Roughly 30 people experiencing homelessness have found housing thanks to a non-congregate shelter that Santa Barbara County opened at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, but the program is only really accessible to South County residents. Homeless advocates in North County say this time, that’s OK.
Santa Barbara County opened Project Roomkey, a 74-room non-congregate homeless shelter, in partnership with Santa Barbara Hotel Group and People Assisting the Homeless (PATH) on April 20. The program, which cost more than $1 million in state funding, is aimed at getting homeless individuals who are especially at risk of experiencing complications due to COVID-19 off the streets and into housing.
But Project Roomkey, which the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors discussed at a meeting on Aug. 18, wasn’t available in North County.
“What about the rest of the county?” Andy Caldwell with the Coalition of Labor, Agriculture, and Business said at the meeting during public comment. “Santa Maria and Lompoc have homeless problems. Is this another issue where the county’s going to spend a million dollars on the South County homeless?”
Community Services Director George Chapjian said the county wanted to offer a similar program in North County, but couldn’t find willing partners.
“We looked at a number of sites in North County,” Chapjian said at the meeting. “We just couldn’t find any hotel owners who were willing to lease out space for us for this purpose. So it was really, really difficult. Even in South County we barely found this one as the Roomkey site.”
But Sylvia Barnard, executive director of Santa Maria’s Good Samaritan Shelter, said a program like Project Roomkey wouldn’t have been as feasible or as effective in North County.
“We are not disappointed at all,” Barnard told the Sun.
Non-congregate programs like Project Roomkey are challenging to run, Barnard said, and require an abundance of support services to operate successfully. While the county provides those services to Project Roomkey clients in South County, where Barnard said most county staff work and live, that work would have likely been left to the Good Samaritan in North County.
Good Sam already provides those services—addiction treatment, counseling, social work, rapid rehousing—to those in its shelters and programs, and Barnard said her staff is stretched thin.
Between the 50 beds (down from its usual 90 beds due to COVID-19 safety precautions) Good Samaritan has at its regular overnight shelter, the nonprofit is also charged with operating a 10-bed overflow center, a 12-room family shelter that can hold about 48 people total, three trailers that can each hold a family of four, a 20-person emergency shelter for the elderly, and a program that provides temporary non-congregate housing services for veterans. Good Sam also helped operate a 70-person emergency shelter at Santa Maria High School for two months in the spring, all on top of the extra cleaning and safety work that COVID-19 now requires of staff.
“It’s just too much for us to be able to handle,” Barnard said.
So Barnard and her staff were glad when the county decided to keep Project Roomkey out of North County.
Instead, Barnard said, Santa Barbara County is working to support the services that are tailored to North County’s needs by helping to fund emergency shelters, hazard pay for shelter employees, and purchasing trailers for families. South County has a larger population of individuals experiencing homelessness, who Barnard said benefit more from non-congregate shelter settings, while North County serves a larger population of homeless families that need to be kept together.
“We feel completely supported by the county,” she said.
Still, she understands the concerns regarding safety at congregate shelters right now. Although the Good Samaritan is doing all it can to spread clients out and keep everyone safe, the shelter had to quarantine for four weeks in late June after 14 of 120 clients in the shelter tested positive for COVID-19.
“It’s been a super challenging time,” Barnard said. “I’m just super grateful that we haven’t had a lot of turnover in our staff.”
This article appears in Sep 3-10, 2020.
