Fresno mayor has an opportunity to address homeless housing he can’t afford to waste
Andreas and his wife were asleep on a dirt embankment overlooking Highway 41 in downtown Fresno shortly past 7 a.m. Monday when their tent started to shake.
They heard voices telling them they needed to pack up their belongings and abandon their camping spot of the past few months, which wasn’t a total surprise since they had been given three days’ notice.
But the familiar face Andreas saw standing outside his tent certainly surprised him. It belonged to Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer. As did the offer extended by Dyer and others: Accept temporary housing (up to 90 days) in a motel room, services to help get him back on his feet and a hot breakfast from the Poverello House food truck.
On a chilly morning at the start of a rainy week, it sounded too good to be true. Andreas and 41 others camped along the freeway near the Belmont Avenue overpass accepted the offer. No one refused, according to city officials.
Remember that ratio — 42 people offered assistance, 42 accepted — the next time you hear somebody opine that homeless people don’t want to be helped, citing either personal anecdote or flawed survey. (Such as the oft-cited study by Fresno’s homeless task force indicating fewer than 2% of the homeless accept help. Oh really? How many of those people were offered something more than a room at a shelter for one night?)
“At first I couldn’t believe it,” said Andreas, who was happy to chat but declined to give his last name. “It was a complete surprise. Everyone was surprised. We weren’t expecting it to happen.”
I met Andreas, along with fellow Highway 41 refugee Francisco Javier Martinez, on the second-floor walkway of a Fresno motel near Highway 99 and Olive Avenue. Under the eaves it was dry, but outside rain poured down. Both men were happy to be there rather than out in the elements.
“It’s good to know there are people who want to help us,” Martinez said in Spanish, with Andreas serving as translator.
The motel (which I was asked not to name) is one of four in the vicinity recently purchased by the Fresno Housing Authority through Project Homekey, a state-funded program to provide temporary housing for the homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic. The city of Fresno committed $6.8 million toward one of them.
Dyer’s initiative, called Project Off-Ramp, focuses on homeless living along Fresno’s freeways while also giving them access to mental health, substance abuse and job placement services.
A citywide survey, using GIS mapping technology, identified about 700 people camped on or near some piece of Highways 41, 99, 168 and 180, most of them on Caltrans property. Project Off-Ramp targets 250 camped in the most unsafe and unsightly areas.
That doesn’t mean the city has immediate openings to house 250 people. It does not. H Spees, Dyer’s director of housing and social services, said that number won’t be reached for months. In the interim, rooms will be filled as they come available.
“The paint was still wet, literally” when the 42 homeless who took up residence moved in Monday, Spees said.
Dyer: More than a bad look for city
Project Off-Ramp began at Highway 41 and Divisadero Street and will proceed north. Once that corridor is addressed, outreach workers will address “hot spots” along 99 and 180, though the exact order has yet to be determined.
“Council members are dueling over who comes next,” Spees said.
Dyer acknowledged that visibility factored into the decision to start along 41 — the six-lane freeway bisects Fresno, after all — and that he gets more calls and social media contacts about homelessness and people camped along freeways than practically any other issue.
But the city’s new mayor insisted Project Off-Ramp is not a relocation effort designed to move homeless out of view, citing the 618 fires that sparked along the city’s freeways last year and other factors.
“It is more than just an unsightly appearance,” Dyer said. “It is a health hazard and a public safety hazard to the folks on that freeway. The humane thing to do, the compassionate thing to do, is to relocate those individuals from our freeways into housing, to provide them services, to provide them counseling.”
Millions pour in to fix homelessness
Fresno has never really gotten a grasp on homelessness. There are shelters and advocates and resources, to be sure, just never enough of them to meet the demand. And that was before the city’s homeless population spiked 45% in the year that preceded COVID-19.
While the pandemic has undoubtedly resulted in even more people losing their homes, it has also brought Fresno (including city, county, Fresno Housing Authority and Continuum of Care) unprecedented resources to address the problem. State and federal grants designated for this purpose have eclipsed $100 million, according to Fresno City Councilmember Miguel Arias.
Which makes this an opportunity Dyer and other local leaders literally cannot afford to waste if they (and we) ever hope to make a dent.
Andreas told me he and his wife have been homeless for eight months, after he lost his job at a tree-service company. They ended up pitching a tent along the freeway because they had “nowhere else to go.”
The Fresno native, who has since regained employment, said he will use the 90 days at the motel to find his own place. The couple also seeks to regain custody of their two sons, who were placed in foster care.
“I’m very happy to be here right now,” Andreas said as the rain poured down a few feet away.
This story was originally published January 29, 2021 at 10:45 AM.
