Petaluma leaders search for solutions amid homeless crisis

Janine Naretto estimates she lived in her tent on the east side of Steamer Landing Park for close to nine months before Petaluma Police forced her and at least a dozen others to leave last week.

Surrounded by the belongings she spared from heavy equipment that scoured campsites between the park and SMART train tracks, Naretto wept.

She said she wasn’t prepared last Friday to be rousted from her home on private property, forced to pack up her tent and an older model teal Honda sedan with a flat tire and busted battery. But Naretto, 57, has come to expect forced evictions after more than two decades without a permanent place to stay.

“I’ve had to move so many times,” Naretto, a Sonoma native, said in a phone interview Tuesday. “I’ve been homeless 23 years, and it’s not getting any better. It’s getting harder, because I’m not as quick as I used to be.”

Amid what city leaders have called a growing crisis, plans have been sketched to double the city’s investment in its primary homeless service provider, funnel $1 million into a new mental health-focused policing model and launch a mobile shower program as a tool for both dignity and outreach. But there’s little consensus among elected leaders on the type of solutions long sought by homeless advocates and deployed elsewhere in the county – investments in hotel rooms, safe parking, sanctioned encampments or tiny home villages.

“Absolutely there’s a problem,” said Vice Mayor Brian Barnacle. “We’re not doing enough, and I don’t have the answers.”

As many as three dozen residents had occupied the encampment near Steamer Landing Park at one point, making it one of the larger unsanctioned camps to have developed within city limits, according to police. The push to displace those residents came on the heels of a similar eviction two weeks ago targeting people who took up residence on McNear Peninsula. It also followed dozens of police visits to the patch of property near Steamer landing in the past six months.

For Naretto, affectionately known as “Ma” to her fellow campers, the constant stream of police activity has become a regular, stress-inducing part of life.

“Every time I see a police car, I’m terrified,” Naretto said. “I’m 57 years old. I just want a place where I can live in peace.”

In its 72-hour notice provided to residents April 26, police offered a number of resources, including the Committee on the Shelterless’ nearby, 80-bed Mary Isaak Center.

As she sorted through her campsite last Friday, Melody Thornton, 56, said she planned to seek shelter at the Mary Isaak Center. She said she didn’t have anywhere to put her stuff, though, and was scrambling Friday to find storage solutions beyond what’s offered at the shelter.

Others have decried conditions at Petaluma’s primary homeless shelter, and they say the city’s pattern of rousting residents from encampments essentially leaves them with nowhere to go.

Advocates in Petaluma have long pushed for safe parking or sanctioned camping sites, as well as tiny home villages, tactics that have been deployed elsewhere in the county, including in Santa Rosa.

Sue Oaks, a retired Petaluma school teacher who began delivering food to encampments after she was inspired to help by her grandson, told the city council on Monday she was furious and frustrated when the tents she bought with her stimulus check were removed by front end loaders and excavators.

“We’ve got to do something,” Oaks said during the public comment portion of Monday’s meeting. “Is there city property or private property for which an arrangement can be worked out?”

Barnacle, who was first elected this past November, said he’s open to discussing tiny home villages, as well as other alternatives to COTS’ Mary Isaak Center, which has struggled to bring people in amid complaints about lack of privacy and rules residents have often found onerous.

“If they cannot or will not go to Mary Isaak Center, where do they go?” Barnacle said.

In a column submitted to the Argus-Courier, the COTS leadership team acknowledged tension related to the nonprofit’s services and approach, and promised to launch a survey of homeless residents to better understand the needs of those living on Petaluma’s streets.

“We want to hear their hearts’ desires and also figure out what sorts of compromises they may be willing to make in regards to their living situations,” COTS’ leadership team said. “In the meantime, we will continue to make shelter space available at the Mary Isaak Center as we work on creating additional housing options.”

Petaluma City Council member Dennis Pocekay has spent much of the past week visiting the city’s homeless encampments to talk with residents.

“I do think the police are bending over backwards to try to gently do what they feel they have to do,” said Pocekay, a first-term council member who was elected last November. “By the same token, I understand why certain homeless advocates feel things aren’t going anywhere near the way they should go.”

With the city expecting reimbursement on its $1 million investment in CAHOOTS, the planned alternate policing model, Pocekay said he favors reinvesting that money to develop temporary housing solutions.

For Pocekay, that means safe parking sites, converting shipping containers into tiny homes and developing sanctioned encampments within city limits.

“I do think we ought to have some place for these folks to go where everybody knows they can go,” Pocekay said.

Brian Cochran, Petaluma’s assistant city manager, said the city has shied away from tiny homes and sanctioned camps because it “it doesn’t get folks closer to being permanently housed.”

But he said city officials do plan to study the potential to secure state funding to convert hotel space into permanent supportive housing, following similar, Sonoma County-led efforts in Sebastopol and in downtown Santa Rosa. The two hotels, purchased with $16 million in Project Homekey state grant funding, have brought 75 permanent supportive housing units to the county.

Cochran said city staff has also proposed more than doubling the city’s investment in COTS – to $300,000 annually from $140,000 – to help the nonprofit agency hire two more case managers. The city also plans to boost support for the downtown streets team, a program that enlists homeless residents as volunteers for city cleanup efforts.

Cochran also touted the city’s planned mobile shower program, one of the first targeted investments of voter-approved Measure U sales tax dollars, as another way the city connects with homeless residents in order to steer them toward permanent housing.

“I feel that we are headed in the right direction,” Cochran said in a phone interview this week. “Our end goal is really to get folks housed. The big question is how do we take steps to achieve that goal?”

Mike Healy, Petaluma’s senior council member who was first elected in 1998, said he supports greater investment in COTS, including a push to expand the Hopper Street shelter into adjacent, city-owned space that once housed a now-defunct wastewater treatment plant. He also pointed to a small piece of city property behind the COTS Family Center on Petaluma Boulevard South as a potential location for tiny homes.

“For myself, I think we’d be open to looking at all solutions,” Healy said, adding that the problem has gotten more severe in recent years.

Although the countywide homeless numbers dropped by 7% between 2019-20, there are still 2,745 people without stable housing living in the county. And in Petaluma, the numbers are growing, reaching a three-year high of 296, according to the 2020 Sonoma County Homeless Census.

Kevin McDonnell, a Petaluma City Council member who also serves as the city’s representative on the Continuum of Care, the lead regional homelessness agency, said he favors permanent housing over any temporary solutions. But he wants to see a strategic, countywide approach to the problem.

“My effort is to try to get more housing for these people – not just temporary spaces, but places that are permanent,” McDonnell said. “That’s where my energies are going on this. Without that, the numbers will increase.”

Mayor Teresa Barrett was noncommittal on any single proposal, preferring more study. She said city leaders took notice when a 300-person encampment along Santa Rosa’s Joe Rodota Trail captured regional attention in late 2019 and early 2020, leading to massive county investments in homeless housing and services. And she acknowledged the problem is worsening in Petaluma.

“While we’ve had homelessness, it’s become acute, I think,” Barrett said. “Every place that is having to deal with this has a new experience. We’ve never had to deal with it at this level before…It’s just grown faster than we’ve been able to respond to it.”

Naretto has couch surfed, lived with family in Colorado and stayed at Santa Rosa’s Samuel Jones Hall, the county’s largest homeless shelter. She lived at Sloan House, a Santa Rosa shelter for women and children that she called “marvelous,” and she has spent time at Petaluma’s Mary Isaak Center.

“My next step is I’m leaving California,” she said.

She’ll have company in Petaluma native Sarah Gossage.

On Friday, as Gossage powered up a hot plate to serve coffee to homeless advocates at her campsite near Steamer Landing, she talked up her plan to head to the mountains with Naretto.

“In eight days, I’m going to get my check, and I’m going to buy a van and I’m going to go to Tahoe and take Ma with me,” she said.

In the days since police ordered the campsite cleared last week, not much has changed for Naretto. The portable toilet is gone, she said, forcing her to walk a little farther.

And her new campsite is just yards away from her previous location near Steamer Landing Park.

“I’m on the other side of the gate,” she said. “It’s public property. Well, maybe it belongs to the railroad.”

Tyler Silvy is editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier. Reach him at tyler.silvy@arguscourier.com, 707-776-8458, or @tylersilvy on Twitter.