City studies 2-pronged approach to getting people off the streets
12/17/14
Aaron West
The Eureka City Council on Tuesday adopted new strategies to deal with an old problem when they voted to explore a combination of options aiming to address homelessness.
The council’s unanimous vote during its meeting will have city staff research how to go about starting a pilot program for a city-sanctioned, small structure encampment, as well as spend $21,000 on developing a Eurekaspecific plan that would explore what it would take to provide the homeless with temporary housing and rehabilitation services through a policy called rapid rehousing.
“There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this problem, and if we look at it in that regard we’re going to fall short,” said Councilwoman Kim Bergel, who along with Natalie Arroyo was sworn in as a new council member early in Tuesday’s meeting. “I agree completely with rapid re-housing, and it’ll give (the homeless) opportunities to integrate into society. There needs to be education. The expectation that we’d put someone in a house after they’ve been homeless for 10 years — that doesn’t make sense to me. Counseling is where they’ll be successful. I’m open-minded to the (small structure encampments) and the tents, but we also need to create different opportunities.”
The small structure encampment idea, which was born from a work session discussion before the meeting, would see a city-sanctioned encampment of powerless, waterless structures called Tiny Houses made available to homeless people who want to live in them, although details surrounding the idea were thin, and the details surrounding the pilot program that the council proposed were thinner.
“We wanted to do a taste test,” Eureka Community Development Director Rob Holmlund said, referring to a list of potential sites for a sanctioned camp. “To see what it feels like, what it looks like.”
Holmlund presented 10 potential sites for the encampment, which he said could work for both the Tiny Houses as well as tents, which ran the gamut from bigger spaces like a northern section of the Bayshore Mall parking lot to more confined areas along the bay and the Eureka Corporation Yard near Costco.
“(The sites) are very preliminary and based on two parameters — is it large enough, and does the city own it,” Holmlund said.
During his presentation, Holmlund — using the Bayshore Mall site as an example — said that the cost of such a camp could run anywhere from $50,000 to $300,000. He acknowledged that like the sites themselves, the projected costs weren’t anywhere near finalized, and more research would be necessary.
“I could be way off,” he said.
One thing that was for certain was that the city doesn’t have the resources to run a sanctioned camp, and that a third-party agreement would be necessa ry, City Attorney Cindy Day-Wilson said.
For comparison, Holmlund pointed to several other cities, including Fresno, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, that have struck such agreements with the likes of churches, nonprofits and businesses.
“Since this would be operated by a third party, we need to think about the caliber of organization we want to work with,” Holmlund said, adding that the organization would come up with their own cost estimates.
The council’s direction to staff to research the plan would have them look into third parties willing to work with the city on such an encampment, as well as explore how long a pilot program might last and how big the encampment would be. “It’s not going to solve the whole problem, but it might give us a footing,” Councilwoman Linda Atkins said.
The the rapid re-housing part of the council’s direction would see the city looking into a program recommended to the city in an initial report developed last year by Focus Strategies, a national group dedicated to helping communities improve efforts to end homelessness by using local data to create programs.
The approach, which would combine temporary, free housing made available to the homeless with access to rehabilitative and mental services, aims to move homeless people from the streets to homes quickly.
While the city currently doesn’t have such a program, or even the housing infrastructure that it requires, the council’s direction will have staff spend the $21,000 it would take to find out how to create it.
“We’ve been studying an awful lot,” Atkins said, “and we need to do something.”
