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Editor’s note: Once again, each of the Times-Herald’s Northern California sister papers takes a look its city’s homeless situation. Stories from each of the cities can be found at each publication’s website.

It’s a difficult scene to watch. Unsheltered Vallejo citizens leaving their belongings behind as the city conducts debris removal pickups near encampment sites. They leave, shaking their head, confused, and in tears — wondering just what the next chapter of their lives will look like.

“The most heartbreaking thing I see is the total emotional anguish displayed on their faces,” says longtime Vallejo housing advocate Joey Carrizales. “What I see is fear, stress and tears flowing as they watch their personal belongings taken away by a bulldozer and destroyed.

“Why, they ask, why are they doing this to us?”

Answers are no easier to come by within the halls of city government.

For those told to pack up and move on, the harsh reality is there are precious few options for the unsheltered in Vallejo. The setting up of a navigation center has been delayed for over a year. Project Roomkey, a program designed to help the unsheltered during the pandemic, has seen at least six people die in alarming fashion during its tenure. A temporary tent site was voted down in a city council meeting.

“In my opinion, no one solution can ‘fix’ the unsheltered issue in Vallejo,” says Carrizales. “However, what can help deter the possibility of becoming unsheltered is to develop affordable housing and create local jobs for residents as well building positive relationships with landlords.”

According to Housing First Solano, a group looking to find homes for those without one, more than 1,000 people in Solano County currently experience homelessness. Among the obstacles the group faces are high rents, low housing stock, and a lack of affordable service options.

It may be hard to gauge what exactly needs to be done concerning the unsheltered because, well, nobody knows the exact information. The purpose of the Vallejo/Solano County Point-in-Time (PIT) count is to obtain a snapshot census of people experiencing homelessness in the community during the morning of Feb. 23.

Prior to 2021, final PIT counts were usually released no later than mid-June. As of Thursday, Solano still has not released its PIT count, even as nearby cities and counties have released their counts. Dawn La Bar, the Homeless Services Manager of Fairfield and a homelessness advocate for over 20 years, said the PIT is approximately two weeks away from being released.

“When you submit data, you’re submitting preliminary numbers and many times a high percentage of those numbers will change before the final numbers are obtained — that’s why we never release our preliminary results,” La Bar told the Times-Herald. “A consultant goes back and forth with the preliminary numbers and has follow-up questions. We don’t anticipate any further questions this year, but the questions we had after the preliminary results this year centered around the number of households without children, as well as the number of people in housing with only children.”

La Bar said she is hoping for final approval with HUD within the next few weeks.

The January 2021 PIT count — just 226 out of 383 (59%) — was severely disrupted due to the ongoing impacts of COVID-19. In fact, almost the entire state of California (11.9% of the country’s population) did not conduct a count of their unsheltered homeless population. This included Solano County.

Also behind is the long-awaited navigation center.

A mid-December news release by the City of Vallejo stated that a Phase I environmental report revealed that the Midway Drive site for the navigation center is unhabitable. The release stated: “This restriction was created because of the land’s prior use for industrial services, which resulted in ground contamination across portions of the site.”

The release went on to say that the center has been assigned to the City Manager’s Office and the Public Works Department to keep it moving forward. However, the release did not give an estimated date for completion. The center is already behind schedule and has seen its budget rise from $2.3 million to $4.1 million. The center was originally supposed to break ground in April of 2021, with services set to begin in August. The center is expected to house approximately 500 people annually.

“What bothers me the most in the delay of building the Navigation Center is there seems to be a lack of urgency,” Carrizales said. “As the center sits idle and not built, problems and more problems are found.”

Meanwhile, former Housing Director Judy Shepard-Hall went on leave for nearly a year.

Things didn’t get any better in mid-December, when the Vallejo City Council voted against a resolution for a temporary “Hope Village” homeless tent city at 921 Amador St. With the Project Roomkey contract set to end on Jan. 5, the housing — in a residential neighborhood near the Church of the Nazarene — would have been in a parking lot featuring approximately 40 tents for 60 people. The site was proposed due to the contract of Project Roomkey coming to an end on Jan. 5.

Project Roomkey experienced a series of issues and concerns before the state-wide program ended in January. A Times-Herald story in January reported that participants Yvonne Montgomery and Jonnetta Scruggs felt that that program was “never structured nor stable from the start.”

The two were sheltered with the program at the Hampton Inn in Vallejo before moving to the Rodeway Inn in Vallejo and returning to the Hampton Inn before recently moving to the Sunrise Mobile Home Park in Vacaville.

“The issue was with the lack of communication from the staff to the participants and the changing of organizations in charge,” Montgomery said in early January. “No structured foundation in regards to housing and who we need to talk to. No time to address housing homeless issues.”

Last month, the city announced that it would be reallocating $2.6 million of funding for the Sacramento Street Apartment Project to HOME Investment Trust Fund. In July 2017 the City of Vallejo executed the first of three grant agreements with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOME Investment Partnerships Program to supplement funding for the $49.5 million Sacramento Street Apartments project. Two additional grant agreements were executed in July 2020 and July 2021 to further supplement the city’s contribution to the budget for the 75-unit, permanent supportive housing project.

However, after delays in the acquisition of the property and construction of the project, as well as a series of administrative errors from 2019 to early 2021 (prior to current management), HUD said it will look to the city to return $2.6 million in awarded grant funding to the HOME Investment Trust Fund.

According to the news release sent out by the City of Vallejo, the funding reallocation and return of the HOME grant funds will not jeopardize the project or delay the project’s expected timeline. The Sacramento Street Apartments project is anticipated to be completed in November, with full occupancy expected by January 2023. The apartment project on Sacramento Street will include 51 studio apartments with 18 one-bedroom and five two-bedroom venues. It is slated to be the first Vallejo housing project to be built with modules from Mare Island-based Factory_OS.

There has been optimism. The Solano Dream Center and Christian Help Center, located on Sacramento Street, have teamed up to become “Transformation Village.” In April the newly-named venue did its best to help out at least 60 unsheltered people by giving out free food, clothes, showers, haircuts, mental health advice and other resources for free.

“What’s been nice is to see so many people come together today and help broken people,” CEO of Solano Dream Center Michael Wurz said earlier this year. “We want to help transform these people where they are no longer blight and they are able to go out in our community and get a job. When you see that transformation and the smiles on people’s faces that come along with it, that’s the biggest win for us and myself.”

Lee Marren, 32, has been unsheltered for most of his life — once in San Francisco and now Vallejo. But somehow, some way, Marren can often be seen downtown or at the waterfront, sporting a smile and a hand-me-down NBA throwback jersey — like his classic Magic Johnson All-Star jersey. Earlier this year, Marren came away from the Dignity Day event with supplies and a fresh haircut.

“It’s been a big help,” said Marren in April. “Shoes, clothes, you name it. I’ve also received a lot of resources, stuff you can’t get or learn about in a group home.”

Meanwhile, others are glad to have the unsheltered nowhere near them. After a recent cleanup on Reo Alley near Tennessee and Sacramento streets, one citizen said: “Bottom line I applaud the VPD for taking this action finally. I called VPD yesterday to thank them on behalf of my neighborhood … All we asked is they be good neighbors. Sorry, it didn’t happen on many levels.”

Carrizales, a former unsheltered citizen who lived near the JFK library for two years before inspiring many to find their way back on their feet, says he wants people to know that “his friends” are often people that were down on their luck for a short time and never received the pick-me-up that others did.

“As a former unsheltered person, what most people don’t know is that we are regular people whose life circumstances caused our lives to change dramatically,” Carrizales said. “We are regular people who had a 1-year-old birthday party. We may have graduated from high school. Maybe we went to the prom. We are regular people who did not wake up one morning, look in the mirror and say, ‘I want to be homeless.’ The struggles of life put us in our unbearable hardship.”

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