What will happen at Sebastopol’s next Project Homekey site?

Construction on Gravenstein Commons, another homeless housing development, could begin this month. We reached out to St. Vincent de Paul director Jack Tibbetts to talk about the community's concerns

Jack Tibbetts is the executive director of St. Vincent de Paul Sonoma County. He will be overseeing the construction of Sebastopol’s next Project Homekey site, Gravenstein Commons.

Given all the issues at Elderberry Commons, several Sebastopol Times readers have written us concerned that Sebastopol is about to get a second Project Homekey site in the next year or so. That project, Gravenstein Commons, will be built by St. Vincent de Paul Sonoma County on the former site of HorizonShine, the now-disbanded homeless RV Village in north Sebastopol.

According to Steve Brown of the Sebastopol Building Department, St. Vincent de Paul could start construction on the site by the end of this month.

We reached out to Jack Tibbetts, the executive director of St. Vincent de Paul Sonoma County, to see what he thought about the issues at Elderberry Commons and to hear about his experience of overseeing his organization’s first Project Homekey site, St. Vincent de Paul Commons in Santa Rosa.

We caught Tibbetts in an unguarded moment. He was on vacation in Oregon. We spoke on Zoom, and he was forthright about the challenges of providing permanent supportive housing for the homeless and the changes he’d like to see in the system.

Have you read our coverage of Elderberry Commons and what did you make of it?

When I read that article, I completely sympathized and related to what Burbank Housing is going through. If you were to go to the St Vincent de Paul Commons in Santa Rosa, you would have heard a lot of the same stuff. We’ve heard allegations of prostitution happening there too, and when we investigate those—and we sincerely investigate, not a blow off, we looked into it—we posted security outside of the person’s door who the allegation is against, and we came to the conclusion that, no, it’s not happening. And even if it were happening, there’s not enough conclusive evidence there to say that it is.

How about drug use?

We know that drug use happens at St. Vincent de Paul Commons, and when we find out about that, we direct our case managers to spend extra time and attention on those individuals, trying to pull them into attending a meeting and trying to work through those issues.

When you start permanent supportive housing, people are coming in right off of the street or from a shelter, so a really rough environment. They get plugged right into a home, and all of the issues that they live with on the street, naturally, and I would say, understandably, come right into the home.

What do we have on the street? Prostitution for drug use—there’s a term for it. It’s basically more or less sex work for protection. A lot of times we’ll see women who get engaged in really bad relationships as protection on the street from being passed around to other partners, right? We see, obviously, the rampant drug use, the mental health issues. I’m gonna be the first to tell you honestly, those come into every permanent supportive housing environment right off the bat.

How you should judge success among housing providers is, what does that look like six months after the housing placement? What does that look like a year after the housing placement? So our experience has been a lot of the same accusations and allegations that Burbank is facing. We look into them. Our case managers start working as hard as they can to help people work through those issues. And then what we found is about every single month, things got better and better. There were fewer and fewer allegations and fewer things to investigate and address.

At the six-month mark, to put this into perspective, we actually were going to put a big gate around the front of our property, because originally, a lot of what happens is the folks who move into housing start having their friends who are still homeless come stay with them, visit them, and do all the stuff together that they did on the street. Yes, that’s clearly happening. So we thought, ‘Well, let’s put up a huge gate.’ But we were a little bit reluctant because we didn’t want to create an institutional, prison-like deal, but we said, ‘Let’s revisit the gate six months from now.’ And sure enough, things got so much better six months later that we said we don’t need a gate anymore, and we reduced security—we still have security at night—but things have smoothed out tremendously. So in that sense, I want to tell you honestly, the process and the program is working.

It’s not to say we don’t still have incidents. We just had a young man, you know, fall back. He was sober, had been sober for a while, he relapsed, and he’s been really problematic. When you deal with homeless folks who have been chronically homeless for years, it’s not a cakewalk. And I’m not one of these executive directors to come to the public and say, “Oh my gosh, there’s nothing but miracles happening all the time!” Miracles do happen. We have incredible success stories.

How does the philosophy of Housing First—the idea that you house people and then attempt to deal with their problems—play into this. I read in the Press Democrat that you’re having some second thoughts about that.

Housing First needs tweaking. I’ve gotten to evaluate Housing First from two perspectives. One is, I was on the Santa Rosa City Council from 2016 to 2021. That was right when Housing First was coming into the fore with government officials and politicians, and we all thought ‘This is going to completely revamp how we address homelessness, and we’ll have much higher success rates.’

But part of what comes with Housing First is the low-barrier model. So the funding sources that Burbank taps into, which are largely the same funding sources we used to build the Santa Rosa Commons and now Gravenstein Commons in your neighborhood, requires that it be low barrier. So if somebody comes in a drug addict, you cannot evict them for being a drug addict. The only thing you can evict for is behavioral issues like destruction of property or assault on staff or other residents.

I was a big champion of Housing First. I love the concept that to stabilize somebody, you have to house them. I do believe that that is true, but I’ve now operated both models. I’ve operated low barrier, and I’ve operated high barrier, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I absolutely prefer high barrier.

Can you give me an example of what high barrier means?

It basically means you can kick people out for any behavior that you deem is undesirable or disallowed. We operated Los Guilicos, and that was hands-down our best and most successful program. We did that in the high-barrier model. What we did was, if you were doing drugs on the property, we didn’t kick you out the first time we caught you. But we ended up having a more or less a three-strikes rule. You know, first strike, ‘Okay, let’s work through your problem.’ Second strike, ‘Okay, let’s work through your problem.’ Third strike—well, we’re gonna really evaluate: have you made progress on your issue, or is it time for you to leave and make space for somebody else on the street who might be more ready to reintegrate into normal societal behavior? And we had much better results under that model than we do with the low-barrier model.

It’s my belief that the low-barrier model attracts two kinds of homeless people. (Well, technically, three because I always put severe mental illness in its own cohort. And I could talk all day about how society has failed that person, and how no nonprofit is gonna manage that person well.) But besides that, there are two types of folks in the low-barrier model: there are people who come in with problems, who want to change their problems. They come in and they start to see, feel and experience a better life, and they want more of that. And then there’s folks who come in—and we have thrown so much free stuff at them, and we don’t try to enforce any kind of regulations or rules that all of us in society have to live by—and they, quite honestly, exploit that. It’s those folks that become challenges for the nonprofits managing housing sites. So I would like to see the state and the county go back to a high-barrier model.

Is doing that a violation of HUD’s Housing First rules?

I don’t know. That’s a great question. Tina Rivera [the former director of Sonoma County Department of Health Services], came to us and said, ‘You need to have a high barrier model.’ And we said, okay, that’s fine. We want that. But then she wanted us to change our contract retroactively, to say we’d been operating with a high-barrier model for a year. That’s dishonest to whomever they share that with, because obviously whatever funding streams they’re pulling from, from the feds and state do come with their own requirements. What those are, I never looked into that…That’s between their funders and them.

I think that having a high-barrier model is ethical and compassionate, but the term “high barrier” has now become a bad word in a lot of homelessness academic circles. Maybe we should call it “medium barrier.”

But realistically you have to enforce some sort of social covenant.

And the other thing I’ll tell you, and I’m quoting Jennielynn Holmes [CEO of Catholic Charities of Northwest California], who brought this up years ago, when we were talking about Housing First and that is the concept of “presentism.”

A lot of these folks are so reluctant to change. We use the analogy of an overturned vessel at sea. You see the captain and the crew clinging to the overturned hull. They’re dying, they’re getting hypothermia. The ship is sinking, and soon they’re going to be swimming in the water, and they can’t let go sometimes of that sinking ship and swim to the safety of the Coast Guard boat, because that ship, even though it’s sinking, is what they know and have understood for years. And sometimes it takes some level of discomfort for them to finally let go of that sinking ship.

Where that analogy came up was addressing Martin v. Boise, [a legal decision] where you had the concept that you couldn’t move anybody from any place in public unless you had an alternative minimum standard to go to? Well, from my perspective at St Vincent, that made our job tenfold harder because if there aren’t police officers out in the community enforcing basic ordinances that protect the welfare of the general population—but also, in a roundabout way, support the general welfare of the homeless individual—there’s no incentive to leave that sinking ship that is their life, and so it was much harder to pull that person into services.

If you think about it, if somebody’s creating a nuisance for you every day, you’re much more likely to say, ‘Well, okay, I’m getting tired of moving from point A to point B and packing up all my stuff and unpacking it. Maybe there is a better world. Maybe I should accept the services.’

You really just have to enforce basic standards.

At the end of the day, behind every person that is just totally unwilling to improve their own lives is somebody who is waiting to get into this backlogged system and off the streets—maybe it’s a woman who’s getting sexually assaulted and living this awful nightmare of an existence most of us can’t even begin to imagine but who is ready to get into that safety and security and enhance her life. And so that’s where Housing First has failed.

The concept of providing someone with a home or an independent living environment in a shelter is still step one. So I would say that 50% of the Housing First concept, standing alone, is good. It works. We have to keep doing it. But this concept that you can take people living in an anarchic, free-for-all environment outside of the home, and just letting them be in the home doing that same stuff, that’s what’s not okay. That’s what’s failing. And I don’t think that that’s Burbank’s fault. It’s in all of our contracts with the state that this is how you have to operate. And I’m sure the folks at Burbank get just as frustrated about it as I do and my staff does.

Some of the tenants at Elderberry Commons said they were promised this would be a family-friendly environment. One tenant, Michael, feels it’s not family-friendly at all. He has this quote I really like that goes “You can’t just create a homeless shelter, throw some kids in there, and call it ‘family-friendly.’”

A Project Homekey environment is not suitable for children, period. At St. Vincent de Paul Commons, we reserve the right to accept families with children, because we recognize that it’s better than the street by far, especially for a child. For example, we had one woman who came to us pregnant. But when she birthed the child, our staff put a Herculean effort into getting her an actual apartment in a normal, affordable-housing environment, and she’s having a wonderful life now.

But if a referral agency comes to us and says—and they’ve done this, ‘We have a mother and a child. They’re homeless. They’re getting kicked out of the shelter tomorrow because they’ve been there too long. Will you take them?’ Absolutely. We do not want that child going onto the street, period, full stop. We’ll take them, but then we try to get them out into an actual [air quotes] “normie” housing environment as quickly as possible.

We do not solicit families to come to St. Vincent de Paul Commons. I don’t know how Burbank marketed their place, but you should not market a Project Homekey site as family friendly. You should have it available as a last-ditch resource.

Is there any possibility of creating homeless housing specifically for families or seniors?

[Editor’s note: Before we launch into this next section, some definitions would be helpful. The Continuum of Care (COC), now renamed Sonoma County Homeless Coalition, is a large committee representing homeless service providers both inside and outside of government. The coalition governs the allocation and administration of federal, state, and local funding for homeless services. They are committed by law to a Housing First strategy. The VI-SPDAT, or Vulnerability Index, is a prioritization tool designed to assess the homeless on the basis of how vulnerable they are and match them to housing.]

If I was the benevolent dictator of the system, I would prioritize families with children over everybody else, regardless of somebody’s status as a high score on the VI-SPDAT, which is what our COC focuses on. It’s a score of 1 to 10, and people who score in like the 9 and 10 cohort are people that are usually dual diagnosis: mentally ill, terminally ill, or have been chronically homeless for more than 2.6 years, something like that.

And then as you go lower on the score, like if you’re in the 1 to 3 cohort, it probably means you entered homelessness recently. You have all of your cognition and your physical abilities, so you’re much more likely to reintegrate into a normal housing situation.

Under the current system, we’ve focused all our resources on the 9s and 10s. We did that, I believe, because they were creating the largest problems in the community, and we felt like, ‘Okay, if we can pull these people who are screaming epithets in the downtown square or going to the bathroom on a business owner’s doorstep, that’s the cohort we should be taking care of first.’

But that’s where, as I alluded to earlier, the failure of the mental health system comes in. Catholic Charities, Burbank, St. Vincent de Paul has no business trying to provide care for those folks. People with severe mental illness belong in an institution under medical care and with pharmaceuticals routinely prescribed.

We all do the best we can. I’m not trying to knock us, but the idea that somebody earning $24 an hour is going to provide meaningful, life-changing care to that person is a fallacy. We do provide comfort, and that’s better than the street. In a perfect world, though, the 9s and 10s would be going to a different environment.

The folks that are lower on the scale should get the housing because it’s extremely affordable. If they have a voucher, it’s virtually free, and they then have the ability to focus on interviewing for employment, getting kids to school and providing a good, healthy environment for their children, and then eventually moving out into an apartment.

Unfortunately, that’s just not the way the system was set up.

How have nonprofits dealt with the particular incentive structure of the current system?

All of us nonprofits have effectively chased the money, because if you take these higher-scoring folks, you get millions or tens of millions of dollars to construct housing, which helps the asset value of your organization.

This is me being, I guess, a little bit pessimistic. There is an optimistic side to it, for sure, and I always will come back to this: we’re still taking people off the street and still enhancing everyone’s lives—the community of folks around town and that individual—there is improvement for both. So that is a win.

But I’m just saying, St. Vincent de Paul, for example, after we do the Gravenstein Commons, we then want to go into more housing construction, but we’ll do it through a conventional finance model with a bank, where we will have total control over our rules and regulations. And we want to focus next on families with kids for the reasons you just stated.

So we chose to take people off the streets, enhance the lives of the community, enhance the individual life of the person who’s homeless, and then, from a shrewd perspective, we want the cash flow to then be able to go build these other communities where we have full, unbridled ability to regulate as we see fit. So if someone’s a routine bad actor, we can kick them out and bring in somebody who’s ready. If we want to focus on kids, we can focus on kids.

I would encourage all of these nonprofits who took these tens of millions of dollars to think about it the way St. Vincent de Paul does, If you’re using it for improvement in the community and in the lives of people who are homeless, but you’re also using it as a means to an end to have asset value on your balance sheet and cash flow to go tackle the other issues that government is now ill-equipped to do (because we are now losing money from the feds) then I think it’s a noble pursuit that nonprofit should do. I think that the community should understand and support this.

Do you see any usefulness in segregating homeless housing by type, say, like a senior community, a family community, that kind of thing?

Complete segregation? No, in fact, I think a beautiful housing model would be housing seniors and people with young families together. And I also think that, yes, segregation in some populations is better. Sometimes I see benefits to having a men’s community and a woman’s community, or just couples and families, stuff like that.

And then, as we talked about earlier, the severely mentally ill or really medically-in-need people having a place for just them and then hopefully finding the funding to get a doctor or somebody to fill that gap that the Sonoma Developmental Center used to serve. That would be wonderful.

So I will tell you that there’s a fair amount of concern in the community, with the police visiting Elderberry so often. People are worried now about Gravenstein Commons having this same situation.

We are going to have the police at Gravenstein Commons—I don’t want to say every day, but with some degree of regularity. It’s going to be more at first, when we first open, and then it’s going to decline with every passing month until we probably get to a place where we get two police visits a month or one a month.

I think what the community needs to understand is that when somebody’s on the street, the likelihood that they’re going to call for help is probably diminished. You have a different frame of mind when you’re living on the street, and you probably don’t even have a cellphone that’s charged. Then they move into a house, and now you have an outlet to charge your phone, so you can call for help.

We want people to feel like they can call for help in society. That’s the point of society.

So I don’t think that the Sebastopol community should judge Burbank or Gravenstein or any project based upon calls for service. In fact, it should be seen as a good thing because it means people have the ability and have the frame of mind to know to call for help when they think something’s wrong.

The community also needs to know that it gets better over time, if it’s being managed well. At the end of the day, what every community has to remember—and most police departments will agree with me and back me up on this—is that it is so much better if there’s going to be an incident on the street on the downtown square where the whole public is exposed to whatever that was, and the police respond, and then they’ve got to go to the creek behind the warehouse in town, and the police are running all around to these different locations every day.

Well, you’ve got two social issues there: one, the general public’s exposed to whatever crime or assault or whatever has occurred. And let’s face it, society doesn’t want to walk downtown to the main square and see that. And two, they now have a police department that’s getting completely consumed running around in multiple places looking for that person.

When you centralize a group of formerly homeless people in one permanent supportive housing environment, you’re still probably going to get the same amount of calls for service in the first month of operating, but by having it in one central location, the police know, “Okay, I’m going to this one place,” and it’s just Point A to Point B, not Point A to B to C to D to E to F. So in that sense, I hope the community can kind of see it that way.

And again, if these folks are living on the street there, and there’s no management, there’s no supervision, there’s no security, no resident manager and case managers, the amount of calls for services happening in the community is never going to decline. It’s going to stay relatively static. If it’s in a permanent supportive housing community, it’s going to go down and down and down and down.

[Editor’s Note: We checked Tibbett’s idea of the number of calls declining over time with the Santa Rosa Police Department, and, sadly, this doesn’t seem to be the case. There were about 40 calls for service a month at St. Vincent de Paul Commons when they opened early in 2024, and there were still 40 calls for service last month.]

At St. Vincent de Paul Commons, we also have a partnership with our police department in Santa Rosa, where they send a patrol car through every day on the beat, and that police presence has a dampening effect on any incidents. It creates a sense of authority and order among the population.

I know some folks just never want to have any kind of a homelessness house in their community, but it’s far better—and I think just about everybody in your readership would agree—it’s better than just having those people wandering the streets, lighting RVs on fire on Gravenstein Highway and creating all the issues that go with that population, right?

Let’s talk a little more about the economics of the situation.

Let me put it very tactfully. What I fear what we’ve done in the last few years with all of this money coming into housing is the nonprofits understandably dove in and chased the money. And it wasn’t just about money, I want to be clear about that. It was an opportunity for us to help more people while simultaneously building our organizations to be more financially sustainable, which should be the objective of any organization. The more financially stable you are, the less resources you have to pull from private donors and government sources in the long run.

And this permanent supportive housing thing was great in that respect, because the voucher money [from HUD] is such that you can operate these things safely with good results just off of the voucher income from rent. So it creates this self-sustained model, so we don’t have to go to the county or to private donors, as much on an ongoing basis to support our work. Their money can support other causes in the community.

And we do help people. We do get people into better living environments. No doubt about it, we help ameliorate some of the issues that the general public faces with homelessness because we’re taking people from the public square and putting them inside a home in a contained, supervised environment.

That’s all good, but what I’m struggling with is sometimes it feels like we are in the people-storing business.

What do you mean “the people-storing business”? Could you explain that?

There’s folks that, essentially our hands are tied, and we have to keep them, and you just can’t really reach through and help that person who really wants or needs the help and just needs that leg up to get going in life, because we’ve already filled that spot with somebody who might just be continuing their issues on the street in that home.

Going forward, I would love to see the low-barrier requirement amended to allow nonprofits to have some sort of a process—I mean, certainly the client being served has rights and there’s a process before you can just kick them out—but this idea that we’re just going to store a person in a space and let them do drugs for years, right? Not okay with me. That’s storing a person. That’s not saving a person. That’s not helping a person.

And I think when it comes to your question about spirituality, that is the part that I am struggling with, and to be quite honest, I think some people on my board are struggling with. All of these volunteers on my board, they’re all Catholics, and most feel like, ‘Well, gosh, can’t we be doing more for people, you know?’

I hope the government has the foresight to allow nonprofits and trust nonprofits enough to say, ‘You know what? All of us up in Sacramento, we don’t know what you’re dealing with every day. So we’re going to give you a little bit more latitude to create services that are more tailored to the people you’re serving. And if you feel like there is somebody who has made no change after a year, two years, then send them out and bring somebody in and try again with that new person.”

Thanks for these comments, Jack. You’ve been very forthcoming.

I believe in transparency, and especially when you’re building something in somebody’s community. So if nothing else, I hope Sebastopol feels like I won’t mince words about what we’re doing. I hope that they feel like they can trust that St. Vincent knows what it’s doing and is going to create a more positive environment at Gravenstein Commons.