When California issued its shelter-in-place order on March 19, hotel occupancy rates throughout the state plunged into the single digits.
Meanwhile, much of the state’s homeless population — 151,000 people as of 2019 — lived in crowded shelters, on the streets or in outdoor encampments without sanitation facilities. Flash spreading of COVID-19 among the homeless was a serious public health risk.
On April 3, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Project Roomkey, a first-in-the-nation plan to temporarily house 15,000 — roughly 10% — of the state’s homeless population in vacant hotel and motel rooms. Newsom also said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was committed to reimbursing three-quarters of the cost.
County social service agencies have long viewed hotels and motels as attractive options for sheltering the homeless. Some local governments issue motel vouchers to homeless people, but leasing or acquiring rooms for long term or transitional housing had been rare before Project Roomkey.
David Grusky, the director of Stanford University’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, said California’s history of addressing homelessness has been marked by policy efforts driven by good intent that ultimately failed to get the job done.
“We tend to employ Band-Aids — poorly funded, ill-equipped Band-Aids that can’t take on such a big structural problem,” he said.
Nonetheless, Grusky is impressed by the ambitious nature of Project Roomkey. “Nothing on this scale has been attempted,” he said. “It’s extraordinary.”
Los Angeles and San Francisco set local goals far surpassing their share of the statewide Project Roomkey objective of 15,000 rooms. Los Angeles alone targeted 15,000 rooms — enough for a quarter of its homeless population — and San Francisco set a goal of 7,000 rooms, which could shelter most of the county’s homeless.
But in the two months since Newsom’s announcement, the undertaking has faced delays in acquiring rooms, opposition from residents and local governments, and concerns about the duration and scope of both state and federal funding.
A survey of five California counties by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and Big Local News found that Alameda, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties are struggling to obtain enough hotel rooms and to fill those rooms with those in need of shelter. They collectively hold more than 58% of the state’s homeless population.
According to data provided by the state’s Department of Social Services, as of June 9 the five counties had acquired 8,984 hotel rooms, though the numbers reported by some counties differ from those reported by the state for the same time period. Nevertheless, that’s little more than a third of their combined goal of 26,898 rooms.
Statewide, the picture is more promising. At least 15,781 hotel rooms were dedicated to sheltering the homeless by late June — more than Newsom’s goal of 15,000.
The challenges the five counties have faced implementing Project Roomkey highlight the complexity of a program that relies on obtaining private property for homeless individuals in a matter of weeks when government and nonprofit advocates have struggled to house this group for decades.
County-by-county implementation
When the state first announced the program, the response was overwhelming. San Francisco’s Request for Proposal garnered 85 responses covering 16,000 hotel rooms. Similarly, Alameda County received interest from nearly 200 hotels covering 4,000 rooms.
Participating in Project Roomkey presented some risk for hotels and motels.
While some establishments saw the program as an opportunity to help a vulnerable group while also keeping its staff employed, other hotels were hesitant, opting to temporarily close instead of participate.
In Alameda County, hotel owners didn’t want to house “certain kinds of clients,” said Willie Hopkins Jr., director of the Alameda County General Services Agency, during a county Board of Supervisors meeting in April.
To help fill the initial need, the state arranged a template agreement with Motel 6 that counties could choose to adopt to access the chain’s rooms in the state. Similarly, early in the project the state signed contracts on behalf of Alameda County to lease 393 hotel rooms from two hotels in Oakland.
But often the counties were left to make their own deals. Procurement rules were loosened to speed the process due to the pandemic, but the counties remained responsible for adequate health and safety measures, staffing, meals and other support services.
In his 30 years in the hospitality industry, Ken Westmyer was no stranger to dealing with government.
“Any county or agency usually says, ‘This is what I want,’” said Westmyer, the vice president of operations for the Ellis Hospitality Group, which oversees two hotels participating in Project Roomkey.
But Project Roomkey was different. “Here it was working together,” he said.
When he reached out to Santa Clara County offering the Holiday Inn Express in Sunnyvale in early March, he knew little about COVID-19. The county’s first shelter-in-place order was weeks away. Neither Westmyer nor the county knew what conditions would be necessary to use the Holiday Inn as a temporary shelter for homeless people. But the county was interested.
After two weeks of research and a consultation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Westmyer came back to the county with nonnegotiable conditions: sufficient personal protective equipment and training.
Even then, Westmyer said an insurance company dropped one of the hotels after learning about its participation in Project Roomkey.
Sacramento County also struggled to provide food and support services at various sites. “There aren’t enough service providers to help run the hotels and eventually help transition the residents into permanent housing,” Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg told the Los Angeles Times.
San Francisco anticipated the complications the county would face in obtaining rooms. In April, the Board of Supervisors urged the mayor to use her authority to commandeer private rooms to meet the county’s goal after “exhausting reasonable options for securing these rooms through agreements.”
By the April 26 deadline to procure 8,250 rooms, San Francisco was short by more than 5,000 rooms. Dan Kaplan, deputy director of finance and administration at the San Francisco Human Services Agency, explained at an April 30 hearing that his administration decided “to work with its hotel partners” rather than commandeer them.
Local resistance
Los Angeles County planned to shelter a quarter of its nearly 60,000 homeless residents. The county contracted with more than 250 local hotels and provided shelter to 3,340 homeless individuals — about 22% of its goal — by the first week of June.
But the county’s efforts were complicated by city officials in Bell Gardens, Norwalk and Lawndale, who tried to stop the initiative, citing governmental secrecy.
Lawndale’s city attorney, Tiffany Israel, wrote a letter to the operator of a hotel in Lawndale that stated the agreement with the county “to become a temporary homeless shelter” was “negotiated and executed in complete secrecy” without any input from the city. The letter threatened that if the agreement between the hotel and the county were not terminated, the city would push the Planning Commission to consider revoking the hotel’s special use permit.
Los Angeles County responded with a lawsuit.
Lawndale Mayor Robert Pullen-Miles said his city’s biggest objection to Project Roomkey was how it was implemented and how city officials were kept in the dark.
“When we heard about this program, they had already entered into a quick agreement with the hotel. They did not do any type of outreach to the community,” he said.
In Southern California, Laguna Hills, a city in Orange County, has also resisted.
Susan Shelley, an Orange County resident, said no one was told whether a neighborhood establishment was participating in Project Roomkey and what terms were negotiated to house homeless people there.
“No one in the communities knew that it was happening,” Shelley said.
Moreover, she said Orange County residents didn’t know whether the contracts allowed for future purchase of a hotel or motel to shelter homeless people long term.
Transparency
Information available to the public about the procurement process and the participating businesses varied across the five counties surveyed.
Los Angeles and San Francisco provide the most frequent updates. Los Angeles County started to release a daily dashboard as early as March 23. San Francisco began releasing its daily updates on April 28. Both dashboards show the number of hotel rooms acquired, and the number of rooms occupied; San Francisco also notes whether the Project Roomkey rooms shelter individuals who tested positive for COVID-19 or are at risk. Neither provides the names of the hotels and motels, although Los Angeles provides a location.
Alameda and Santa Clara counties initially reported with less frequency, but released the names of participating hotels and motels. On May 11, Santa Clara voted to create a daily dashboard that would also include expenditures.
Sacramento County was the most secretive of the five counties. Janna Haynes, a county spokesperson, said the county will not release the names nor locations of Project Roomkey hotels to avoid having homeless people congregating outside.
Without a uniform tracker across the participating 58 counties, some numbers reported by the counties conflict with the state reports obtained by Big Local News. For example, in Los Angeles where there is daily information, a comparison of the county’s report for June 9 with the state report of acquisition shows a discrepancy of 700 rooms.
A spokesperson for the California Department of Social Services confirmed the state’s report uses numbers directly reported by the counties. The variation could be explained by county reports including other noncongregate shelter options, like trailers, or including rooms used to quarantine COVID-19 patients from the count.
Longer-term solutions remain a challenge
When the federal government offered to help finance rooms in hotels and motels for the homeless, 42 of the state’s 58 counties jumped at the opportunity.
The California state Legislature pledged $150 million and FEMA said it was ready to reimburse up to 75% of Project Roomkey costs.
At the end of June, state officials deemed the program a success and extended additional funding to counties to launch into the next phase of a homeless housing initiative.
But the amount FEMA will reimburse the counties for the previous costs remains unclear. Its program only reimburses the cost of housing homeless individuals who are COVID-19 positive, exposed to the virus, or considered “high risk” due to their age (over 65) or underlying health conditions.
Not all of the counties follow those guidelines.
A San Francisco ordinance, for example, includes all homeless San Franciscans, with priority for “especially vulnerable groups,” including homeless individuals over age 60.
“While I’m arguing as persuasively as I possibly can for more resources for the homeless … the other half of my brain is saying … as quickly as the economy is declining and local government revenues are degrading, where is the money going to come from? ”
Alameda County wants to lease more hotels and fill them with people coming from unlicensed boarded care homes and other transitional housing, said Lucy Kasdin, director of Alameda County Health Care for the Homeless. But deviating from the official project guidelines could jeopardize the county’s ability to be fully reimbursed.
County agencies running the program did not always know if each of their expenses qualified for reimbursement by FEMA, but spent the money anyway, said Dave Cortese of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.
“Normally that would get someone fired in a noncrisis,” Cortese said. “But this is not ordinary.”
Now, the counties and the state are shifting to longer-term solutions. On June 30, Newsom announced the expansion of Project Roomkey with a $1.3 billion allocation from the state budget to homeless housing and planning initiatives. Racing against the deadline before federal funding disappears, the state seeks to adopt a solution to address homelessness by converting hotel lease agreements into purchasing deals. The new initiative is called Project Homekey.
The state will draw on $550 million from the CARES Act and $50 million from state general funding to restore and repurpose various forms of housing in addition to hotels and motels: vacant apartments, residential care facilities, tiny homes. All of these spaces will be devoted to homeless individuals.
Cortese said the shorter-run FEMA money will come. The bigger concern, he said, is whether this future funding to shelter homeless people will follow, especially as the state prepares for an economic recession.
“While I’m arguing as persuasively as I possibly can for more resources for the homeless … the other half of my brain is saying … as quickly as the economy is declining and local government revenues are degrading, where is the money going to come from?” Cortese said.
“This [recession] is by orders of magnitude the worst fiscal situation we’ll ever face and it’s at a time when the social safety net is needed more than ever to protect the vulnerable.”
* Delianne, Dworetzky, Moser, Ochavillo and Baucom are from the Graduate Program in Journalism at Stanford University.
Angel of the Night offers comfort amid pandemic
By Sam Baucom
Valerie McEntee is having an entirely different quarantine experience from many people.
McEntee often walks the streets of San Francisco, block after block, from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. On any given night, in her role as a minister with the nonprofit San Francisco Night Ministry, she may speak with a military veteran battling post-traumatic stress disorder, a drunken college student who needs directions, a bouncer, a drag queen, or a homeless person who doesn’t know where else to turn.
“We just meet people where they are,” McEntee said.
The ways that the homeless have responded to the physical distance McEntee now puts between herself and others are as varied as the topics they choose to speak to her about. While many do not mind her standing a small distance away, especially given current circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic, some homeless individuals are offended when McEntee refuses to get close to them.
“The people who live outside are frequently treated as if they’re sort of untouchable, like nobody wants to be close to them,” McEntee said.
The night ministry, one of many nonprofit organizations that work with the homeless in San Francisco, provides spiritual support, operates a crisis hotline and recently has been handing out sanitation items. Now, it’s adding a new task: helping the homeless navigate the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We talk to everybody who is outside at night,” McEntee said. In San Francisco, that is a wide range of people, including those out partying, those living in single occupancy rooms, or those who are homeless and panhandling.
McEntee came to the night ministry in 2007 as a crisis-line counselor. In 2008, she completed a fellowship with the night ministry and became an ordained minister. After being an ordained night minister for 12 years, McEntee has developed “regulars” whom she checks on each evening.
“Just like with anyone, it can take time for some to feel comfortable enough to share their heavy stories,” McEntee said. Others may share a deep story or challenge within five minutes.
“It is such a privilege that people will tell me those stories,” she said. “When I was fairly new to night ministry during my first year, it seemed like every other conversation was, ‘I’ve done murder and I’ve done my time.’ I knew they were waiting to see if I would freak out before telling me what was really going on.”
In the early 1960s, seven members of the interdenominational Council of Churches launched an experimental ministry to reach out to “street people” at night, when the only social services available were police, fire departments and ambulances. Eventually, that experiment morphed into what the night ministry is today.
“Something that I began to hear from homeless individuals is ‘How do I shelter in place when I don’t have a place?’”
Once COVID-19 hit and everyone was instructed to stay at home, the concerns McEntee heard from San Francisco’s homeless community began to change.
“Something that I began to hear from homeless individuals is, ‘How do I shelter in place when I don’t have a place?’” McEntee said.
In addition to the night walks, the night ministry operates a crisis hotline from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. Trained phone volunteers speak with anyone seeking spiritual and emotional support in San Francisco and beyond.
With most of the San Francisco Night Ministry’s in-person services and activities canceled, some homeless people who participated in these events have turned to calling the ministry’s phone volunteers for companionship, McEntee said.
Because call volumes have increased substantially, the San Francisco Night Ministry has trained 30 new volunteers since the virus started and is considering imposing a time limit on the calls, something it’s never done.
People from coast to coast call the ministry, McEntee said. “Some people call just because they are lonely and have no one else to speak with.”
“I have no one,” “No one cares,” “I only talk to hotlines,” are all sentiments the crisis hotline volunteers have now grown accustomed to hearing, McEntee said.
In the time before the COVID-19 pandemic, the San Francisco Night Ministry held two open-air worship services each week, one at the 16th and Mission BART station, and the other at United Nations Plaza.
Both services have been halted indefinitely.
“You talk about things you never imagined in seminary,” McEntee said. “I never imagined I would be on a crusade to find hand sanitizer for people. We’ve handed out over 800 little bottles of hand sanitizer to people living outside so far.”
In addition to passing out hand sanitizer, the San Francisco Night Ministry has received 100 tents from the Coalition on Homelessness, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, which they have passed out to individuals. And a manufacturer of cocktail napkins has shifted its operations to making face masks and donated 1,200 of them to the night ministry to distribute.
In the middle of March, McEntee was on Polk Street checking up on a few “regulars” when she saw an older man inebriated on the side of the road, clearly having a difficult night. “This was before masks were worn. I think this was the second week of March,” McEntee recalled.
“He was telling me about his combat experiences and seeing his buddies blown up. This is so weird, and it felt cold to me to be so far back and listening to this story, but I listened to it,” McEntee said, noting she stood six feet away from the veteran.
“Normally I’d be sitting right next to somebody, maybe a foot away or something and put a hand on their shoulder.”
‘Are you going to feed us to the wolves’ when temporary respite ends?
By Sam Baucom
Mike Melcher didn’t have a home. It was the third week of March and Melcher, 63, was living out of his truck in Covina.
Until then, he thought he would be safe from COVID-19, keeping distance from others and using the restrooms at 24-hour restaurants like Denny’s. But the virus was spreading throughout Los Angeles County and restaurants began to close.
“It got to a point when the virus came around, there were no public restrooms whatsoever,” he said. “I had no place I could go to.”
On top of that, he said, “The virus scared the hell out of me.”
Before he was homeless, Melcher said he was an insurance estimator for 30 years. “I made good money and started an auto shop business, which I ran successfully until I turned to drugs,’’ he said.
One month after he got clean in the spring of 2018, Melcher said he suffered a stroke. It put him in the hospital, out of work and onto the streets. The stroke also resulted in the loss of his driver’s license.
“I’d never been to a hospital in my life,” Melcher recalled thinking as he looked up at bright hospital lights from a gurney.
After getting out of the hospital, Melcher eventually got his driver’s license back and, with the help of his son and brother, put together enough money to buy the small truck. He said he chose to live in the truck because he didn’t want to be a burden on his family.
Told by his doctor that he was at risk of another stroke, Melcher stopped working and began to live off $800 in food stamps and Social Security.
The doctor also diagnosed him with rheumatoid arthritis, which made moving around painful. “I would basically sit in my truck throughout the whole day and just people watch,” Melcher said. “There was nothing else for me to do.”
One morning in the middle of April, Melcher started his truck, worried about the gas he was burning to scout out bathrooms and other services. He drove to five separate places in search of a bathroom. Everywhere he went, he saw signs hanging on business doors: “Closed due to COVID-19.”
“Oh my God. What am I going to do?” Melcher recalled thinking as he drove to building after building, only to see the lights out and chairs flipped on top of tables.
He got the answer to his question later that afternoon. His phone rang and it was one of his doctors, who connected him to the Health Homes Program, a system under the California Department of Health Care Services.
Because of his stroke and arthritis, Health Homes referred Melcher to Project Roomkey, a first-in-the nation plan to house 15,000 homeless individuals in vacant hotel rooms to combat the spread of COVID-19. To qualify in Los Angeles County, people had to be age 65 or older or have underlying medical conditions.
Two days later, on May 14, Melcher arrived at the Lincoln Plaza, a participating hotel in Monterey Park, just east of Los Angeles. Excited to get off the streets, he showed up at the seven-story hotel at 11 a.m. — three hours early.
“Wow, look at this place,” Melcher remembered thinking as he walked into his temporary home feeling a bit overwhelmed.
The first floor was designated as office space for the Union Station Homeless Service, the nonprofit tasked with running the hotel site. The second and third floors were under construction so Melcher, the 30th person to arrive at the hotel, was put on the fourth floor.
As of mid-May, the hotel had filled all of its 120 rooms.
The double room he was assigned had two beds, a 60-inch TV, a mini-fridge and even his own restroom where he could shower. The days of driving around town looking for somewhere to clean up and relieve himself were finally over.
What most caught Melcher’s attention, however, was not what he saw inside the room, but what he could see outside.
“I get to look out at my dad and grandpa everyday.”
“The view is overwhelming,” Melcher said. “I haven’t closed my window since I got here.”
His window overlooks a green hillside. To the right, he can see rolling hills. Downtown Los Angeles is just on the other side. To the left he can see the cemetery where his father and grandfather are buried.
“I get to look out at my dad and grandpa everyday,” he said.
Melcher gets meals brought to his door three times a day and, if he’s still hungry, can find leftovers in a large refrigerator on the first floor. His meal deliveries are accompanied by a health check to make sure he isn’t exhibiting any symptoms of COVID-19.
Every morning, Melcher takes a hot shower and makes a cup of coffee. Because he isn’t too fond of the meals that are served at the hotel, he often gets in his truck, which he is able to keep on-site, and goes to a local store to pick up food.
Often, he sees other homeless people who are staying at the same hotel walking with bags of groceries and will pull over to offer them a ride.
Anytime he returns to the hotel, he said one of the two on-site nurses checks his temperature. He also must go through a metal detector and any items he brought back with him are searched.
“I actually really appreciate that they do that,” Melcher said.
Back in his room, Melcher likes to turn on the big, flat-screen TV and watch cowboy movies. His favorite is “True Grit.’’
Recently, the hotel staff began activities for everyone. Sundays are movie nights and a group of Project Roomkey participants added bingo to the weekly activities schedule.
Although he is happy with almost every aspect of his Project Roomkey experience, one thing that worries Melcher is what is going to happen to him once the program ends.
“What are you guys going to do after the 90 days?’’ Melcher recalls asking on-site workers. “Are you going to feed us to the wolves?”
He has been assured by Project Roomkey officials that they will do everything they can to find him permanent housing once the hotel contract expires. It was extended at the end of June.
But with no firm, long-term plan, Melcher is concerned he will soon be back on the streets.
For now, though, it’s enough to have a safe place to lay his head at night.
Editor’s note: Big Local News is a program of Stanford University’s Journalism and Democracy Initiative and collects local data to discover the regional or national patterns that will yield stories with impact.