April 19, 2021 — Today, about seventy people who have been homeless or at high risk for it are moving into Live Oak Apartments, a former Best Western Inn in Ukiah. The building is part of the state’s Project Homekey initiative. Last year, counties got money specifically to buy lodging establishments and convert them into permanent housing for vulnerable populations. Mendocino County received $9.6 million, and has spent most of the time since purchasing the building installing kitchenettes and remodeling common areas. The priorities have been seniors, veterans, families with kids, and people who are especially susceptible to a bad outcome if they get covid-19.
One 70-year-old wheelchair-bound tenant has been living in a car for a year. Another elderly tenant’s story is largely unknown due to severe short-term memory loss. Megan van Sant, a senior program manager with the county’s Health and Human Services Agency, has been able to unravel that this tenant does have a work history and therefore access to social security benefits, but has no ID, no bank cards, and no memory of where their money is.
Van Sant gave a tour of the building last week, before anyone had moved any of their things into the rooms. Beds were stripped, and a few light fixtures were laid out on countertops, prior to being installed. Some of the rooms had multiple sinks, to satisfy funding requirements about kitchenettes and facilities.
There will be 25 children in the building, including one with special needs, whose single parent had to stop working when school closed. But sometimes it’s just bad credit that makes it hard to get ahead. Four of the living units are double rooms, to accommodate families with several children.
Another single parent is blind and will have to seek regular treatments at the dialysis center, which is a block away in a neighborhood shopping complex.
As of last week, 37 households had been accepted into the program. Some of those households consist of one person, while others are multigenerational families. Ten of the rooms will be empty until they’re equipped with kitchenettes.
The funding to keep the building staffed and maintained is coming from a variety of social services programs. Housing vouchers will pay for rooms with kitchenettes, and veterans typically get benefits through HUD-Vash, a federal housing program. Some tenants are getting help from CalWorks, some have social security or retirement benefits, and some of them have jobs. Whatever their source of income, they have committed to paying 30% of it toward housing here. And there are rapid rehousing grants that are available for the first few months after tenants move in.
Sex offenders, people with a recent felony history, and arsonists cannot be housed here, even one person whom van Sant referred to as “a mild arsonist.” Also, it’s against the law to discriminate against people based on where they are from, so it would be illegal to offer services only to people who satisfy some criteria of being local. However, van Sant said that after selecting applicants without knowing where they were from, only one was from out of the county. Still, there’s only so much that can be done with one project, even with a multimillion dollar windfall from the state.
“And again, we prioritized veterans, seniors, families with children. We never even had the opportunity to look at anybody who didn’t fit one of those categories. Because the demand was so high,” van Sant recalled. “And frankly, there are individuals who have a level of care that exceeds what we can provide in this building. So there are homeless individuals who have very complicated needs, and we were very clear that’s not a level of care that we can provide here.”