Some Petaluma homeless families see a lifeline severed
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.”
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