Sonoma County, Santa Rosa, Petaluma launch plans for tackling homelessness as spending on the crisis surges

As spending on homelessness in Sonoma County reaches unprecedented levels, governments in the region are trying to coordinate long-term plans for outreach, increased shelter capacity and other services to better tackle the growing crisis.

Sonoma County, Santa Rosa and Petaluma are now in the process of drafting what officials hope will be shared frameworks for substantially reducing homelessness over the next five years.

“It is really a countywide effort,” said Michael Gause, head of homelessness programs at the Sonoma County Community Development Commission. “It’s the county, the cities, other stakeholders, people that have lived experience (with homelessness), all rowing in the same boat.”

The plan for Sonoma County, which oversees and distributes the vast majority of homelessness money locally, will include strategies for bolstering street outreach teams, adding shelter bed capacity and “safe parking” programs, and creating more supportive housing sites for those who have spent years living on the street — all with the goal of helping homeless people move to lasting homes.

A group of north county cities, including Windsor, Healdsburg and Cloverdale, completed a joint homelessness plan earlier this year.

The plans come as tens of millions of dollars in state and federal funding for homelessness programs has poured into Sonoma County in recent years as the region has struggled through a chronic housing shortage and the economic upheaval of the pandemic.

Just last week, the county approved $14.4 million in state and federal funding for a range of homelessness services, as well as $4 million in federal pandemic stimulus money for additional homelessness programs including a “tiny home” village in the Sonoma Valley.

“Together, in partnership with (county homelessness staff) and our local cities, the county investments take another step toward the goal of ending homelessness,” said Supervisor James Gore, chair of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, in a statement last week.

Those approvals come on the heels of a 550% surge in pandemic-era spending on homelessness programs by Sonoma County and Santa Rosa, the two largest local governments, according to an analysis by The Press Democrat.

But despite the increase in spending, the county’s estimated homeless population grew 5% during the pandemic to nearly 2,900 people, according to new homelessness data released last month.

Roughly half of the $92 million spent by the county and city on homelessness programs over the first two years of the pandemic went toward sheltering vulnerable homeless people in hotel rooms and other sites to keep them safe from COVID-19. Officials said the goal of the pandemic shelter spending was to prevent unhoused people from getting sick, not necessarily helping them emerge from homelessness.

With most of the pandemic shelter programs now expired, Kelli Kuykendall, homeless services manager for Santa Rosa, said officials have shifted their focus to helping homeless people through the local system of care and into permanent homes. Santa Rosa’s five-year homelessness plan will be key to that effort, she said.

(See a map of homeless encampments in Santa Rosa here.)

“Despite following best practices … we (at the city) don’t really have a plan, so we’re realizing we need to be more strategic,” Kuykendall said.

Kuykendall said the city is reaching out to residents, businesses, nonprofits as well as those experiencing homelessness to help inform its plan.

Santa Rosa and Petaluma both have held community input sessions and conducted online surveys for their plans. Sonoma County is preparing similar public outreach.

To help with outreach and drafting its plan, the county has hired Homebase, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that contracts with local governments to combat homelessness. Santa Rosa has hired a similar consultant, Walnut Creek-based Focus Strategies. The cost of hiring the consultants and developing the plans is so far around $100,000 for each city.

Petaluma is contracting with Andrew Hening Consulting in Richmond. The cost of its plan is expected to be around $25,000.

All three plans should be finalized by this fall.

Dave Kiff, interim director of the Sonoma County Community Development Commission, said the county’s plan should help determine how many more shelter beds, supportive housing units and affordable homes are needed in the region to meaningfully reduce homelessness.

Kiff pointed to California’s $3.6 billion Project Homekey program, which funds the creation of housing with wraparound services for homeless people, as a key aspect of the county’s plan.

Homekey, which launched in 2020, has so far awarded six local projects a total of about $54 million to create around 300 units of homeless housing by the end of this year. That includes sites in Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park, Petaluma, Sebastopol and Healdsburg.

“We're hopeful that Homekey is going to be a place where people transition through (to permanent homes), so we can get many chronically homeless people housed and stabilized,” Kiff said.

You can reach Staff Writer Ethan Varian at ethan.varian@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5412. On Twitter @ethanvarian