The goal of California's Encampment Resolution Fund is to transition homeless people living in encampments or on the street into permanent housing.
“The situation with encampments in California is unacceptable,” Gov.Gavin Newsom said in a news release announcing the program. “I refuse to accept the status quo – our fellow Californians suffering in tents, under highway overpasses, exposed to the elements and living in unsanitary conditions. These new funds are another step towards providing dignified housing options for people exiting homelessness.”
But Alastair Boone, a reporting fellow covering homelessness at KALW, has found that there are some problems with the program.
"The folks who work in the state on the ERF program will say that it's a difficult population to reach," she said. "When you look at the numbers of how many people have been reached by the Encampment Resolution Fund, a little bit less than 10% of those people have actually made the transition from unsheltered homelessness into stable, permanent housing."
She said there have been a few different roadblocks.
For one thing, there often isn't enough housing to go around, let alone affordable housing with landlords eager to rent to those exiting homelessness.
"[This program is] supposed to transition you into permanent housing, and there just aren't enough permanent housing units for you to move into," Boone said. "That includes both permanent supportive housing programs that are subsidized and just affordable housing on the private rental market."
Turnover and burnout among nonprofit staff also slow progress.
"Often, those jobs are underpaid and don't have stable funding. So the ERF grant might give your county funding for a year or two years of opening up one of these programs, but then the funding runs out," Boone said. "In the meantime, it's a hard job, and the research shows that a lot of people just burn out and leave."
All of that trickles down to the residents needing help, some of whom end up searching for housing themselves on the private rental market.
The homeless services nonprofit SoHum Housing Opportunities in Humboldt County received about $3.5 million in ERF funds.
Their goal was to create a camping village, supported by services, but that's taken a while to get going.
In the interim, the organization is housing 22 people in a motel and is using grant funds to provide rental support for eight people for permanent housing. SHO still plans to open up its camping village in the future.
Leadership said they have difficulty ensuring folks are ready for permanent housing, even though there are often rentals available.
"It's learning how to live in housing," said President Patte Rae. "They've been used to being in a camp, and so that's a challenge as far as preparing them because they have a tendency to hoard. They have a tendency not to clean up trash, so we're working with them."
"It's been hard for them, even with them reading the lease, understanding the limitations, talking them through it," said Jimmy Durchslag, consultant and grant writer. "It's still been difficult for them to break some of the habits."
To help make the process easier of transitioning folks from the street into permanent housing, Boone recommended better support for case managers and housing navigators.
"That might mean making those higher-paying jobs for the people that work there, making it a better working environment for the staff, so that they have the stability and the tools that they need to help people," she said.
Boone said California also needs more housing overall so that homeless folks have someplace to end up.
"You need transitional housing programs to get people ready to move into permanent housing, but you have to make sure that they have somewhere to go," she said. "If you invest too much in the transitional housing, you end up with folks who exit back into homelessness. If you invest just in the permanent housing, you might not have enough support on the ground getting people ready to move into those programs."
Durchslag said increasing community awareness is also important.
"The more interactions people have with the homeless and people who have been challenged, the more they realize that they're just folks like them," he said. "When they see them being able to be successful in this kind of transition to permanent housing, I think that's really helpful to creating community understanding."
