Some Petaluma homeless families see a lifeline severed

COTS family shelter, like many in the region, is overburdened and some residents must move along.|

On July 9, 2017, Michelle Brown walked into the Committee on the Shelterless Petaluma office and turned over her bag of methamphetamines to a staff member. She fell to her knees in front of the family shelter in tears, begging god for deliverance from 18 years of addiction and for a better life for her and her 7-year-old son.

Last week, with 250 days of sobriety under her belt, she was on the cusp of achieving her dreams. After spending eight months in COTS’ family shelter, she had one more exam between her and a GED, she had a job at TJ Maxx, she was scheduled to complete a test to get her driver’s license, and she was soon to find out about a placement in an affordable housing complex in Sonoma County.

But, instead of celebrating her achievements and her son’s success at Grant Elementary School Friday, she was loading their belongings into her father’s car to make the more than 90-mile journey to move back into a Sacramento senior mobile home park with her mother. It was an agonizing moment, she said, realizing that her last lifeline had been severed.

Brown and her son, Keith Slatt, were among the eight families who were asked to leave the 11-room COTS’ family shelter effective March 16. She said she’d received the notice to vacate on Valentine’s Day.

“I’m so beyond tears and I’m so beyond anger, I’m laughing at it - I’m just blown away,” the 38-year-old said in a phone interview as she was packing the last of her things. “The fact that they can even attempt to feel OK about this, I don’t know how they sleep at night.”

COTS’ CEO Mike Johnson said the nonprofit did all it could to help the families as homelessness explodes in Sonoma County, with an already-tight housing market that further constricted after October’s fires displaced thousands. The family shelter was reopened in 2015 after a three-year closure due to budget cuts.

In the current climate, the average length of stays for families COTS serves has doubled, from three months to six, he said. The eight families asked to leave had already been given extensions beyond the six month mark, he said, and five of the eight families who had no other viable options accommodations were offered beds in the main shelter for another 30 days.

“The case management personnel looked at the situation (of the three families) and said ‘you have options if you choose to do that,’” Johnson said. “We have a backlog of families now that are trying to get into the shelter for the first time and are sleeping in cars or they’re in tents and they haven’t even had a shot at a shelter for a day, let alone 10 months. That’s sort of the push, plus we have to try to serve the whole community. We do the best we can to move families along from the shelter to permanent housing.”

Failed system

Brown in part blamed her previous case manager, Ruben Armenta, who she said failed to provide services she was promised during her time at COTS. She claimed the former case manager did not turn in applications for affordable housing properties, appointments were not kept and vital information about programs wasn’t shared. He has since been replaced with a different case manger, she said.

Johnson declined to comment on Armenta’s performance, the reasons he provided for leaving the organization this January, or grievances brought up by families, citing personnel confidentiality statues. Johnson said he thought Armenta worked with the organization between two and three years, and was not aware of previous issues.

Armenta, reached by phone, said he left COTS because he “didn’t feel like I made as much of a difference” after unspecified changes were made to programs at the nonprofit.

“The only thing I can say is that there were clients that were willing to work toward the program and there were clients that weren’t,” he said. He turned in housing applications given to him by COTS’ clients, he said.

Limited resources

Chief Development Officer Sarah Quinto said the nonprofit is contractually obligated to serve a certain number of families each year. Currently, there are 257 homeless families on a coordinated intake waitlist for shelters across the county, and more on a separate waitlist, Johnson said. Last year, 111 homeless families comprised of 326 family members were counted during a survey of Sonoma County’s homeless, according to county data.

“Some of the families had gotten a little comfortable and have sort of put it on us to make sure they have a place to live and have not really sought their own housing either, and that’s a piece of it,” Johnson said. “And of course, the availably of housing for families in Sonoma County is another piece. What it adds up to is for some of these folks, the challenge is finding the next place and for some of them, it’s actually getting them to work on their own lives … we have continued to extend them months past their exit dates and we’re doing that because we want to make sure they’re safe and their kids are safe.”

The shelter operates Rapid Re-Housing and Integrity Housing programs, initiatives that place families and individuals in homes and provide financial assistance and supportive services to qualified applicants seeking housing. In January, COTS handed off its food box program to Salvation Army to hone its focus on housing. The nonprofit is in July poised to open a center in Santa Rosa that will build on those programs, Quinto said.

They hope the expanded Rapid Re-Housing program, which helps families with rent and bills, will serve 572 people in the next three years. The 5-year-old COTS program is the longest running in the county and last year served 89 people, Quinto said in a February interview.

The nonprofit is actively seeking landlords to take part in its Integrity Housing program, where a home is leased to COTS at the federal fair market rent level or lower. In exchange for lower-than-market rents, COTS guarantees steady rent payments, no lost rent revenue, property management services and maintenance services, Johnson said.

Currently, 94 people are in such arrangements, including 33 children and families, Quinto said.

The transitional family program at the Mary Isaak Center will also be modified into housing for single adults or couples, with changes made by mid-July or August, Johnson said. That demographic is in dire need of help, he said.

In total, COTS serves 2,400 people each year through food and housing programs, Quinto said.

New beginnings

Left with few options last week, Brown quit her job, enrolled her son in a Sacramento school and tried to chart the course for her next move. She’d left her hometown Sacramento after an altercation with her mother and landed at COTS.

“I didn’t think I was done - I had drugs on me,” she said. “I didn’t decide I was done until I stepped foot in the shelter.”

She enrolled herself and her son in counseling and came clean to him and her 21-year-old daughter, Alyssa Morales, about her hidden struggle with substance abuse. She got pregnant with her daughter at 16, when she made the hard choice to drop out of school in favor of taking a job.

When her daughter was 4, Brown found herself bouncing from house to house. She gave up Morales to family for a few weeks while she sought a more permanent situation. She never got her daughter back.

“I missed her so much, the only thing that could numb that was meth - I found that,” she said, adding that she’s still in debt for child support payments. “The more and more situated and stable she became, the less I became. I unraveled and got more addicted … I didn’t realize how bad I was getting, it was like my medicine. None of my friends knew, I kept it away from my family.”

She’s proud of what she’s been able to accomplish and laments what she called an error on COTS’ part as she was just realizing her full potential.

“There hasn’t been a day that goes by that I don’t better my situation,” she said.

Not quite homeless

For East Bay native Randy Villarreal, 32, leaving the shelter means heading back to a nomadic life, moving from one hotel room to another with his 2-year-old son, Daniel, and his wife, Vanessa, who is two months pregnant.

Villarreal, who has been in recovery from a meth addiction for almost five years, works as a construction apprentice, and his wife has epilepsy and can’t work. He makes just enough to be able to afford rooms in hotels, moving transiently to “every hotel from Cloverdale to San Rafael” since 2015, he said. He doesn’t make enough to qualify for market-rate homes, many of which require income that’s three times the monthly rent, he said.

It’s difficult to find shared housing, and moving in with family isn’t an option, he said. They’re on a waiting list for affordable properties, and he’s “too proud” to take up COTS’ suggestion of calling Red Cross to ask for hotel vouches when he has an income, he said. Vanessa entered COTS July 22; he followed Aug. 30, he said.

Villarreal said his housing applications weren’t turned in and now his family is staying at a hotel in Novato while he works in Tiburon. They have a meeting with a COTS case manager in coming weeks, and hope to get positive news about Rapid Re-Housing, since his wife wants to be near her family during her pregnancy.

“I’m frustrated, but it is what it is,” he said. “I’m not going to get mad, nothing is going to happen and then I’m going to be angry. I’d rather just be happy.”

Solutions

The city’s housing market is bleak, and at last count in October, there was a 1.12 percent vacancy rate in the major apartment complexes, meaning that only 35 of 3,125 units were available to rent.

The median home value in Petaluma is $698,200, and home values in the city have risen 9.9 percent during the past year, according to real estate website Zillow. The site predicts home sale prices will spike an additional 2.8 percent within the next year.

The median price of homes currently listed in Petaluma is $745,000 and the median rental price is $2,945, according to Zillow.

The city is exploring its options for altering the course of the housing crisis, including requiring developers to build affordable units as part of new rental and for-sale housing projects of more than five units.

At a February workshop, the city emphasized the need for expediency in approving housing projects, and sought more details about parking requirements for accessory dwelling units, or granny units, built in the existing footprint of neighborhoods.

City Manager John Brown is working to craft an ordinance that temporarily relaxes parking requirements to provide refuge for displaced fire victims and investigating a zoning code amendment that would allow housing in commercial districts and business parks.

“More housing affordable to the lowest wage earners is the solution,” Johnson said in an email.

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