Coronavirus
Fresno drops plans to shelter homeless in hotels during pandemic. What’s the new plan?
As the pandemic took hold of Fresno around mid-March, officials rushed to shelter the homeless.
The goal, city leaders told The Bee, was to bring inside “every single person” experiencing homelessness — about 2,000 people in Fresno — to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
Within days, around 300 beds were made available. Two months later, the number has not changed by much.
About 319 people were staying in the emergency beds on Wednesday, according to Sonia de la Rosa, principal administrative analyst for Fresno County.
In total, Fresno has 446 homeless beds to respond to the coronavirus. But 50 of those beds are in state trailers, for example, and reserved only for individuals awaiting COVID-19 tests. Fresno has reported only one case of COVID-19 among the homeless population.
Other beds are in partially occupied shelter rooms, where officials want to keep families or friends together without adding a stranger.
“Even though it looks like we have vacancies, we really don’t because the configuration of the rooms are different,” De La Rosa said. “We usually are hovering at capacity, but even this morning, we had a few beds available.”
City and county officials opted to extend the length of time beds could be available, saying it was a more sustainable way to combat chronic homelessness.
The last federal count showed about 2,100 people experienced homelessness in Fresno city and county in 2019. The city and county made available hundreds of triage and bridge beds this summer. According to their data, 648 people had gone through those beds by the end of March, with 339 people making safe exits into permanent housing or drug rehabilitation.
Nearly $5 million in homeless funds
To run the coronavirus beds costs about $20,000 a day, and the county has spent nearly $1 million already. With about $2 million in state funding, the money will run out by mid-June, De La Rosa said.
In April, the federal government awarded the city and county about $3 million in additional funds to address homelessness. Officials planned to house hundreds of more people in a Fresno city hotel or a series of motels.
But the original two hotels fell through because officials could not find a single provider to operate them.
Fresno County supervisor Steve Brandau blamed NIMBYism.
City Council president Miguel Arias said that because the city has to notify residents within 1,000 feet of a new project, the city faced a backlash among councilmembers.
“NIMBY leads you to ask a whole bunch of questions,” he said. “The end result was we ended up with a better plan.”
The plan is to continue funding the current beds through September, after which Arias said he hopes to secure funding to open a permanent shelter. He has floated the Elkhorn Correctional Facility, which Fresno County previously used as a youth boot camp.
“When the economy recovers and hotel rooms are again utilized, we will still be left with the reality of adding shelter beds,” Arias said.
The county money from the federal government will be used to open 60 beds in Selma and another 24 in west Fresno county, according to De La Rosa.
Some continue to refuse services
Arias and De La Rosa said that after bringing in hundreds of people with the summer triage shelters and the new coronavirus shelter beds, only the most challenging population to bring inside was left.
“I think part of it is, a lot of people are simply not ready to come off the street. Our outreach teams are continuously out there, and they continuously decline services. Those people are not ready to be housed,” De La Rosa said.
But homeless advocate Dez Martinez said she has about 20 people calling her every day asking for a spot to go. She said that when she has called providers, they tell her, “We’re full.”
At the same time, she said multiple homeless residents had left shelters because they feel trapped.
“When you take people who have been living on the street for so long, and you lock them in a room, you have to think about how that mentally affects them. If it’s affecting normal people living in houses, what do you think it’s going to do to someone with mental illness living on the street?”
Manuela Tobias is a reporter with the Fresno Bee. This article is part of The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California.
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