Rough start at Elderberry Commons, Part One

Police are there almost daily, but managers of the new permanent supportive housing facility say this is just a transition and that caseworkers need more time to reach the most difficult cases

Local politicians and homeless advocates at an opening celebration at Elderberry Commons in mid-April.

Editor’s note: This is Part One of a two-part article.

The first indication that something was amiss at Elderberry Commons came from an offhand remark at a city council meeting. Councilmember Sandra Maurer questioned why the police were being called out there so often. After all, the new permanent supportive housing complex for formerly homeless people had just opened a month and a half before.

Curious, we reached out to Police Chief Sean McDonagh, and he confirmed that Elderberry Commons was getting an unusually high number of visits from his officers (and sometimes from him). At first, he said, it was one call every other day, but by mid-May police visited Elderberry almost daily—sometimes several times a day.

McDonagh said the police had logged 28 “decent calls for service”—a suicide threat, an arrest warrant, suspicious subject, suspicious vehicles, drug complaints, lots of calls about disturbing the peace, and “a situation with a knife,” McDonagh said. There were even reports of prostitution.

In addition, the police make regular security checks at the location—they’ve done 85 of these since it opened.

“It’s definitely taking more and more of our time and resources,” he said.

A tenant of Elderberry Commons showed up at the end of the Sebastopol City Council meeting on May 6 and tried to talk to the council about the problems there, but they came in just as the meeting ended and everyone was leaving for the evening.

After the meeting, the tenant stood outside comparing notes with McDonagh and Councilmember Jill McLewis, who owns a chocolate business (Eye Candy) in Gravenstein Station, which shares a parking lot with Elderberry Commons.

As they stood there, the tenant ran through a litany of complaints—some involved actual or suspected crimes (prostitution, the use of fentanyl and methamphetamine) and some seemed more like questionable apartment management practices (ignoring unsanitary hoarding, an off-leash pitbull). According to this tenant, a parent with a minor child was housed next door to the room where another tenant is allegedly turning tricks—and that child is allegedly getting an earful. In one case, a tenant lay semi-conscious and partially exposed on the sidewalk, in front of the facility for three days.

Then there are the more philosophical, policy-related questions, such as the wisdom of housing children and medically fragile seniors in this kind of environment—and allowing the seriously mentally ill to refuse treatment.

“I think we can agree that allowing a human being to lie on the sidewalk for three days—clearly altered on drugs, her pants down—is inhumane,” said McLewis, who filmed a video of the woman lying in front of the facility as evidence.

The tenant who came to the council meeting also claimed that the management had retaliated against tenants who complained by threatening to transfer them out of permanent supportive housing and back to the shelter system. (Management said tenants were simply offered the opportunity to transfer if they weren’t happy.)

“With all this going on, it’s exhausting,” said the tenant, who did not want their name used for fear of retaliation. “I thought this would be a reprieve from being homeless,” they said, their voice cracking. But now they are wondering if they might feel safer and more relaxed living in a van.

Who’s running Elderberry Commons?

The Sebastopol Times reached out to the two organizations in charge of Elderberry Commons: West County Community Services and Burbank Housing.

The apartment complex is owned by Burbank Housing, which received it from the county. Burbank holds the leases on Elderberry’s studio apartments.

West County Community Services (WCCS) provides the wrap-around social services that make Elderberry more than just a low-income housing complex. WCCS provides a full-time housing manager, Seamus McChesney, as well as two case managers. In addition, there is also an onsite property manager from Burbank Housing, Talia Beaumont, who was previously a services navigator for WCCS at Elderberry. There is also a maintenance person who lives onsite, as well as security.

McChesney was open to discussing the reasons for the frequent police presence at Elderberry Commons, but she wanted to frame this in the broader context of the housing policy known as “Housing First.”

“The philosophy behind Housing First is first you stabilize somebody, and then they can address whatever needs they have,” she said. “It’s a valid philosophy. It works great, and it takes time.”

“Any intervention that you’re doing with someone who has behavioral or mental health issues, it’s an average of seven interventions,” she said. “That means one person maybe only needs one intervention, but another may take 21 interventions.”

“The reality is, because we’re Housing First, we took the most vulnerable people who wanted Sebastopol or west county as their preferred location, and we don’t screen for anything else,” she said.

Regarding the allegations of drug use, McChesney said, “Yes, we have folks who are actively using drugs—absolutely we do. We don’t know if they’re doing it on site or not. But we can tell from our interactions with them, and we offer them detox,” she said.

“Per their lease, they cannot have drugs on site; that doesn’t mean people don’t,” she said. “It just means that that can become a lease violation. WCCS provides ‘the people support.’ Burbank housing provides ‘the physical plant support.’ So Burbank Housing tracks lease violations—having drugs right in their room would be a lease violation, right? They do that side.”

“We [WCCS] can go in and say, ‘This is becoming an issue. It is putting your housing at risk. How can we support you? Do you want to go to detox? Do you want to go to treatment?’ We have those resources available to us. ‘Do you want to talk to a mental health professional? Do you want to go to Sonoma County Behavioral Health?’” McChesney said. “So we can offer those, but we cannot force anyone to take us up on those offers.”

What do they do when people decline help? “What we do is we try another day to talk to them,” McChesney said.

Asked if living in an environment of rampant drug and alcohol use made it difficult for tenants who were sober or in recovery, she said, “It’s always been a concern if you have people who are in recovery right next to people who are actively using—absolutely—yet it could be that the person in recovery can become a role model for the person who is not yet there. So it can work both ways.”

McChesney sees it as a question of setting up a healthy culture for tenants to grow into.

“We moved 38 people into this community all at once within a matter of eight weeks, so there was no existing community culture,” she said. “So that can make it difficult. The other difficulty we've had was that we haven’t had an on-site property manager until a couple of weeks ago…so now we are working together to try and see if we can get folks to accept assistance. We’re working together to try and make people successful. There’s a lot of positives going on here.”

She noted that they’ve brought in an art program for residents and made sure parents with children were signed up with WIC (a nutrition program) and knew about Head Start. They’ve also found IHSS assistants for tenants who need help with cooking or laundry. In addition, they try to connect residents with resources that are unique to Sebastopol, like the classes at the senior center or community cultural center.

Regarding the question of whether one of the tenants is using their room for prostitution, McChesney sighed. “Possibly so. We have security video cameras that cover the property. We view them daily, and we will intervene with someone if we see a behavior that is not going to make them successful.”

Asked whether it would be possible to move the parent and the minor child to another room in the building—away from the noise emanating from site of the alleged prostitution—McChesney said that probably wouldn’t be possible because all the rooms were full. She also said that tenant declined to be moved. Stefanie Bagala, Burbank Housing’s communications and public relations manager, said she couldn’t provide information about any specific case, but said, “The whole process of making changes with tenants or anything like that does take time. It’s kind of like a due process for all of this. But it’s definitely, like, if someone’s disturbing the peace, that’s definitely something that we would be reviewing as a violation.”

Regarding the tenant who lay untended in front of the building for three days, McChesney said that happened over the weekend, when the staff had gone home. She contends that the police rolled by twice but didn’t check on the woman—though she concedes that perhaps they didn’t see her. She’s angry that Councilmember McLewis filmed the woman on the ground. (“How would you like to be filmed at your lowest point?” McChesney said.) Bagala from Burbank Housing said that the facility’s security camera recorded that the security team checked on the woman but that she refused their help. “We can’t force people to accept help,” she said.

“Running up against people’s resistance can feel very defeating because we know that if they continue on this path, they’re not going to be successful in housing,” McChesney said. “We really do want everyone to be successful. There is not one person here that, as a group, we do not want to be successful and finding a path to that can be difficult. It hurts my heart some days.”

Noting that Burbank didn’t have an onsite property manager for the first month and a half after the facility opened, McChesney wondered if Burbank Housing, which has traditionally worked with affordable and low-income housing clients, was fully aware of the difficulties of working with the particular population at Elderberry.

“Burbank has been doing permanent supportive housing for only three years, and so their experience with this is somewhat limited,” McChesney said. “That is not to say they are not doing their jobs, because they are. They have to do their jobs within the parameters of the law.”

In Part 2 of this article, we’ll hear from Burbank Housing and learn more about ‘Housing First’ and how that policy is playing out at Elderberry Commons.