Bay Space Homelessness Regional Motion Plan Introduced; Seeks To Home 75% Of Homeless By 2024 – CBS San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) – Local and state leaders, housing professionals, corporations and social justice advocates from all nine Bay Area counties have come together to create a regional action plan that will house 75 percent of the homeless in the area by 2024.

After a year of planning, the multi-layered strategy was announced at a virtual press conference on Tuesday. There, Santa Clara District Leader Cindy Chavez, State Assembly Member David Chiu, D-San Francisco, and the leaders of All Home, the nonprofit that leads the effort, admitted that it was an ambitious goal.

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More than 35,000 people live on the area’s roads in the Bay Area, according to a 2019 report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That number may have increased since the pandemic began.

In three years this number is to be reduced to 10,000 people.

“Anyone who has lived in the Bay Area for an extended period of time knows that this is a very bold goal,” said Ken Kirkey, All Home’s chief partnership officer. “But we believe that this is partly achievable because the plan has an integrated approach while simultaneously providing things that we have played off against each other in the past.”

The strategy has many moving parts, but focuses on two main areas: creating more living space and preventing more people from becoming homeless.

The regional action plan, commonly referred to as RAP, initially focuses on extremely low-income residents, with an emphasis on racial justice.

“We are actually seeing more people becoming homeless faster than we can take them back in,” said Sherilyn Adams, executive director of the Larkin Street Youth Service. “Inexpensive investment and prevention can keep our families and individuals stable and housed.”

For Adams and the rest of the coalition, this means people affected by COVID-19 will receive expedited cash payments, income-based rental support, and other housing benefits at the state and federal levels.

In an effort to eradicate racial inequalities, the coalition calls on the state to establish and expand justice measurement practices across California to monitor progress and increase accountability for results by drawing funds on proven progress in eliminating Disparities are bound.

It also calls on the districts to extend the eviction moratorium by at least 60 days if the state moratorium, which expires on June 30, is not extended.

The second main component of the RAP is getting people into temporary or permanent shelter.

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The coalition plans to do this using what is known as the 1-2-4 framework.

In essence, the plan provides that for every interim housing unit built, there should be two units of permanent housing and four units of homelessness prevention measures to ensure housing for the people.

“The one-to-four ratio is our analysis of the Bay Area homeless population, which was capitalized,” said Kirkey. “When that gets brought to a county level that might be different in Santa Clara County … than Sonoma County.”

However, Kirkey said the coalition intends to work with individual counties to find a tailored approach.

All of the coalition ideas above are not new, but a regional, comprehensive plan with contributions and organization by the governor’s office, local governments, philanthropic partners and many others is new, the leaders said.

And it could allow the region to be more fluid in the way funds are used to tackle the cross-border problem of homelessness.

“By working together, we will be able to change the course of a whole range of initiatives, including how we fund permanent supportive housing and how we fund the services people need,” said Chavez.

All of Home’s founder and CEO Tomiquia Moss said this is because the counties can communicate and work together to find funding gaps.

This is necessary because resources are often tied specifically to local or regional jurisdictions and cannot be geographically shared, Moss said.

“Our region is interconnected and we need to tie our policies and systems together so that people can be served,” Moss said.

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The coalition includes the mayors of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, locally elected officials from all nine Bay Area counties, Facebook, Salesforce, Kaiser Permanente, Goodwill and Destination Home.