Siri Oru lived in her Subaru for two years with her huskies. For months, she unpacked and re-packed her belongings so she could drive to a new spot before spending the night. Ms. Oru, who is 72, suffered nerve damage in her leg from sleeping in her station wagon every night.
But when she finally secured a Section 8 housing allowance, she was hesitant to move to an apartment over the hill. She wanted to stay in West Marin for the familiar landscape and the community of people who knew and cared about her.
“As a single person, and just for my sense of wellbeing, I could be a happy camper here,” Ms. Oru said. “I’m not an urban person.”
Some unhoused locals feel even more strongly. “Most of our homeless in West Marin don’t want to leave West Marin,” said Chloe Cook, manager of the county-run West Marin Multi-Service Center. “They’d rather be homeless in West Marin than housed in eastern Marin.”
Yet options to house the area’s unhoused are vanishingly few. Some suggest a supportive housing site in West Marin to accompany the Project Homekey sites in Corte Madera, San Rafael and Larkspur, an idea Ms. Cook enthusiastically supports.
When Marin County passed a new budget last week, homelessness was among its highest priorities. Supervisors committed $7 million in one-time federal Covid relief funding toward Project Homekey, the rehabilitation of several disused properties in eastern Marin to house formerly homeless people in a supportive setting. Another $1.5 million went to town governments to manage encampments, and the same amount went to permanent supportive housing, boosting the budget of Health and Human Services.
Homelessness is on the rise in Marin. The results of the biennial point-in-time survey of homeless people, delayed by the pandemic until February, will be released next month, but preliminary numbers showed an increase of 8 percent since 2019, and a 10 percent increase in chronic homelessness. Those numbers were shrinking before Covid-19. In the pandemic’s wake, fewer homeless are in shelters: Nearly three quarters are unsheltered this year, compared to 68 percent in 2019.
The county’s approach to homelessness focuses on creating and maintaining permanent housing, with Project Homekey sites as a centerpiece. The state program, which has granted billions to local governments, grew out of Project Roomkey, an early effort in the pandemic to offer homeless people safe rooms in motels. The latest funding can pay for the conversion of empty hotels, nursing homes and commercial buildings into housing more lasting than a shelter.
But West Marin’s homeless population doesn’t fit neatly with that plan. Unhoused people in the villages and parklands tend to have deep ties to the area and a reluctance to enter shelters or housing over the hill.
“Most of them are out here for a reason,” said Fatai Tokolahi, the lead West Marin outreach worker with Community Action Marin. “They love being outside in nature. It’s quieter, it’s less crowded, and now they know that the services can come to them through us and other
agencies.”
At last week’s budget hearings, Supervisor Dennis Rodoni suggested that a hypothetical third round of Project Homekey funding should consider a site in West Marin. A small motel is the simplest to convert, but he did not suggest a specific site. Ms. Cook hailed the suggestion and floated the former barracks at the Coast Guard development as a potential Homekey site.
The county and Community Action Marin recently helped organize a Homekey unit for a 78-year-old man who had lived in Olema for nearly 20 years. He will move into the Corte Madera project, partly because he needs to be closer to a hospital. But Ms. Cook said some West Marin residents have been housed in a former motel near the 101 freeway, only to return and live outside again. “I would really like to see a Homekey model in West Marin,” she told the Light.
Ms. Oru worked as a nanny for a local family for seven years, and was shocked when they evicted her in the first days of the pandemic. She was on the waitlist for EAH’s affordable housing units in Point Reyes Station but needed help immediately. After short spells in Oregon and Humboldt County, she moved back to town, where she relocated nightly for months to avoid sitting in one spot too long.
“You feel like you make a fair number of people uncomfortable,” Ms. Oru said, “and so it causes you to become a little bit invisible.”
A deputy once stopped her for a “wellness check,” but law enforcement generally left her alone. In 2014, deputies stopped enforcing a county ordinance that criminalized living in a car after a federal appeals court struck down a similar ordinance in Los Angeles. Four years later, the same court dealt a lasting blow to anti-camping ordinances in Martin v. Boise: Municipalities could not enforce such laws unless they could provide enough shelter beds for their entire unhoused population. Marin, like most jurisdictions, falls far short of that margin. According to its housing needs analysis, the county has about 270 emergency beds, and that number fell during Covid. This year, surveyors counted more than 1,100 homeless people.
Deputies can’t issue criminal citations for camping in public, but they often ask people to move along, though the Sheriff’s Office says that’s only in specific cases. “We do not move people along just for being in cars,” said Sgt. Brenton Schneider, a spokesman for the office. “It has to be for some kind of parking violation, or if someone is causing a health and safety concern where they are, they might be asked to move. But we’re strictly adhering to Martin v. Boise.” County code requires cars parked on the street to move every 72 hours, so deputies sometimes mark a tire with chalk and eventually cite the owner, especially if a property owner complains.
That means if a homeless person wants to park somewhere for an extended period, it helps to have tolerant neighbors. After quickly being asked to move by the Dance Palace and Nick’s Cove, Ms. Oru spent nine months parked at B and Sixth Streets, near the Coastal Health Alliance and Papermill Creek Children’s Corner.
“I felt like it was a generosity from the people who worked at the clinic, a generosity from the women who were daycare providers,” she said. “They’ve always been generous.”
In March, just as Ms. Oru’s Section 8 voucher was on the verge of expiring, she heard a unit was available. Her two dogs, Luna and Fellow, finally had more space, and she could unroll the carpets that she had crammed into her car after being evicted.
Best of all, the townhouse was right in town, just blocks from where she’d been sleeping. It was a chance not often afforded to West Marin’s homeless. “I’m surprised how hard it is to get lined up with resources,” Ms. Oru said. “It was more like winning the lottery.