Newsom issues additional $62M to Project Roomkey as nearly 12K people face hotel room evictions
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Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday announced an additional $62 million in emergency funding to allow counties to keep homeless individuals sheltered who were slated to be evicted from temporary hotel rooms by the end of the year.
Project Roomkey is a statewide program launched in April to temporarily house thousands of people in hotel rooms across California to prevent high-risk homeless individuals from contracting COVID-19 while living in encampments, mass shelters or on the streets. The program targeted seniors, pregnant women and others at risk for having severe COVID-19 symptoms.
More than 28,000 people, which is 17% of the state’s homeless population, have received a hotel room placement under the program.
The state previously said initial funding needed to be spent by the end of the year. As a result, nearly 12,000 people still housed in Roomkey hotel rooms — mostly clustered in California’s largest counties — were facing the possibility of returning to homelessness as the pandemic rages on, according to an analysis by The Desert Sun published two weeks prior to Monday's announcement of additional funding.
It is not clear how many of those individuals will be able to remain in their current hotel room placements with the additional funding. Riverside County, for example, should be receiving a portion of those funds, but the total is unknown, according to Greg Rodriguez, policy advisor for Riverside County Fourth District Supervisor V. Manuel Perez. The amount of funding will help determine how many people can stay housed and how many can be assisted in transitioning to permanent housing.
The state is making the one-time funds immediately available to local governments that still have Project Roomkey sites operating “so that clients living in motel or hotel rooms under this life-saving program will not be forced to return to street homelessness while the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact California,” according to a statement.
Of the total allocation, $24 million will go directly to funding the hotel rooms.
“Project Roomkey exceeded all expectations, providing safe shelter to more than 22,300 Californians experiencing homelessness,” Newsom said in a statement. “But this pandemic is very much still with us — and we can’t take our eye off the ball. That’s why we’re supporting our counties with this new money, so they can continue this critical life-saving Roomkey mission and help clients transition into more stable, permanent housing.”
The state initially distributed $150 million to counties to address the need, but that funding quickly ran out. Many counties already have shut down their programs completely, kicked clients out due to lack of funding, or stopped taking new clients in.
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Overall, only 5% of Roomkey clients have found a permanent home, according to The Desert Sun's analysis, which was compiled by requesting client and placement data as of mid-October from all 58 California counties. Of the 45 counties that responded, 36 said they participated in the program. Thirteen counties did not respond.
Those 36 counties told The Desert Sun they have served 28,716 Roomkey clients since April. This is more than is shown in publicly available state data, which only accounts for 22,300 individuals helped in those counties.
Of the total clients, 16% returned to homelessness, 40% are still in a hotel room but feared facing an eviction come the new year, and 39% left the program but caseworkers don’t know where they went, according to The Desert Sun’s analysis.
Nearly 100% of counties that responded to The Desert Sun’s survey reported they needed additional funding from the state or federal government in order to meet the needs of their local homeless population.
“The need for additional local support has been made clear,” the state said in its statement on Monday.
Initially, Project Roomkey funds only covered hotel rooms, meals, security and custodial services. Any additional services, such as behavioral health, health care services and case management, would need to come from counties’ budgets.
Fresno County social services program manager Laura Moreno said that setup created a barrier for providing wraparound services. At the start of the program, Moreno said her county was not able to provide caseworkers to help transition clients into permanent living situations, nor pay for the technology used to track their housing progress.
Other counties funded their own caseworkers or reassigned staff from different social services departments to the Roomkey program. Of the 29 counties that provided relevant data, the average ratio was one caseworker for every 36 Roomkey clients, according to The Desert Sun's analysis.
Emmanuel Baxa, a Project Roomkey caseworker in Riverside County, previously told The Desert Sun that the optimal number of clients to manage at one time is closer to 15.
Now, more than 50% of the state's new $62 million allocation is slated to be used for rehousing services. Of the new funding, $35 million will go toward transitioning individuals from Project Roomkey into permanent housing. The funds can be used for rental subsidies, case management, housing navigation and landlord incentives, among other resources, according to the state.
Additionally, $3 million will be used for state-deployed housing specialists and for resources that will help counties create plans for permanent re-housing of all Project Roomkey occupants.
Desert Sun reporter Nicole Hayden covers health and homelessness in California. She can be reached at [email protected] or (760) 778-4623. Follow her on Twitter @Nicole_A_Hayden.