Last winter, two homeless people in Marin were treated for exposure. In response, San Rafael temporarily opened the Marin Center and the National Guard Armory to host 40-80 of the county’s homeless residents. During that same time, a dozen churches and synagogues housed and fed about 60 people nightly. A grand jury report found these and other actions to be indicative of the county’s lack of emergency services to accommodate its homeless population.
Despite the efforts of county officials to expand emergency shelter space in the years following that report, Marin County still hosts just 55 permanent emergency shelter beds at the Mill Street Center in San Rafael, which is operated by the organization Homeward Bound of Marin.
This year, 15 churches and synagogues reopened their doors on Dec. 1 to host about 55 more local homeless residents in what’s now known as the yearly Rotating Emergency Shelter Team project, aka REST. Even with this added support, the St. Vincent de Paul dining room in San Rafael decided to open its doors temporarily last month to host roughly 40 homeless residents during an especially cold week.
Homeward Bound Executive Director Mary Kay Sweeney has been helping to find a place for another permanent shelter. The task is easier said than done, she said, “because there’s nobody in this entire county who wants a shelter near them.” The same goes for low-income housing. For the issue to be addressed, she said, “we need a groundswell of people who will say low-income housing isn’t what you think it is.”
In the meantime, the county is now looking to a new approach it hopes will curtail the need for emergency shelter. Marin County supervisors on Dec. 14 were scheduled to vote on whether to allocate $200,000 yearly toward a program called Housing First, which would provide housing subsidies for the county’s homeless.
The idea behind Housing First is to bypass shelters and instead put homeless residents in subsidized housing and provide support services to keep them there. Those chosen to participate would be scattered in housing units around the county. The program has proven in many jurisdictions to be a more efficient investment than shelter funding, according to Bobbe Rockoff, a policy analyst for Marin County Health and Human Services.
Rockoff said Housing First funding would not take any money away from the Mill Street Center and its existing emergency shelter beds. “However, it is an alternative to developing an expanded permanent shelter,” she said.
Larry Meredith, Marin County director of Health and Human Services, said the county’s search wouldn’t be abandoned. But it might be put on the back burner.
But some local homeless advocates believe putting emergency shelter beds on the back burner in lieu of emergency shelter housing is a mistake. “We need both,” said Rev. Paul Gaffney of the Marin Interfaith Street Chaplaincy, who co-founded the REST program.
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, agrees with Gaffney. She says investing so much in housing is “putting the cart before the horse,” even if the concept behind Housing First is a solid one. “The problem is that we have so many more homeless people than we do resources for housing,” she said.
Meredith said the county simply doesn’t have the resources to do both. “If you’re on the planet Earth these days, you know that the resources for publicly funded programs are in decline,” he said. Plus, many Marin communities have indicated they are not in favor of a large permanent shelter, he said.
The next step following the council’s decision is to select agencies to work with the county on the Housing First program, Meredith said. Sweeney said she expected that, given the amount of funding, the program would serve about 12 people total. Meredith said he could not confirm the number of people the program would serve.
Contact Anna McCarthy at amccarthy@marinscope.com.
