PD Editorial: Santa Rosa needs a plan to meet homeless goal

The Santa Rosa City Council this month approved a five-year “Homelessness Solutions Strategic Plan.” Calling it a “plan” was generous. The document is high on aspiration but low on concrete steps and accountability.

The plan’s overarching goal is straightforward. The city, in partnership with regional partners, aims to have “functional zero” homelessness within five years. That doesn’t mean that no one will slip into homelessness ever, but when someone does, it will be “rare, brief and nonrecurring.”

It’s an ambitious goal. The number of homeless residents and their impact on quality of life has, if anything, increased in recent years. Things are getting worse despite the city, county and state spending tens of millions locally to help people move into housing and remove problem homeless camps.

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently called out the failure of communities statewide to move the needle on homelessness. He suspended state funding to localities for homeless programs until they put forward better plans. He has since reinstated the money.

Whether Santa Rosa’s plan is what Newsom had in mind is open to debate. The city paid an outside consultant $100,000 to work with staff for six months developing it. That was extended an additional six months.

The goal of ending homelessness by December 2027 is a solid starting point, but the how of it remains unclear.

The strategic plan provides vague guiding principles. The city will focus on dignity, respect and equity; consult homeless residents as the experts on what they need; and prioritize helping people attain stable, permanent housing. Great. What does all that mean in practice?

The plan offers some strategies, but they are just as nebulous. The city will “prevent homelessness through the adoption of problem solving … and targeted prevention.” OK, so the plan is to prevent homelessness with prevention? That sort of tautological thinking goes nowhere.

The city also will expand mobile outreach services, provide low-barrier shelter, expand housing solutions and more. Each one sounds good as a catchphrase, but the specifics are lacking. Again, all are useful ideas, but the details of implementation are the hard part.

The plan does promise to “implement performance measurements and continuous quality improvement.” It mentions measuring big-picture data like how many people are homeless and how many are placed in and remain in permanent housing.

Genuine accountability has been missing for too long. It must be grounded in granular data reaching down to the individual service providers who contract with the city. If they are not achieving their own clearly defined metrics, there’s no way the big picture will improve.

When it comes to funding all this, the plan is equally light on details. Officials hope not to spend more than the $5 million annually that they now spend on homelessness, but that means grants and other funding sources will have to materialize. Competition with every other California city will be fierce.

To the city’s credit, officials acknowledge the plan’s shortcomings. “It’s a framework to help guide us moving forward to make decisions on where and how we’re making investments in homeless services,” said Kelly Kuykendall, the city’s homeless services manager. “It’s not the answer.”

Fair enough, but now that the city has set a five-year goal, the clock is ticking. Santa Rosa’s homeless residents and the community at large deserve actual plans, identified funding sources and measurable metrics for success up and down the spending ladder.

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