Catholic Charities Weighs in on $4.2 Million in Sonoma County Homeless Housing Fund Threatened Under Trump Policies

Mark Morton has struggled with “eating right” since the spring, when he underwent surgery for cancer in his esophagus and stomach.

Morton, 66, who has spent half his adult life homeless, has been slowly recovering in his small unit at The Palms Inn, a converted south Santa Rosa motel that has provided permanent supportive housing since 2016.

Somewhat emaciated, Morton stood uneasily on a recent day next to his bed on rail-thin legs as his dog, Verna, a Jack Russell terrier and Chihuahua mix, bounced about the room, avoiding somehow Morton’s collection of stacked pennies and other coins.

“Palms has really helped me out with my recovery,” Morton said, adding that if he were still homeless, “I’d be dead.”

The supportive services that Morton and other residents at the 104-unit Palms Inn receive are now being threatened by sharp cuts in federal housing grants planned by the Trump administration.

Detailed in a 128-page notice from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Trump’s new vision for homeless housing aid slashes funds for long-term supportive housing programs and shifts billions of dollars to more restrictive, transitional housing programs.

The new policies favor programs that promote “self-sufficiency” over a reliance on government support, according to a Nov. 13 HUD press release outlining the funding change.

“We are stopping the Biden-era slush fund that fueled the homelessness crisis, shut out faith-based providers simply because of their values, and incentivized never-ending government dependency,” said HUD Secretary Scott Turner.

Federal funding for permanent supportive housing projects across the country, currently $3.3 billion annually, would drop to $1.1 billion under the proposed policy, according to an Oct. 22 memo distributed among board members of the Sonoma County Homeless Coalition.

The board is the decision-making body of the Sonoma County Continuum of Care, or CoC, which coordinates local distribution of HUD funding for homeless housing and services. The board receives about $4.2 million in HUD funds for permanent supportive housing projects and related programs.

Under new HUD rules, no more than 30% of CoC funds can be used for permanent supportive housing. Currently, 87% of those funds can be used for long-term housing programs, according to the local homeless coalition.

Michael Gause, the county’s ending homelessness program manager, said that under the new rules only 30% of CoC funding will be “guaranteed,” compared to 90% last year. According to analysis by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, 70% of funding will now be subject to new competitive scoring and rankings where “even small scoring differences could lead to major funding losses.”

These shifts potentially represent staggering losses to nine permanent supportive housing projects that serve about 250 of the county’s most vulnerable homeless people, currently living in 209 housing units, Gause said.

The number, he added, includes about 40 people living with HIV, some 60 veterans and more than a dozen transitional age youth. Everyone receiving permanent supportive housing services has experienced years homelessness, living with serious disabilities and chronic illness.

Projects could lose hundreds of thousands

At The Palms Inn, Catholic Charities receives $727,000 in HUD funding to cover supportive services and rental aid for 40 units. The loss or drastic reduction of those funds would destabilize the entire 104-unit project, Gause said.

“There’s 60 veterans there,” he said. “What happens if The Palms goes under because this funding is going away.”

Beth Schlanker/The Press Democrat file

Jennielynn Holmes, CEO of Catholic Charities Northwest California, poses Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2022, outside the Caritas Center in Santa Rosa. (Beth Schlanker/The Press Democrat file)

Jennielynn Holmes, chief executive officer of Catholic Charities of Northwest California, said the HUD funding leverages other sources for local permanent supportive housing projects. About 65% of the nonprofit’s budget for The Palms Inn comes from HUD.

“Housing will go away unless we figure out a way to fund it,” she said, adding that the residents who currently live in permanent supportive housing are too vulnerable to return to the street. Some would not survive, she said.

“In my opinion, we don’t have a choice,” Holmes said. “We have to figure out how to backfill this funding. We’re going to have to make some hard decisions about what we’re going to fund and not fund.”

Other large permanent supportive housing programs, also established at former lodging sites, include Elderberry Commons in Sebastopol and St. Vincent de Paul Commons in Santa Rosa. The programs receive, respectively, $309,335 and $327,166 in HUD funds.

The nine permanent supportive housing programs receive a total of more than $3.3 million in HUD funding.

The local nonprofit Community on the Shelterless, or COTS, has 18 units of permanent supportive housing units that are fully funded by HUD. The $350,000 in federal funds go toward paying master leases and clinical and case management services at housing sites primarily in Petaluma and Rohnert Park.

Karen Shimizu, Petaluma Housing Manager greets Karen Strolia of the Downtown Streets Team at an open house hosted by the Committee on the Shelterless, where they demonstrated the transitional shelters they plan to place at the Mary Isaac Center. (CRISSY PASCUAL/ARGUS-COURIER STAFF).

Cabral said the HUD funds also pay for job training, providing application assistance for benefits, transportation and health care navigation. Some of the residents, she added, have lived in their units for nearly a decade and have a long history of being homeless; all of them have some disability and the majority are over 70.

“These are not people that you can just say, ‘OK, go live in a market-rate unit and get a job,'” she said.

Cabra said the HUD officials have been signaling a shift away from the “housing first” model but she and other homeless services providers never imagined it would be “quite this drastic.”

She said the focus on transitional housing is laudable but should not be done at the expense of permanent supportive housing.

Turning back the clock

The housing first model that has dominated homeless policy for at least a decade prioritizes providing permanent housing to people without barriers. Lease conditions are similar to those put on renters in the private housing market, where the use of alcohol or drugs — in and of itself and without other lease violations — is not a reason for eviction.

But in HUD’s press release announcing CoC funding changes, the agency disparaged the Biden administration’s focus on permanent supportive housing and called the housing first model “failed.” That model, HUD contends, “encourages dependence on endless government handouts while neglecting to address the root causes of homelessness, including illicit drugs and mental illness.”

The blowback from policy experts and providers in homeless services has been swift and wide.

Holmes, the Catholic Charities CEO, said HUD’s new housing priorities ignore the “mountains of research that’s disproven the old way of thinking. This is taking us back more than a decade.”

“There’s this assumption that housing is a privilege not a right. That’s the undertone of this whole thing,” she said.

But Holmes said providing permanent supportive housing saves a community roughly $34,000 annually by reducing the costs associated with emergency care and jail cells.

“At the end of the day, you’re paying for it either way,” she said. “You can either pay for it through criminal justice, emergency response, hospitals, losing sales tax in your downtown corridor. Or you could go the route of human dignity and housing as a right.”

The National Alliance to End Homelessness contends HUD’s shift will make more people subject to local laws across the nation that are seen to criminalize homelessness.

In its funding notice, the agency stated that local homeless funding hubs “should work with law enforcement, first responders, and their state and local governments to reduce encampments, public camping, and public drug use in order to address barriers to maintaining housing and increasing self-sufficiency.”

“These factors elevate the influence of local criminalization policies,” the Alliance wrote in its analysis of HUD rules.

Gause said the county is now scrambling to craft new provider contract language in accordance with HUD’s new policies. The Sonoma County Community Development Commission is the designated applicant and lead agency for the local CoC.

The deadline for the county commission to submit contracts on behalf of providers is Jan. 14.