Sonoma County nonprofit finds success renting shared homes to chronically homeless

They weren’t exactly perfectly minted roommates when they all moved into the house called Birch Haven in Santa Rosa early this year.

Each of the three men had been homeless in one manner or another. One is recovering from what he termed “some pretty hardcore drug abuse.” One cannot abide bureaucracy. Another is said to be on the autism spectrum, although he is not sure he agrees with that diagnosis.

One is 29 years old and was a foster child; the other two are in their fifties. Two are veterans. All three suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Seven months later they are still living together in the house in Roseland and, in certain ways, thriving — most crucially in that none have fallen back into homelessness.

“It’s a lot easier than I thought it was going to be,” said Aaron Mello, 53, an Army veteran who fought a methamphetamine addiction for 10 years during which he was also homeless.

Now, two years clean and sober with ambitions to be a peer counselor, Mello moved into Birch Haven from a residential treatment program for veterans.

“We haven't killed each other yet, so obviously something is working,” said Michael McKay, the 29-year-old, who before moving into Birch Haven had lived in shelters since leaving the foster care system at 18. He is an intern at Voices Sonoma County, a youth advocacy program.

For SHARE Sonoma County, the nonprofit that leases the three-bed, two-bath house and has turned it into a home for people once homeless, the arrangement’s success is further assurance that its model for addressing homelessness works.

“The housing is there and the program is working and it’s getting folks who are literally chronically unhoused into housing with extensive case management,” said Amy Appleton, SHARE’s founder and executive director.

Nonprofit acts as landlord

SHARE, through its Community Shared Housing program, secured Birch Haven by signing a master lease with its owner; it then matched the three men as housemates. Each has his own lockable bedroom.

The nonprofit, in its role as the landlord, collects the rent from each tenant and pays the property owner. It also provides essential supportive services including drug and alcohol, mental health and financial planning counseling to help clients navigate their new living arrangements and other aspects of life.

Tenants contribute to their rent if they can — using housing vouchers — and SHARE uses rental assistance grants to make up the difference.

The nonprofit has similar arrangements with 21 other properties in Sonoma County, housing a combined 77 people. Now, with new funding from the county and state governments, SHARE is aiming to increase, within a year, the number of houses it manages to 36 and the number of residents to 172.

SHARE’s fiscal year 2023-24 budget is $2.3 million, which covers the costs of housing deposits, rent, case management and operating expenses. Appleton said the nonprofit's personnel costs are 27% of the budget, operating costs are 6% and direct client costs are 67%. The program’s per-client costs are $8,622 annually, she said.

“It’s hard to say for sure without seeing a full case breakdown of what is being offered, but generally speaking for permanent supportive housing, that’s a very competitive cost per client,” said Andrew Hening, an independent consultant on strategies to address homelessness.

Per-client costs decrease each year, as well, Appleton said, as initial housing deposits are no longer needed and case management costs go down when clients become more stable.

“We assess the clients, continually assess them, and as their baseline increases to less vulnerability, they’re not on our radar as much,” said Appleton, “though of course we’re still in the house at least weekly.”

Of all SHARE clients, 4.3% fail, she said, meaning they don’t work out as residents.

Shifting the ‘mindset’

As policymakers nationwide struggle with an entrenched homelessness crisis, SHARE is on the forward edge of an approach that is quickly gaining favor, say experts who are also familiar with the nonprofit’s work.

“I think (Appleton is) in the avant-garde, if you will, across the state of how to do that type of program,” said Hening, who has worked with Sonoma County and other local governments on homelessness issues.

He said that in his experience, what is known as scattered site, shared, permanent supportive housing, such as what SHARE provides, suits “at least half” of people who are chronically homeless.

In Sonoma County, according to the county’s latest homeless census, there are currently about 550 people who meet the federal definition of chronically homeless (someone who has been homeless for a year or more or at least four separate times in the past three years that add up to 12 months).

SHARE “seems to have really figured out the secret sauce around how to have scattered site, permanent supportive housing that’s also very roommate driven,” said Hening, who was previously San Rafael’s director of homelessness planning and outreach.

SHARE’s approach represents an evolving shift in thinking about how to create permanent supportive housing, in which people who are homeless are placed into housing that is accompanied by supportive services including counseling for drug and alcohol abuse and mental health.

“Fundamentally, there's been this belief that permanent housing means independent housing, which means everyone gets their own unit,” said Kris Freed, a founder of Impact, a Los Angeles-based homelessness services consulting firm.

"You're starting to see the wheels and the pendulum shift,” said Freed, former chief program officer for LA Family Housing, one of Los Angeles County’s largest providers of housing and homelessness services.

“Community by community is starting to try to figure out how to change the conversation,” she said, “so that we shift the mindset that shared housing is the bronze prize, the last resort, and start to talk about it as though it’s the gold standard.”

Los Angeles is so enamored of the approach, Freed said, that it recently approved signing master leases for 110 shared housing units, with another 153 being proposed.

Putting ‘my life back together’

The men at Birch Haven believe the house has been crucial to their transitions from homelessness to new, more stable lives.

“It's given me a place to be able to put my life back together in a comfortable fashion. I needed it,” said Mello.

As the months have passed, the Birch Haven tenants require fewer supportive services than some other houses are provided, because Mello and the other Army veteran in the house, Scott Driver, use counseling and other services from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But the support of a case manager (in Birch Haven’s case, SHARE’s Director of Client Services Francis Estep), while no longer routinely needed, has helped settle waters roiled at times by disputes that threatened to sour the arrangement, the housemates said.

“That's been the biggest thing, just with three guys that come from vastly different backgrounds and have gotten here in completely different ways. That's where Francis comes in. He helps us meet in the middle,“ said Driver, 56, who came to Birch Haven from a transitional housing program for veterans. He earns money by selling 3D printings of military figurines and models.

"You've got three guys here with PTSD who potentially can overreact to anything and can just snap, just flip a switch,“ Driver said. ”So having Francis sort of be that, you know, solid rock, it's a safety net.“

Over time, the men have learned to accommodate each other’s personalities and habits — and grown to appreciate each other’s unique backgrounds.

McKay put it this way: “I think the notion between the three of us is that we all have different histories, but, you know, we don't judge each other for it. You know, none of us are ever sitting in a room saying to ourselves, it's like, oh, you know, my sad backstory is worse than your sad backstory, right?”

Another house coming online

One of the next SHARE community houses to open will be on Moorland Avenue, on 1.6 acres just south of the Santa Rosa city limits, where Appleton has signed a master lease agreement for a 6-bed, 2-bath home with a granny unit studio. The rent will be $4,800 monthly.

For property owner Noni Verbiscar-Brown, the supportive services SHARE provides its client-tenants sold the deal.

“People have caseworkers and that's the necessary ingredient between stability and it working and chaos,” said Verbiscar-Brown. “That's the thing that makes it different, that I've got eyes and ears here.”

Another motivation, too, drove her decision to, essentially, rent her property to people who have been homeless, which some landlords might balk at.

“There's a ginormous number of unhoused people and the need is ferocious,” Verbiscar-Brown said. “And if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

Kim Carson, Birch Haven’s owner, also has two other SHARE community houses.

She said Appleton’s team has swiftly handled all of the very few problems that have arisen — for example, a homeowners association at the site of another of her properties objected to a tenant erecting a cover over her patio.

“I know lots of landlords don't want to rent it to homeless people, but I don't mind,” Carson said. “They’re human, too.”

‘The big questions’

The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors in June awarded SHARE $476,000 in funds raised through Measure O, a 1/4-cent sales tax approved by county voters in 2020 to support homeless and mental health services.

The nonprofit will also receive what’s known as encampment resolution funding, a state program that directed $4.6 million to Sonoma County to help serve 130 people from encampments on the Joe Rodota Trail; many of those people moved to a county-funded tent facility in Santa Rosa, from where SHARE is likely to transfer some into its community houses.

An advantage of the SHARE community housing model, said Dave Kiff, the county’s director of homelessness services, is that it can create permanent supportive housing more swiftly. County officials in December adopted a strategic plan with the goal of creating more than 1,000 permanent housing units or beds over the next five years.

"It’s an opportunity to take advantage of existing housing stock, not wait for additional units to be built, and start to house people tomorrow, next week, next month versus waiting for a year or two years or three years down the pipeline for enough units to come on board,” said Kiff.

“To me,” he added, “the big questions are, will enough clients be willing to set up a household either done by SHARE or someone else, and will they be successful in retaining their housing? Will everybody get along? Will we as a system be able to provide the right case management? And then will enough neighborhoods embrace it such that landlords would feel more open about master leasing with SHARE, too?”

Asked whether he could envision Sonoma County getting into the business of signing master leases to create shared housing, as Los Angeles is, Kiff said that if those questions are satisfactorily answered, “I think we'd be all in.”

Last week, SHARE added six new clients — four from temporary trailer housing at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, one from the Elderberry Commons transitional housing facility in Sebastopol, and one from the county’s emergency tent facility — all headed for two new community houses in Santa Rosa.

As long as they are homeless and display a willingness to try and make housing work, SHARE will take them in, Appleton said: “They don't have to come halfway and meet us, but they have to come a little way. They have to want it. That's how it's successful.”

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