Volunteers fan out to tally Sonoma County’s homeless population

Dawn had just broken as Randy Clay strode purposefully down a paved trail in Petaluma’s Shollenberger Park.

Red-winged blackbirds performed a free concert in a marsh to his right. Two swans circled lazily in the water to his left.

But Clay fixed his gaze directly ahead.

“Where the trail bends up here, you can see an island,” he said. “I know a guy who stays there sometimes. He’s pretty, uhh, adventurous.”

Why does that man stay there?

“When he’s out there, nobody can really get to him, and if they try, he knows they’re coming,” said Clay, the no-nonsense lead outreach specialist for Petaluma’s Mary Isaak Homeless Center, also known as COTS.

Clay and his team of three were part of a small army of over 150 volunteers, outreach workers and paid guides fanning out over Sonoma County in the predawn hours Friday, looking to count the region’s homeless population.

Their mission: to count the number of people in the county who live outdoors, in abandoned buildings, storage structures, vehicles, encampments, “or any other place unfit for human habitation,” according to the research firm that helps conduct the annual Point-In-Time Count of Sonoma County’s homeless population.

Participants helping with the effort reported to deployment sites in Guerneville, Healdsburg, Petaluma, Santa Rosa and Sonoma. Of critical importance to the success of the entire enterprise: coffee was served at each.

5% increase last year

Employing “blitz and survey” tactics — conducting a census by a large team over a very short period of time — small teams proceeded to their designated areas. The squads were comprised of volunteers, outreach workers, program staff and “lived experience guides,” as the research firm referred to members who’d previously been homeless.

The expertise of those guides, their knowledge of the terrain, is invaluable in locating as many homeless people as possible. Their participation also gives volunteers an opportunity to get to know them and hear their stories over the five hours they’re together.

Last year’s Point-in-Time count tallied 2,893 people homeless residents, a 5% increase over the number of unhoused people identified in the census taken in February 2020 — a month before the coronavirus pandemic hit. (The 2021 count was canceled due to that outbreak.)

While 5% was “still too much,” said Michael Gause, the Ending Homelessness Program Manager for the Sonoma County Community Development Commission, “I think it could’ve been much worse without a lot of the COVID emergency aid, which made a big difference.”

With emergency funds surging in from both the state and federal governments, Sonoma County and the city of Santa Rosa together spent unprecedented sums on this stubborn, complex problem. That included tens of millions of dollars to help launch safe-parking sites for people living in their vehicles; temporary pandemic shelter programs; and long-term supportive housing.

“COVID has obviously settled down a lot, we’re back to more like normal, so I’m curious what things will look like this year,” said Gause on the eve of the count. “I don’t’ really have a sense of that yet.”

“He doesn’t bite”

“This is an observer count only — we’re not asking them if they’re unhoused, or unstably housed,” Peter Connery said in a briefing at COTS before the teams headed out. He works for Applied Survey Research, the company interpreting the data these foot soldiers would collect.

Safety, he emphasized, was the main priority — a message that flashed to mind for Clay during his close encounter with a large canine lunging at him at the Rocky Memorial Dog Park.

Stepping out of his car, eyes fixed on the near bank of a tidal slough — until recently a campsite for some homeless — he was rushed by a German shepherd. Rather than attempt to pet the dog, Clay got back in his car.

“People always tell you, ‘He doesn’t bite,’ he explained later, “and I ask ‘em, ‘did you take his teeth out?’”

As indicated by his direct manner and upright bearing, Clay spent 21 years in the Army. His transition to civilian life was turbulent, leading to 6 months of homelessness. “Everything kind of fell apart,” he says. “But then I woke up, right quick.”

He was accompanied Friday by Stacie Questoni, manager of the People’s Village, consisting of 25 tiny homes at COTS, some of whose envious residents have nicknamed her Stacie With the Good Hair. Both are well known and trusted by Petaluma’s homeless population, often entering encampments to cultivate relationships, and persuade the unhoused to come in from the cold.

When they weren’t scanning the terrain for makeshift shelters, they told old stories — like the time they rolled up on a pair of homeless gentlemen engaged in combat. Literally. One guy was attacking a man who defended himself with a garbage can lid.

While Clay waded in to break it up, recalled Questoni, “I had his back. Well, I did call 9-1-1.”

Veteran and exemplar

They were joined on this mist-shrouded morning by Ron Potter and Jeff O’Dell, residents of People’s Village who have lived out of doors for long stretches of time. The team’s assigned “tract” for this count was a roughly 3-mile stretch along the Petaluma River, from Shollenberger Park to the densely populated, trash-strewn Cedar Grove Park encampment, hidden from view behind the SMART tracks a half-mile north of the city’s downtown.

Potter is a Marine veteran with a weakness for Batman regalia. He sported a Batman kerchief, and replied, when someone asked for the time, “Let me check my Batwatch” — which did indeed rest on his wrist.

He is also a veteran of COTS who commands much respect from his fellow residents.

“When someone gets a bike stolen, we tell Ron,” said Questoni, “and he says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it back.’ And he does.”

Coming upon several trash-cluttered abandoned campsites on the north side of the river, he reacted like an embarrassed host. “I tell guys, this gives all of us a bad name,” he lamented.

Potter is doing everything right. He’s a dervish of a worker. He’s paid off three cars, and his credit is good. But with just two months left on his yearlong transitional housing voucher, he’s still struggling to line up permanent housing, in part because he lacks renting history, and partly because of the acute shortage of affordable housing in this county — compounded by “fire upon fire,” said Gause.

Critical tool

The value of this annual canvassing is much more than a single number. When the full study is released later this year, it will include survey data based on interviews with hundreds of local homeless people.

“The count is a critical tool for the work we do,” said Jennielynn Holmes, CEO of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Santa Rosa. “It helps show us where we need to be prioritizing funds, resources, attention, strategies.”

It is also, in a way, the cost of doing business. The Point-in-Time Count is required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for jurisdictions hoping to get federal funding related to homelessness. The Sonoma County Continuum of Care gets $3.9 million annually in federal funding.

Rather than “just check the box,” said Holmes — meaning, to do the minimum to qualify for those HUD funds — Sonoma County performs the census “in a really high-quality way that also gives us information that shows us how to invest our limited resources.”

Follow-up surveys in upcoming weeks help researchers drill down on the status of specific groups, including veterans, families, young adults, and those who are chronically homeless.

Sonoma’s County’s last Point-In-Time Count showed a growing percentage of chronically homeless, a trend Holmes called “very worrisome.”

A person is considered chronically homeless by the county if they’ve been unhoused for more than a year, or experienced 4 or more episodes of homelessness within the past 3 years.

The longer a person is homeless, said Holmes, “the harder it is to get them out of it.”

“I didn’t choose this”

O’Dell is trying his best not to get sucked back down that whirlpool. Four hours into the count, the hardest work behind him, he leaned on the railing at Steamer Landing, the rising sun highlighting the creases in his careworn face.

“I never thought I’d be here,” he said, meaning in danger of becoming unhoused, again. “Some people out here choose that life,” he went on, nodding in the direction of Cedar Grove Park, whose tents and sometimes elaborate plywood shelters housed 47 occupants, along with several dogs, two of them markedly aggressive.

“That’s not me. I didn’t choose this. I’ve always worked.”

For a dozen years O’Dell was foreman of a drywall company, making $39 an hour. But that job went away, leading to additional reversals. He turned to drugs. “The numbness kind of helps — keeps you from feeling like a piece of s---, the way society looks at you.”

The last four months have been “extra rough,” he reported. After figuring out that someone had been draining funds from his bank account, he finally requested that the state start sending his disability check to his son in the mail.

Before heading back to the car, he repeated, “This was not my choice.”

Gause reported by phone at 10:30 a.m. that the count had gone “really smooth, overall,” but offered no predictions.

Holmes, of Catholic Charities, dropped a hint at what she thinks lies ahead. With the disappearance of much of that emergency COVID funding — particularly funds providing rent assistance — “my worry is that we will see some increased numbers” of homeless in 2023.

“I hope I’m wrong,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.