Marin County needs a centralized coordination system to deal with homeless people if the area is going to achieve a stated goal of ending chronic homelessness by 2022, a San Rafael official said.
“We need to create more operational efficiency for stakeholders,” said Andrew Hening, San Rafael’s director of homeless planning and outreach, in a report Monday to the City Council. “Currently, the housing development process in our region is very disjointed.”
Hening made his remarks as part of San Rafael’s response to the Marin County Civil Grand Jury’s May 9 publication, “Homelessness in Marin: A Progress Report.” The report says some progress has been made since the last such study in 2015, but more needs to be done. Hening agreed, adding that at least 400 new units of affordable housing are needed in Marin to house all the chronically homeless.
“Counties all around us have passed or are planning to vote on significant affordable housing funding mechanisms like bond and sales tax measures,” he said, adding that many are using low-income tax credits based on the “local money” they are able to raise. “If all of our neighbors have access to increased ‘local money,’ it will become even more difficult for developers to finance projects, no matter the size.”
Hening said he and other local leaders last year formed a group, Opening Doors Marin, which is working on streamlining the process of housing the homeless. The group is seeking to organize the mish-mash effort now underway among developers, nonprofits, advocacy groups, community volunteers, donors and funders across the county and make it revolve in an orderly fashion around a centralized operation.
“Opening Doors is an early effort to create more coordination,” Hening said.
Reaching goals
The City Council voted 3-0, with Mayor Gary Phillips and Councilwoman Kate Colin absent, to accept Hening’s response to the grand jury report. But council members on Monday questioned whether the goals set by Hening’s group could ever be achieved.
“We could entitle as many units as we want to, but if no one’s going to build them, it doesn’t matter,” said Councilman John Gamblin, referring to the difficulty in attracting affordable housing developers to smaller projects that would fit in Marin. “How are we going to make an impact if we have no one to develop these projects?”
Gamblin also asked Hening about the success in Bergen County, New Jersey, which eliminated chronic homelessness completely after building a centralized homelessness service center in 2009. The Bergen County scenario, which was mentioned in detail in the grand jury report, involved passing a bond measure to build the central operations facility, Hening said.
“From the center’s opening in 2009 to 2015, 815 individuals were placed in permanent housing with a recidivism rate of less than 5 percent,” the grand jury report said of the Bergen County project.
But Councilwoman Maribeth Bushey told Hening that even with an approved bond measure, the county was “years and years away from having something actually constructed.”
“What sort of practical strategy for the here and now and the foreseeable future are you doing right now to house people?” she asked.
Voucher program
Hening said he and others are working with the Housing Authority of Marin to use ongoing funding streams from hospitals and law enforcement agencies to improve the local rental voucher program. The vouchers, which allow for cheaper rents, were also mentioned as a suggestion in the grand jury report.
Hening said the Housing Authority has so far added 80 new landlords willing to participate in the program by accepting people with vouchers as tenants in exchange for subsidies, Hening said.
“Basically (the program) creates more Section 8 (type) vouchers,” he said. “If we could create more vouchers tomorrow, we could start housing more people tomorrow.”
As to building new affordable housing units, the likelihood of financing was slim without a bond measure or special tax, Hening said. For example, if San Rafael had to finance a project like the 54-unit Victory Village senior affordable housing being planned in Fairfax — now at a cost of up to $600,000 per unit — “we could only afford two units” using the money the city currently has available.
He added, however, that the costs of new housing countywide could be reduced if there were more coordination. A regional effort could help, for example, in terms of “bundling” smaller projects of 15 or 20 units together to form one project that could attract a developer, or in using modular housing, Hening said.
‘Best practices’
On the positive side, Hening noted that, in the past three years San Rafael and the county have implemented a series of “best practices” recognized nationally, including:
• Coordinated Entry System, which focuses on housing the most vulnerable and chronic homeless people first.
• Housing First, which places people in housing first and then provides them services such as health care or counseling while they are housed.
• Whole Person Care, which provides. through the county of Marin, a case management system to track people as they are placed in housing.
• Homeless Outreach Team, which includes a team of law enforcement personnel and other public employees who connect with homeless people in the streets or at camps to help them access services.
But the grand jury report said a lot more needs to be done — and that the problem is getting worse since the 2015 survey.
“The Point-in-Time Survey conducted on Jan. 27, 2017 found 1,117 homeless living on the streets of Marin, compared to 1,309 in 2015,” the grand jury report said. “The total number of homeless decreased, but the number of chronically homeless increased from 281 to 329.”
The grand jury noted that the chronically homeless “suffer from one or more conditions that impact their health, such as mental illness, physical disability or substance abuse.”
Increases in housing costs also have made the problem worse, the grand jury said. A “substantial portion” of Marin’s population does not have the annual income of $98,800 needed to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Marin priced at about $2,470 per month (as reported in July 2017), the grand jury said.
“The result is that,” the grand jury said, “in spite of the progress made in providing health care and other needed services, the cost and availability of housing continues to impact Marin.
June 19, 2018
Marin Independent Journal
By Keri Brenner
No comments:
Post a Comment