The Emergency Housing Village ordinance, adopted by the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors in August, crafted a permitting pathway to make communities for homeless people to live in. The villages described by the ordinance can be operated by a nonprofit, government agency or religious organization and could be a group of mobile homes, RVs or even tents with shared kitchens or bathrooms.
Come Sept. 30, this kind of development will be principally permitted in the inland zones of the unincorporated county.
But what does it take to make these types of communities happen?
Efforts in Eureka
One example of a similar program in Eureka, running since 2016, is Betty Chinn’s Blue Angel Village. Similar to the county ordinance’s proposes, there are on-site common facilities like a bathroom and a dining area where residents are fed. The units are five shipping containers retrofitted into double rooms. Up to 40 people can stay at the village at a time — along with their dogs if they have them — for a 90-day program that hopefully moves people to permanent housing, with help from staff.
When asked what she’s learned running the site, Chinn said she understands what guidance is needed to show people how to exit chronic homelessness.
“That kind of learning is not just ‘get them in here and get them out of here,’ that kind of stuff. Like what I say, I learned to be patient,” she said.
This includes teaching people, some of whom have lived without permanent housing for decades, to not smoke inside and to keep a place clean. She provides links to treatment for drug addiction or mental health services. Residents also receive help tracking money saved with a case manager and work to find permanent housing and hold down a job.
Case managers there also check in on people six months after they leave the village.
Blue Angel Village resident Ron Tuey had three days left in his stay. He really liked the program, he said.
“It’s nice to have a bed, a dresser, to be able to shut a door by yourself and sleep,” he told the Times-Standard on Thursday.
He doesn’t know where he’s going next and is calling other programs to see if there’s space for him. Otherwise, he said it’s back to the streets. He gets a few hundred dollars each month in survival benefits from his wife but it’s not enough to rent a room in a house. He said it’s hard to find a job while homeless — with no shower or way to do laundry.
“But I’ll go get a job, and I’ll make money but, like I’m saying, to get a place is hard to do,” he said, noting rentals are expensive and require more than just money.
He gestured to a man in a blue shirt.
“That guy, he’s been getting out tomorrow. He’s been looking for a place every day and he can’t find nothing. He’s got the money,” Tuey said — but people don’t want to rent to homeless people.
Chinn estimates that by Christmas a new transitional housing site will be up and running at the Crowley site, a city-owned lot on Hilfiker Lane. The property could host people like Tuey when they finish their 90 days at the Blue Angel Village. Right now, Chinn says they’re just waiting for PG&E hookups. She says the Crowley pods will be the next step after people move out of the village. Residents will pay rent, establish credit and rental histories and eventually move to housing in the community.
The site will host 33 residential units, including shared showers and a kitchen.
“We are really lucky,” she said.
The Eureka City Council declared a shelter crisis in 2016, which allowed the relaxation of building and housing guidelines to get the Blue Angel Village built. Betty Chinn’s village came about quite quickly under a time crunch with the planned displacement of homeless people living in the Palco Marsh.
County ordinance
The hope to alleviate the county’s shelter crisis and address homelessness shaped the creation of the ordinance. The goal, according to the ordinance, is to allow a broad range of housing types for occupancy as emergency housing. No person in the villages shall be denied shelter because of inability to pay.
The need for housing is substantial: 1,573 homeless individuals were counted on the night of Jan. 22 at the point-in-time count in Humboldt County.
Organizations won’t need to get a special permit to open an emergency housing village basically in any zone that also allows housing — from residential multifamily to highway service commercial. This raised concern from 2nd District Supervisor Michelle Bushnell at the August meeting.
She worried that given Garberville’s diminutive size, an emergency housing village could be erected virtually anywhere in town because of the proximity to bus stops.
“I just think that there should be a process where public input could happen, and I think that the pushback could be large if this were to happen on (Garberville’s) downtown main street,” Bushnell said.
The ordinance includes a range of housing types, from emergency units without a toilet to a group of RVs or mobile homes. The village and its units must meet minimum requirements set by the state for emergency shelter — and it applies only to people living homeless during the shelter crisis, declared by the board in 2018.
These kinds of programs — run by organizations that say helping people out of chronic homelessness requires more than just a place to sleep — are not cheap. Arcata House Partnership’s safe parking program, the only of its kind in Humboldt County, ran out of funding in June — operating at a cost of $477,000 annually — and closed the program.
“I think it’s opening up an opportunity,” Nezzie Wade, president of Affordable Homeless Housing Alternatives, said of the tiny emergency villages ordinance.
She’s trekked to the planning commission meetings and the board of supervisors where they hashed out what the ordinance would look like and has commented on the drafts.
She said any kind of effort to build tiny homes is good, to increase the number of affordable units in the county. But she said that top-down projects are very expensive — the organization needs to have land and capital to get it off the ground.
“My concern: The models that are being proposed or happening in Humboldt are multimillion-dollar projects,” she said.
She hopes that a project like Opportunity Village in Eugene, Oregon, can happen in Humboldt County with the ordinance, a self-governed community with a cost of $100,000 a year.
“This increases the zoning where things can happen, which is good. I’m really happy to see we have tiny house anything, basically,” said Wade.
Sage Alexander can be reached at 707-441-0504.
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