After months of planning, a North County effort to move hundreds of unsheltered homeless people from encampments into housing is underway, and it is showing progress.
It’s been about a year since Oceanside and Carlsbad received a state grant to move unsheltered homeless people camped along state Route 78 and the Buena Vista Creek into long-term housing.
The goal is to move every person living in encampments around the nearly 4-mile shared border between the two cities into housing. The state gave them three years and $11.4 million to do it.
The money is part of a series of grants through a program called the Encampment Resolution Fund, first announced by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. Cities are required to provide reports to the state to track spending and outcomes, as Voice of San Diego previously reported.
So far, those outcomes look promising, Oceanside project leaders told Voice. In fact, more people are accepting services and housing than city staff originally projected, a victory they attributed to the project’s unique, wrap-around approach.
Yes, Boots Are on the Ground
After an initial slow start to the boots-on-the-ground phase of the project, work at the first encampment zone, or area, is in full swing.
The project will address different zones of the encampment. One zone, for example, has a large presence of vehicle homelessness. After completing each zone, city officials will shut down the encampments and prevent new ones from forming.
A team of Oceanside staff members, homeless outreach workers and local nonprofit organizations have been working with homeless people living in the first encampment zone since April, said Sofia Hughes, Oceanside’s management analyst for the city’s Housing and Neighborhood Services Department.
Though the first zone is within Oceanside’s city limits, staff from Carlsbad are helping to coordinate services, including mental health support and housing navigation, Carlsbad Homeless Services Manager Chris Shilling wrote in an email.
Oceanside and Carlsbad have contracted with four local homeless service providers (Interfaith Community Services, Community Resource Center, Catholic Charities’ La Posada de Guadalupe homeless shelter in Carlsbad and Whole Person Care Clinic) using portions of the funding.
The organizations set up booths and resource tents around the encampment area and are going directly into it to engage with residents, offering wrap-around services like housing navigation, medical care, case management, substance abuse treatment, mental health services and more, Hughes said.
Whole Person Care Clinic recently closed their North County office permanently. Representatives for the clinic could not be reached for comment, but Hughes said the project will not be impacted by the closure, and staff members from Whole Person Care Clinic have been working at the encampment zone alongside the other organizations.
The Methodology
The team first created a list of every resident in the encampment zone, along with details about each person’s situation, housing status and any needed supportive services. That took about a week and produced around 65 names.
Now, they’re using rapid re-housing – rental assistance and other supportive services – to place individuals and families living in the encampment into their own apartments.
To do that, Oceanside and Carlsbad officials contracted Brilliant Corners, a nonprofit that provides supportive housing solutions for low-income people. Workers from Brilliant Corners are at the encampment zone engaging with people to find them housing, Hughes said.
“The residents of the encampment that we’re working with I think expected us to just provide them with resources from organizations or agencies for them to reach out to and navigate on their own,” Hughes said. “But Brilliant Corners reworked their model to come sit in the field with us and talk to these residents and help them through the process to get them into housing.”
So far, 11 households have moved into supportive housing units with 16 more households set to move in over the next couple of weeks. Some include partners, family members or pets – factors that can often make it harder to find housing.
“We’ll have more than 30 individuals housed by the first week of June,” Hughes said.
Some residents moving out of the encampment have lived there for upwards of 10 years, but only a few people have declined services and housing – way fewer than Hughes and other project leaders were initially expecting.
“A narrative has been built up around this demographic that they are more service resistant,” Hughes said. “We have not found that to be the case at all. Clients are showing up and working with us every day.”
Each client from the encampment gets up to two years in supportive housing – these are typically studios or one-bedroom apartments – where they will receive a rental subsidy based on their income. Those that don’t have any income will have their entire rent subsidized. All rental subsidies and moving costs are funded by the state grant, said Salvador Roman, Oceanside’s senior management analyst who spearheaded the proposal for the grant.
During those two years, clients will work with case managers, counselors and use other available resources to find stable employment and achieve self-sufficiency.
“We know very early on who the candidates are that may need longer than two years, and we start intervention early on to get them into the right situation,” Hughes said. “If someone has a disability or can’t maintain long-term housing on their own, we are prepared to search for those longer-term resources that fit their circumstances.”
The team now has about six weeks left in this first encampment zone, and so far, spending of the grant is on track, Roman said.
He added that there may not be as many people living in the encampment areas as was projected when the team first submitted their grant proposal. If that turns out to be the case, they would ask the state to add a new encampment area to the project, Roman said.
“The amount of support we’ve seen from the different city departments, the organizations we’re working with and the community has been incredible,” Roman said. “This really hasn’t been done before, and there are a lot of people rooting for us to be successful.”
As for the increased reporting requirements from the state, Roman said Oceanside had already adopted strict reporting standards when it comes to tracking homelessness spending and outcomes, which they have continued to follow for this project.
“We want to make sure we’re creating a blueprint that can be replicated,” Roman said. “We’re going in with a balanced approach to addressing this complex issue, and we want to be able to show exactly how we did it.”
The teams will focus on encampments within Carlsbad’s city limits next, with the same goal of moving people into stable housing, wrote Shilling in an email.
“Early results have been encouraging, with overwhelming interest from those in the encampment to accept services and housing—many even open to sharing housing with others leaving the encampment,” Shilling said. “This approach builds on successful efforts already underway in Carlsbad and we believe it could serve as a model for other communities.”
