Opinion: Reducing homelessness depends on sustaining pandemic’s urgency
This pandemic will pass, but our epidemic of homelessness will persist. Our greatest opportunity to reduce homelessness depends on our ability to heed the lessons of this pandemic and to sustain its urgency.
More housing would help, yet the Bay Area presents daunting obstacles for builders. The cost to build a Bay Area apartment complex exceeds $750,000 per door, and each project requires three to five years to develop.
While expanding traditional supportive housing, San Jose has also stretched to find more nimble, cost-effective approaches. We began converting motels to transitional housing in 2015 — which the state has since embraced through its Homekey program. Since then, we have deployed tiny homes, modular units, shipping containers and microunits — each with benefits and drawbacks.
The pandemic brought new urgency and new federal dollars for solutions. Progress accelerated: Since 2020, nonprofits, the city, housing authority and county partnered to bring 4,886 of our metro area’s unhoused into permanent housing and 7,989 into shelters and motels.
Yet as quickly as we have housed thousands of residents, the pandemic has impoverished thousands more. Californians see little progress amid urban landscapes dotted with encampments, and the expiration of pandemic-related assistance could worsen the crisis.
We need more solutions — fast. As the pandemic set in last March, we huddled to explore a new approach. Could we leverage new construction technologies and the emergency health orders to clear red tape and rapidly accelerate affordable housing development? Within weeks, Jim Ortbal led a city team to launch construction of prefabricated, modular dormitories on three underutilized sites owned by Caltrans and the city. We used $24 million in flexible state and federal funding. Local emergency orders streamlined city approvals and hearings, and an executive order from Gov. Gavin Newsom enabled the projects to bypass the lengthy California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) processes.
The results: three communities of 317 residents, housed in dormitories with private bathrooms. Rather than spending $750,000 per apartment, we spent $110,000. We didn’t need several years to finish each project but mere months.
Each of these developments — which we call emergency interim housing communities (EIHC) — will serve several hundred tenants in any given year, providing residents with stable housing for several months at a time, until they can find an apartment. Local nonprofits provide on-site mental health, drug treatment and employment services. The low-slung EIHC design facilitates community-building, featuring shared space for gardens, dog runs, shared kitchens and dining commons. One tenant, Sandy, shared with reporters how her new Bernal Road community made her and her neighbors finally feel like “human beings, not statistics.”
Success breeds success. Philanthropic partners have stepped up. Peter and Susanna Pau contributed several millions of dollars worth of prefabricated units at a third and fourth site. A fifth site will come under construction this fall, with help from John A. and Sue Sobrato, and we’ll push to identify several more. Mountain View recently opened its first prefabricated EIHC in the spring.
Lessons have emerged from this pandemic. First, urgency enables. The “urgency dividend” has expanded our toolbox to overcome barriers of cost and delay. Post-pandemic, we cannot fall back to tolerate a process that has every project enduring several years of meetings, public hearings, reviews and appeals before breaking ground.
Second, bureaucratically rigid, top-down housing programs from Washington and Sacramento won’t solve this problem. Cities need flexible dollars to respond nimbly, with accountability assured by outcome-focused metrics and mandatory “clawbacks.” California’s large-city mayors have consistently urged as much, and thanks to strong legislative leadership — including Assembly Budget Chair Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, and Senate Budget Chair Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley — we’ll see record investment this year for local solutions.
This work must continue — and scale. We cannot lose our urgency, nor ignore its dividends.
Sam Liccardo is mayor of San José.
Originally published at https://www.mercurynews.com on September 4, 2021.
