Santa Rosa homeless camp grows after virus outbreak hampers shelter intake

Bill Lyon is coming up on his 60th birthday, which he’ll likely spend with Asia, his 6-year-old Akita. In his younger days, he figured he’d spend his golden years somewhere he could look at the sunset dipping over the ocean.

But the past decade has not been easy on Lyon, who previously lived in Palo Alto and worked for the Hyatt hotel company. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2010 and became homeless after the 2017 Tubbs fire burned down the Coffey Park home where he rented a room.

After bouncing around Sonoma County — Guerneville, Forestville, and other parts of Santa Rosa — Lyon now lives in a makeshift tent, one of a hodgepodge of about 60 such shelters and about 20 RVs lining Industrial and Center drives north of Piner Road in northwest Santa Rosa as of Monday. Up to 100 homeless people have staked out space in the area, according to city officials.

The encampment swelled over the past few weeks due in large part to a coronavirus outbreak at the city-owned Samuel L. Jones Hall homeless shelter, the largest in the region. To stem the outbreak and curb infection risk for the existing residents, shelter operator Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa stopped allowing any new arrivals — and so the city didn’t move to clear out any encampments.

“Our efforts to resolve encampments throughout Santa Rosa, including in the area of Industrial Drive, are on hold until shelter intakes resume at Sam Jones Hall,” Kelli Kuykendall, the city’s housing and community services manager, said in an email last week.

At least a dozen shelter residents tested positive for COVID-19, but Kuykendall said Wednesday that the latest round of testing came back all negative. With no positive tests since Jan. 8, Sam Jones is set to reopen Friday, two weeks after the last positive test, clearing the way for Santa Rosa to offer shelter to residents of the Industrial Drive camp and to eventually enforce local anti-camping rules and clear the encampment.

The cluster of tents and vehicles now sprawl along streets, gutters and sidewalks across at least two blocks of the mostly commercial area, made up of large furniture warehouses, a bus terminal, a hardware store and other businesses. The Industrial Drive area is the latest in a string of large encampments that have in recent years vexed city and county officials, who on several occasions have stepped in to clear camps only after they’ve been declared health and safety risks.

City officials, especially, have been limited by a court order that since 2019 has restricted their ability to preemptively clear homeless camps on public ground without first offering occupants shelter space and storage for their belongings.

Even before testing signaled Sam Jones was clear of COVID-19 on Jan. 15, the city was making plans to disperse the Industrial Drive encampment.

A day earlier, the city sent out a traffic memo to business owners and residents in the Industrial Drive area, informing them of pending rules to bar parking between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. — “in order to reduce the impact of continuous long-term overnight parking on the street,” according to a copy obtained by The Press Democrat.

Asked whether the parking restrictions would be rolled out according to the court-imposed limits, Kuykendall said: “All our actions related to encampments take into consideration the terms of the preliminary injunction.”

The Industrial Drive encampment is likely Santa Rosa’s largest since the displacement last year of sprawling camps in Highway 101 underpasses and in Fremont Park. It sits in the district represented by Councilman Tom Schwedhelm, who lives close enough to hear the occasional nighttime noise from the encampment.

“Right now, we have no place for them to go,” Schwedhelm said earlier this month. “It’s extremely frustrating.”

Nearby business owners have raised their concerns. Jeff Phillips, who owns nearby the nearby Comet Corn popcorn company, reached out to the city of Santa Rosa seeking to understand how the encampment could be allowed.

“It’s a quandary,” he said. “I get it.”

While some aspects of the encampment annoy him — noise from RVs, scavengers making a mess of his trash and recycling — there’s nothing that causes significant damage, Phillips said.

“It doesn’t make the experience of customers better when there’s a loud generator running outside the window, but they also recognize that people are trying to get by,” Phillips said. He acknowledged that the city faced a challenge when it came to clearing encampments, given court-imposed limits and the coronavirus outbreak at Sam Jones.

“I’m actually happy to not be the person that’s responsible for this, because that’s a proverbial rock and a hard place,” he said.

A 2019 court order, which has been extended through the first half of 2021, bars sweeps of encampments on public property in Santa Rosa unless city officials first offer adequate notice and options for storage or shelter. That injunction stemmed from a lawsuit filed in early 2018 by advocates for homeless people, who then were fighting the clearance of a large encampment behind the Dollar Tree store on Sebastopol Road.

The pandemic is complicating an already fraught homelessness challenge for cities across California and the nation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for nearly a year has advised authorities to avoid displacing unsheltered people, fearing that clearing encampments could spread COVID-19 and increase the difficulties of contact tracing in case of an outbreak.

Santa Rosa followed that guidance for a few months until a large encampment of about 90 people became entrenched along several blocks of downtown beneath Highway 101. The city cleared that cluster of tents in late June and subsequent camps, including one in Fremont Park, have also been dispersed once they reach a point where the city deems them to pose greater health and safety risks than the threat of spreading the virus.

Social workers with Sonoma Applied Village Services who frequently visit the Industrial Drive site estimate they give away between 70 to 100 bagged meals each day. The have voiced frustration that the city hasn’t arranged for or allowed the installation of a dumpster, portable toilets and handwashing stations, as was done at some of the other large camps.

“It would make all the difference in the world,” said Jackie Nappi of SAVS.

While the county provided some sanitary services to the Highway 101 encampment earlier in the pandemic, “resources aren’t currently available,” said Kuykendall, and “we don’t have plans to provide sanitary facilities.”

“With shelter beds becoming available this week, the goal is to work with individuals on shelter placements prior to any closure and cleanup of the encampment,” Kuykendall said.

Shelter residents who have tested positive had been kept apart from the general population of Sam Jones in a temporary structure the city had erected recently to restore capacity at the shelter, which had 213 beds prior to the pandemic but lost about 60 due to the need for greater social distancing.

A coronavirus-free Sam Jones will be able to use the temporary structure for sheltering up to 60 people as early as Feb. 1, Kuykendall said.

Lyon has pitched his tent away from the main part of the Industrial Drive encampment, wary of the health risks posed by being close to others these days. His immune system has been weakened by years of chemotherapy and living with cancer, so he worries he would be more susceptible to a severe case of COVID-19 were he infected.

He keeps a mask around his neck but admitted that he doesn’t always pull it up over his face when around other people.

He let loose a grim chuckle when asked what he’d like to improve his situation. “A life,” he said.

He’d settle for reliable transportation and a roof over his head, preferably closer to the Russian River, where he felt most at home when staying in Forestville and Guerneville.

“The right thing will appear,” Lyon said. “It always does.”

You can reach Staff Writer Will Schmitt at 707-521-5207 or will.schmitt@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @wsreports.