Annual count kicks off effort to document Sonoma County homelessness

Lee Rocchio passed a heap of plastic chairs, cardboard boxes and other trash early Friday morning, leading two others through an empty, grassy lot in southwest Santa Rosa, where a blanket of fog was just starting to clear.

Rocchio, a homeless outreach worker with Santa Rosa-based Catholic Charities, Sonoma County’s dominant homeless services provider, was familiar with the property, having visited the area on multiple occasions in his more than four years on the job.

The trio were one of dozens of teams helping Friday with an annual count of the county’s homeless population. The census, overseen by the county’s Community Development Commission, dispatched to corners of the county about 200 volunteers and about 70 paid guides, all formerly or currently homeless people.

At 7:30 a.m., more than two hours into their shift, Rocchio’s team approached a large makeshift home constructed of tarps, plastic pipes, wood bars and rope on the otherwise bare plot of land off Hearn Avenue near Stony Point Road.

Four people - two men and two women - were inside, Rocchio said, relaying what he knew from previously talking to the camp occupants. Another member of the group tallied the information on a sheet of paper. A small dog began barking inside the shelter, and the outreach team went on their way.

“This is not a far area for a person to go out and camp in,” Rocchio said out of earshot. “They can stay off the radar and still have access to stuff.”

The county’s annual homeless census is a mandatory step to receive federal and state funding that is especially crucial as local governments grapple with a homelessness crisis and affordable housing shortage that observers say has pushed more people onto the streets. It is the first step in a larger data collection effort the county undertakes every year to better understand the area’s homeless population. Nonprofits, county agencies and other local governments use the data to identify shortfalls in services and other means to reach homeless people.

“Covering the entire county and having trained volunteers and trained guides, it’s going to give us the best picture,” said Michael Gause, the county’s acting homeless services manager. “We’re trying to determine if people are living in their car, an encampment or literally on the street.”

Learning to adjust strategies

This year’s count comes just weeks after local authorities cleared more than 200 homeless people from an unsanctioned camp along the Joe Rodota Trail in west Santa Rosa. The camp, which sprang up last summer, grew to be a public safety and health crisis. Though 60 former residents were resettled in a temporary, sanctioned camp off Highway 12 near Oakmont and another 30 are bound for a pair of homes purchased by the county, 3 out every 5 residents along the Joe Rodota Trail refused shelter help. Many dispersed into nearby spots in southwest Santa Rosa.

Finding those people and gauging the overall size of the county’s homeless population is an important barometer to show whether local efforts are making a difference, officials said.

“Every year we get trended information to see how we’re moving the needle, or areas that we need to adjust our strategy,” said Jennielynn Holmes, chief programs officer for Catholic Charities.

Last year’s census estimated a total of 2,951 people experiencing homelessness around the county - down 2% from a year earlier and well below the peak of ?4,539 in 2011.

But the 2019 count also showed a 29% spike in people under the age of 24 living without any kind of shelter.

The report also highlighted an 11% increase in adults over the age of 55 who were homeless compared to 12 months prior; about 29% of the county’s homeless people were reported to be living in vehicles.

New ways to collect data

This year, the county debuted a smartphone app to assist the count, allowing volunteers to upload information online. Paper sheets were used as a backup.

The second phase of data collection - peer-based surveys of roughly 600 homeless people living in Sonoma County - began Friday afternoon and will take several weeks to complete, Gause said. Those interviews, conducted by people who are or were recently homeless, will be much more in-depth, chronicling the root causes of homelessness, length of time without shelter and previous military service or mental health and substance abuse issues.

Together with the San Jose firm Applied Survey Research, the Community Development Commission will sort through the data and compile a report, which typically publishes in June or July.

Catholic Charities’ Family Support Center in downtown Santa Rosa served as the Santa Rosa headquarters for Friday’s count. There, at 5 a.m., Mayor Tom Schwedhelm teamed up with Police Chief Ray Navarro and retired Santa Rosa Fire Battalion Chief Keith Flood. The trio began their count walking north on Morgan Street, on the east side of Highway 101. Before they reached College Avenue, they encountered at least a half-?dozen people sleeping in cars and in highway underpasses.

“When you’re actually out doing the count yourself, you’re seeing some of the conditions that people are in and it brings it home,” Schwedhelm said, explaining the impact the county’s homeless count has on volunteers who may not be familiar with the local homeless population. “This is why we do this.”

Gauging with numbers

Back at the Homeless Services Center on Morgan Street, about 14 homeless people lined up for free coffee and food at 6 a.m.

Rick Robison sat at a small table as he sipped his coffee and smoked a cigarette, waiting for his friends to arrive. He’s been homeless for about nine years and is currently enrolled in the Redwood Gospel Mission’s Nomadic Shelter, which connects unsheltered people with churches that agree to house them for a night.

“It’s necessary,” Robison said of the count. “You can’t gauge a situation without having some numbers.”

Hours later, on Sebastopol Road, Santa Rosa resident Alex Campbell and two guides were nearing the end of their count.

They had run out of space on the two sheets of paper given to them to document the people they encountered throughout the morning. They were staying near fast-food restaurants and convenience stores but were up and active before dawn.

Kimberly Jo Smith, a paid guide who accompanied Campbell, guessed that they felt safer napping during the day.

Smith and Campbell said they expected to see more people during their count in the wake of the late January disbandment of the Joe Rodota Trail camp.

“I expected to see more people, and if you looked around at where we were, there were so many places where people could have gone but they didn’t,” Campbell said.

Gause and Holmes both declined to say what they expected the count to show in terms of an overall population. Susan Gorin, the Board of Supervisors’ chairwoman, said this week that she expected an uptick. The last documented increase in local homelessness came in the wake of the 2017 fires.

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com.