Sonoma County officials acknowledge pressure on homeless plan amid Newsom money freeze

Two top Sonoma County officials in charge of reducing homelessness say they are taking Gov. Gavin Newsom’s temporary halt on state funding for local governments seriously, but they aren’t worried about making the requested changes.

No deadline has been set for responding to the revisions sought from all 58 counties by the Newsom administration — specifically, the Interagency Council on Homelessness, the state’s funding arm, according to Michael Gause, Sonoma County’s ending homelessness program manager.

The funding suspension affected a joint request from the county and local cities for $8.5 million, a tiny fraction of the unprecedented sum of state, federal and local dollars that have been allocated and spent countywide on homeless services and related housing in the past two years.

“We just want to do it as fast as possible,” Gause said. “We don’t anticipate it being a huge lift. We want to make sure we’re on track for the housing goals we set and provide evidence. It’s just a matter of expanding some more data points.”

Neither he nor David Kiff, director of the county’s Community Development Commission, who spoke to The Press Democrat via Zoom Thursday, said they considered Newsom’s move a serious setback for the local efforts to address rising homelessness.

“I was surprised but not shocked,” Kiff said. “I think the governor has been speaking more about the importance of addressing homelessness and we’ve been hearing around the county that we need to address it faster.”

Chronic homelessness, where a person has been continually homeless for a year or more or has experienced homelessness on several occasions within the past three years, spiked in Sonoma County over the past two years despite the surge in government spending, according to a February point-in-time count.

The Feb. 25 count documented a 5% increase in Sonoma County’s overall homeless population, to an estimated 2,893 homeless residents, the first reported increase since the 2017 North Bay fires.

The state homelessness council sought two main revisions to the county’s latest plan to reduce its unsheltered population:

• More details on how that reduction would be accomplished

• More details on how the county is going to increase the number of people placed in permanent housing

Gause said he knew of other counties that received the same two requests. He wasn’t aware of any different or additional requests for more information on concrete steps local governments are using to get people off the streets and out of emergency shelters.

The Community Development Commission, the county’s chief housing and homelessness agency, has already received 20% of the $8.5 million it requested jointly with local cities through the region’s Continuum of Care agency to support countywide homelessness response.

“If we didn’t have the 20%, we would be very concerned,” Kiff said. “And we will be very concerned if it isn’t addressed fairly punctually. If it stretches into months, that’s a problem.”

Newsom, along with local officials, has faced stiff criticism for California’s mounting struggles with homelessness — a point his political rivals are all too happy to score in this election cycle and possibly future ones.

But as with greater housing production from often reluctant cities and counties, his administration is seeking a clearer pattern of results on homelessness from local governments.

In a first this year, the state made homeless action plans a requirement for local governments seeking state funding.

Newsom said this week that many of those plans fell far short. He ridiculed one joint application that pledged to not allow homelessness in its area to grow by more than 71%.

“I thought it was a typo,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “But it wasn’t.”

Sonoma County’s plan calls for reducing the number of people who are unsheltered by 10% within a year. It also seeks to reduce the number of people who have just become homeless for the first time by 3% and increase those moving into housing by 10%, Gause said.

How are the county and local cities poised to do that?

“The solution to homelessness is, of course, more housing,” Kiff said. “That sounds trite, but it’s true.”

A big need is more sites to build interim housing — non-congregate space “where you can have an animal, you can lock your stuff up,” like Los Guilicos Village near Oakmont in eastern Santa Rosa, Kiff said. The county needs 200 more of such spaces to get people out of shelters.

To meet this goal, the county has already shifted its system geared to getting unsheltered people off the streets from emergency shelters to “more of a housing focus,” Gause said.

There is also a need for 1,000 more permanent housing units, such as apartments or tiny homes where there is a kitchen and a stove, according to the county’s homeless plan.

The county has already been chipping away at those figures with the recent construction of state-funded sites including the newly opened Labath Landing, a 60-unit project in Rohnert Park, Gause and Kiff said. And a lot more is being built or on track to be built, they said.

“This is the first time funding has been paused like this,” Gause said. “So we take this very seriously.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kathleen Coates at kathleen.coates@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5209.