people out and they say, ‘Well, what about her?’” she said.

‘Working fairly well’

Dave Kiff, the county’s homelessness division director, told me that neighborhood fear and opposition were loud when the idea for the county camp was first floated. He said he believes the county has delivered on the promise to be a good neighbor, but he recognizes the effect any change that adding 75 people to a neighborhood can have.

He, too, has heard reports of trash accumulation and drug use.

But, to Kiff’s mind, there was more concern before the site opened and less since it’s been operational.

“I have seen some of that. I haven’t seen a lot of that,” Kiff said. “Overall, I think it’s working fairly well.”

Kumpfer has lived in the neighborhood longer than most, about 25 years.

She has seen and felt the ebb and flow of positive and negative activity in the park directly behind her home.

A pathway to the park goes right by her house, and over time it had become a thoroughfare of sorts.

“It was the trail, down this driveway back to the park and the barbecue pits,” she said. “It was perfect for homeless people and drug dealers. It was bad. I had people coming to my door.”

And worse.

Kumpfer recalls heading out one winter evening to buy Christmas lights.

She returned to find a man in her house.

“It was really cold,” she said. “He took a shower and was in my bed. He said, ‘Thank you for the shower.’”

Kumpfer recalls the firepits being magnets for people with no interest in grilling out.

Drug use was common and out in the open.

The city eventually removed the firepits.

Even when the city installed the new playground equipment, few came to use it. The park had gained a certain reputation, neighbors said.

In early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic had taken hold and health officials were discouraging people from congregating, officials placed barricades in the road to keep people from using Steele Lane Park and parking indefinitely.

That’s when Kumpfer recalls first seeing Grace. She assumed she was a city employee.

“She would sit right at the mouth of the park,” she said. “I thought she was monitoring and I thought, ‘Boy, they are serious about this.’”

Grace didn’t work for the city or the county Public Health Division, but she was, in a way, monitoring the park.

She took a kind of homeowner’s pride in keeping her space tidy and the wider park free of trouble.

Neighbors leaning on neighbors

In particularly bad weather, Grace would ask to store some of her things on Dorrance’s porch.

When her tent was destroyed one winter, neighbors replaced it.

They came to lean on her.

Easy to talk to, with a confident air, Grace is not shy. She’s opinionated. She’s thoughtful.

More than one neighbor joked that she could have hung a “Doctor is in” sign at her site, a la Lucy Van Pelt of “Peanuts” fame, because she was often counseling people through struggles.

In turn, neighbors got to know her story, as she told it, of how she came to be living outside.

She is from New York. Poughkeepsie, specifically.

She grew up with her parents and two older brothers, with relatives living next door and around the corner. She said she was raised by the figurative village.

Her father died in his sleep when Grace was young. The loss tightened the bond she already felt with her mother, whom everyone called “Sissy.”

So tight was Grace with her mom, that they lived together until Sissy’s death seven years ago.

College educated, Grace, who has also gone by Qua, Ellen and ElGrace Cole over the years, describes herself as a successful career woman, but someone who was deeply unsatisfied.

And, in her telling, working in financial aid and billing at a small, private university, she was driven, focused on material things, and not at peace.

Suffering from stress and high blood pressure, she dealt with short periods of depression that she associated with her need to feel in control of every aspect of her life.

When her mother died in 2016 after a stroke, Grace became unmoored, she said.

“She was my God,” she said.

Grace had already lost her two older brothers, to leukemia and a heart attack, but her grief over her mother was overwhelming.

She sold the house in Poughkeepsie at a steep loss and started driving south. She lived in New Orleans for about a year.

Paralyzed by doubt, she bought neither a house nor an apartment. She lived in a hotel instead, burning through her money.

Broke, she started driving west.

In Arizona, she stopped at a truck stop to use a shower. There she picked up a free Bible.

Her mother had been a religious person, but until that moment, it had never appealed to Grace.

Still, she started reading.

“I just knew. I knew, ‘I got this,’” she said of a life that had been feeling out of control. “It just made me feel better.”

But she came to Jesus not in a flash, but rather a slow burn.

“It took time,” she said.

Her two Bibles were among the things police took from the park, so now she reads passages on her phone.

She had driven west from Arizona and was in Ventura, California, when she says the Nissan Murano she had driven since leaving New York got repossessed, with her and her six-pound Maltese, Buttons, sleeping inside.

She tells the story with a hearty laugh, how her beloved pooch made nary a sound as the car was hoisted up.

“I certainly didn’t have him for protection,” she said. “What was he going to do? They towed my car, and he can’t even bark.”

In Ventura, a woman she had gotten to know gifted her a 2003 Ford Focus. She headed north.

“I drove eight hours,” she said. “God was with me. Oh Lord, that car needed work.”

She and the car limped into Sonoma County in September 2017. Santa Rosa was less a destination than the end of the line. She was running out of gas.

When the car well and truly died, she became homeless in a way that she hadn’t been before. She was living on the streets.

Unable to properly care for him, she gave Buttons to a couple in Doyle Park.

“Facts over feelings,” she said. “I can’t take care of me. I can’t take care of him.”

As if speaking to her dog she says, “You didn’t sign on for this, baby.”

She started seeking safe places to sleep: Creek beds, among the trees off of Chanate Road, parks.

For 14 months, she lived with the three surviving members of a Bay Area commune.

But the dynamics in the house were a struggle, and after a little more than a year, she left.

She calls that period in her life humbling.

Shortly after leaving, Grace started living in Steele Lane Park.

'She prefers her autonomy’

Her world is relatively small. She walks everywhere she needs to go unless someone offers her a ride.

Peet’s Coffee is a 5-minute walk from her spot in the park.

It’s where she spends her days. She chats with regulars. She draws. She watches videos on her phone. She reads the Bible.

At night, she stays in a yurt in Kumpfer’s backyard.

At 12 feet in diameter, the yurt sits on a wooden platform. It has a double bed, two chairs and a small table. Up until now, it has served as Kumpfer’s guest bedroom.

Grace has stayed there before, when her tent had been damaged or the weather had been particularly rough.

Kumpfer recalls initially worrying that those short-term offers would somehow turn permanent.

They never did.

“I thought, ‘Oh, God, she’s going to want to move in. But nope,’” she said. “I have had her come in and eat dinner with me, but she prefers her autonomy.”

Still, Kumpfer has extended herself to Grace for years.

One day a week, Grace drops laundry at Kumpfer’s back door. Kumpfer washes it and returns it.

Why not? she asks.

“I’m doing mine, and it’s a big old washing machine,” she said.

Grace has long had regular access to an outdoor tub on Kumpfer’s property.

Sometimes they cross paths, sometimes they don’t.

“I don’t have a lot of money to support her ongoing in that way, but I have resources I could share,” Kumpfer said.

So when Grace was evicted from the park, turning to Kumpfer was a logical move.

“It was probably two days later, she said, ‘My camp is gone,’” Kumpfer said. “She knew my yurt was always available to her.”

The clothing she wore the morning she left the park for the last time is what she wears every day — a purple long-sleeve shirt, black sweatpants, maroon sweatshirt and Ugg boots.

When it’s especially cold, she has a fleece pullover.

Her hair is always covered in a variety of cloth wraps or a knit beanie.

She always looks put together.

In hours of interviews, discussing her clothes is the only time Grace sounds a note of want.

“I’m hot as hell,” she said, sitting at a small shaded table in Kumpfer’s backyard. “I’m in winter clothes. I want cooler clothes.”

Her possessions, including cooler clothes, are being held by police free of charge for 90 days. She can collect them any time she wants.

But she refuses.

“They took it. They need to bring it back,” she said.

That stubborn streak extends to public services. Grace doesn’t seek any. She doesn’t receive Social Security, no benefits.

Grace said going without is intentional, that it keeps her closer to God.

“I don’t get to see God’s work if (the government) gives me money,” she said. “Living outside allows me to see his works.”

It also allows her conversation and connection with others — one of her deepest joys.

If she lived in a house, apartment, shelter or even continued staying in the yurt, Grace worries her connection to others would be frayed at best, cut off entirely at worst.

“How would they get to know me?” she said.

She wants to return to the park.

“I feel like I live out there and nothing ever happens to me, so they feel safe,” she said.

While Grace does not accept government funds and services, she does accept money and she does occasionally ask for money. Friends give her gift cards and cash.

And coffee.

At Peet’s, where she is a regular, Grace is never without a fresh cup on her table.

Throughout our hours of conversations, she routinely pauses to greet friends and acquaintances, asking after their health and business. Then she apologizes for the interruption and returns to the conversation. An artist, Grace will exchange drawings for whatever the recipient feels is fair. She recently completed a pencil drawing of a man’s dog.

He paid her $40.

After a long interview in the sun one afternoon, Grace began talking about retirement funds, the stock market (which she terms “a casino”) and real estate.

She spoke of the value of cash. She then asked if I had any.

I’ve been reporting for three decades. We don’t pay for stories or interviews. But it was so disarming, I found myself mumbling, “I can’t do that,” as I pulled out two $5 bills.

On another morning, after I asked if she has any way to store food now that her cooler is gone, I bought her a coffee and a sandwich.

As a person, I didn’t give it a second thought. As a journalist, I wondered if it was the right thing to do.

Complicating the debate

As the debate over how to handle people experiencing homelessness among us turns increasingly black and white, Grace’s situation is decidedly gray.

Society, and particularly government, are not well suited to deal with exceptions. They complicate the debate.

Rules and policies are crafted for the many, not the few.

“Grace’s situation points out something that government struggles with,” Kiff, the county’s point person on homelessness, told me. “We tend to work in absolutes: ‘You absolutely cannot camp here. You absolutely need a home with four walls and a roof.’”

But things work until they don’t.

“Some … can survive very effectively and happily with little effect to a neighborhood like Grace did,” he said. “But there isn’t a carve-out for Grace.”

District 4 Supervisor James Gore, whose district includes the park as well as the county’s sanctioned camp, called Grace’s situation heartbreaking.

But officials cannot allow her to stay while barring others. And nobody -- not neighbors, not Grace, not city and county officials -- wants multiple people sleeping in that park.

“That would be illegal, to provide one person an exemption and not provide the same to others,” Gore said. “This is based on rights, not personality. While that is painful, rights come with responsibilities, too.”

Santa Rosa City Councilwoman Victoria Fleming, whose district includes the park, said she’s never received a complaint about Grace, only “gratitude.”

“I think it’s a beautiful example of how things can work in a community that is close-knit,” she said.

But Fleming, too, said it’s problematic to create systems that benefit the few, or in this case, the one.

“That’s really risky,” she said. “But I also think that government needs to be creative and innovative. We should be able to try things and if they don’t work, try something else. But we are incredibly risk averse.”

I ask Grace what she wants, how she sees this ending.

Kumpfer has house guests coming. She needs her yurt back.

Grace looks excited at the question. But offers no answer.

It’s God’s will, she said.

“I can’t wait to see what happens,” she said.

“I want to guess, but I’m not going there. I have learned to wait and see. It’s going to be good and it’s going to be good for all of us, and I can’t wait to see it.“

You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.