Marin County officials are pulling together a proposal to buy a hotel or apartment building and convert it into housing for the homeless with funding from a new state program.
Under the Homekey program, the state will dole out $600 million to California cities and counties to create housing for homeless residents. The program is a spinoff of the state’s Project Roomkey, which pays for counties to lease hotel rooms as temporary shelter for the homeless during the coronavirus pandemic.
Marin County officials, who are working on an application in conjunction with the Marin Housing Authority and a group of city and town leaders, haven’t yet narrowed down a property that could be suitable for the program. But they must act quickly. Funding through the Homekey project — backed by federal coronavirus relief money — must be spent by the end of the year. Preliminary applications from Bay Area jurisdictions are due Aug. 13.
“It’s a very new initiative on a tight timeline, but it’s a fantastic opportunity,” said Ashley Hart McIntyre, the county’s homelessness policy analyst.
Applications can be submitted before property negotiations have begun, McIntyre said.
“We’re not focused on a specific site yet,” she said. “At the moment, we’re casting a wide net.”
Officials are aiming to have a list of two or three prospective properties by the application deadline, according to San Rafael’s homeless planning director, Andrew Hening.
The program has set aside $100 million for Bay Area jurisdictions, and competition for that slice of the funding is likely to be tough, said county Supervisor Damon Connolly. He said the program dovetails with Marin’s “housing first” approach to addressing homelessness, which involves providing the most vulnerable homeless residents with permanent housing and offering them supportive services such as job training and counseling to help them get back on their feet.
“We are grateful for the opportunity to make a significant difference in the lives of our vulnerable neighbors,” Connolly said.
When Marin last tallied its homeless population, in January 2019, there were 1,034 people experiencing homelessness in the county and more than two-thirds of them were not living in shelters.
Since March, Marin County has sheltered 343 homeless residents in hotel rooms that the county is leasing through the state’s Project Roomkey. The initiative has cost roughly $2.1 million so far — or about $6,116 per person sheltered — not including the cost of county staff who are supervising the hotels, according to Assistant County Administrator Angela Nicholson. Those expenses are expected to be reimbursed by the state and federal governments, according to a county report.
The county is leasing 90 rooms, spread among two hotels, for people who are homeless, not living in shelters, and are over the age of 65 or have medical conditions that increase their risk of complications from COVID-19. At another hotel, 22 rooms are reserved for homeless families. A fourth hotel is providing shelter for people who have contracted the coronavirus and are homeless or cannot isolate from the people they live with.
One such hotel is the Motel 6 in San Rafael, where the county is leasing 60 rooms for vulnerable homeless residents. Officials have declined to identify the other three hotels.
Funding from Project Homekey could help the county make the program permanent. But a grant from the state wouldn’t cover all the associated costs, said county Supervisor Katie Rice.
“It’s not just about funding for the brick and mortar, it’s also about making sure we can match up funding for the long term case management and other support these folks will need once housed,” Rice said.
But state or federal funding for homeless housing, she said, “is hard to come by — pandemic or no pandemic. So our folks are definitely looking at the Homekey opportunity.”
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August 02, 2020 at 07:59AM
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Marin County eyes state funding to buy hotel for the homeless - Marin Independent Journal
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