State of homelessness .. ‘No new housing money’: Lack of federal funds hamstring efforts ...Middle East

Across Humboldt County, providers of homeless services are weathering headwinds, some dire, in 2025. They’re nonetheless doing important and often lifesaving work dealing with a homeless population that has continued to increase statewide despite efforts at the state and local levels.

1,573 homeless individuals were counted on the night of Jan. 22, 2024, during the most recent point-in-time count in Humboldt County. In June of this year, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors allocated just over $4.6 million in state Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention Program funds. Those funds were distributed predominantly to Arcata House Partnership, the city of Eureka and the Redwood Community Action Agency, three of the region’s largest providers of homeless services.

This is just one source of funding for these agencies, however, and at the federal level, service providers say, many sources of funding and programs that support housing assistance and provide for services for homeless people have been cut, leaving shelters impacted and homeless community members — many homeless for the first time — without a way to transition from emergency shelter to stable housing.

Breakdown in the process

Much of the federal support that has been essential for many people transitioning from homelessness to stable housing in Humboldt County in the past has been withdrawn in 2025.

Arcata House Partnership executive director Darlene Spoor says that for her organization, which provides a large portion of the county’s supportive services and housing assistance aimed at moving homeless individuals from emergency shelters to more stable housing situations via vouchers and other means of assistance, a lack of federal funding has all but stopped the process whereby those in crisis can move into permanent subsidized housing.

In Spoor’s assessment, the situation is dire.

“There’s no new housing money coming our way,” Spoor said. “The small amounts that are coming are monies that we wrote for several years ago, in this county, and those monies are at risk. So for me, the question is: how do people get housing? And the answer right now is: there is no way.

“I wish it was different. There’s no affordable housing support. There’s no housing vouchers for people who are low-income. All of those safety nets have been removed.”

Spoor said that AHP has had to make staffing cuts. And where once the nonprofit was able to use vouchers to place many homeless people into permanent housing, now they can only fill a handful of vacated units in facilities like AHP’s 60-unit The Grove complex and the 18-unit Ke-Mey-Ek’ Place (operated in conjunction with the Yurok Indian Housing Authority).

Still, Spoor said, AHP still serves 900 people and is providing more meals than it has in past years. She said that the nonprofit will continue to provide excellent service to those that they can, but that it’s difficult to tell community members that they cannot help them. She said that AHP is currently looking for ways to leverage community support and explore programs like an “adopt a senior” program, helping community members who struggle to make ends meet on a fixed income avoid first-time homelessness later in life.

“The money is not there, but for the money that we get and for the support that we get — not just AHP but the whole systems, … the system is doing a fantastic job on very little money,” Spoor said. “And we’re all committed to continuing to do all of the work we can, even given these funding reductions. So it’s not that we’re not doing it, but we can’t do more. We’re continuing to do what we can today.”

A new village

In August, after eight years of effort, the Betty Kwan Chinn Homeless Foundation celebrated the opening of the Bayside Village transitional housing. The 34-unit village, which began accepting residents in June, hosts tenants who have been chronically homeless, most for more than a decade, with one current resident having been without shelter for 35 years.

Conceived in 2017, the village experienced a tragic setback in 2022 when the PG&E-donated trailers that were to be converted to housing were destroyed in a fire. Subsequent difficulties during the pandemic and ensuing inflationary period delayed Bayside Village several years.

The village sits on a city-owned site along the Humboldt Bay Trail. It features amenities such as showers for residents and non-residents, a community room that hosts on-site Narcotics Anonymous meetings, a dining facility, a community garden, shuttle services to St. Vincent De Paul’s Free Meal Dining Facility and the Uplift Eureka Community Resource Center.

Betty Chinn told the Times-Standard that opening the Bayside Village and working with its long-time chronically homeless tenants has been one of the most challenging times in her life — even more challenging than helping to move some 200 residents of the Palco Marsh homeless encampment. Still, she said, the foundation and the community are making progress.

“I think it’s much, much better than three months ago, two months ago,” Chinn said. “I think when they see that we really care, then they change, and also take time to process the change, their environment too, right? They need a time to change … (and) to tell themselves, ‘we are OK; we are changing our lifestyle.’ I’m very encouraged today.”

Chinn is working to bring 40 more tiny home-based transitional housing units to the region in the near future.

Attempt to ‘criminalize’ homelessness

In January, the city of Eureka began exploring the possibility of overhauling two longstanding but rarely enforced ordinances that prescribe camping in public areas and sleeping on sidewalks. Following a June 2024 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court — City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which allowed local governments to impose civil and criminal penalties for public camping — city staff saw an opportunity to create a single ordinance that would impose misdemeanor criminal penalties on those found in violation of the law.

That escalation of what had previously been an infraction to a misdemeanor, city staff reasoned, would give the city and its police department an opportunity to move chronically homeless people, characterized as “treatment resistant,” into a criminal diversion program, thereby creating an enforceable path to treatment and housing.

In the ensuing months, though, Eureka City Council found the new ordinance would become a flashpoint. Community members on both sides of the issue came out to voice their opinions en masse. Some came to support what they thought of as necessary and humane extension of the city’s established commitment to community policing and others to oppose what they saw as the criminalization of homelessness along the backdrop of increasingly draconian national politics and sharpening income inequality.

In May, the city council elected not to adopt a new ordinance in a split vote.

City Manager Miles Slattery told the Times-Standard that staff had been disappointed with the decision, which he said would have continued the city’s success in addressing homelessness using EPD only when necessary.

“When we do use EPD, they’re very well-trained in de-escalation and addressing homelessness in a compassionate way as opposed to a punitive way,” Slattery said. “… It was not a criminalization effort in any way, shape or form. It was based on years and years, and we’ve been doing this since 2013 …

“The fact that it was construed that we were somehow going to be going out and with the same programming and the same staffing … that have been doing all of these compassionate things for so many years, that we were just all of a sudden going to flip the script and put everybody in jail, was laughable to me.”

Changing behaviors

One of the community members speaking in support of a new camping ordinance was Bryan Hall, executive director of Eureka Rescue Mission. The mission is a faith-based organization that, with more than 160 beds in its men’s shelter and 43 — soon to expand to 70 — in its women and children’s shelter, is the city’s largest emergency shelter provider.

He said that he supported the city’s plan to compel campers into diversion treatment because of his own experiences as a recovering drug addict.

“I was homeless. I was jumping from place to place, basically, and I was a criminal,” Hall said. “I was on meth and I was stealing and I was ruining my life. I was bringing my wife down. My family was torn apart. I was absolutely out of control, and I needed intervention. I needed to be arrested.”

Hall credits his eventual arrest and placement in a diversion program to saving his and his wife’s lives. Now a grandfather of seven and director of Eureka Rescue Mission for 13 years, Hall says that an approach that houses homeless people without addressing addiction and mental health issues is, in his estimation, doomed to failure.

Statistics bear out that those are problems for large swathes of the city and county’s homeless population. Survey data compiled by CSET, CARE, and Uplift Eureka in 2024 reports that as many as 48% of homeless respondents have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. And a majority, 59% of respondents, reported suffering from drug or alcohol addiction.

Hall said that he would like to embrace those people that need help — literally and figuratively — and see as many of them as possible get the resources they need to change their behaviors and get help for addiction before a tragic ending.

“It’s not a crime to be homeless. It can happen to any one of us,” Hall said. “We could have an earthquake that drops 90% of the homes in this county, across California, and all of a sudden everybody’s homeless … It’s a matter of what you do to help yourself rebuild your life and not lose hope. And that’s hard, especially in the world we’re living in right now. It’s pretty dark out there.”

Eureka’s collaborative efforts

In Eureka, the city and police department have been working in close collaboration for several years to address the region’s homeless issues.

“We are way beyond any other law enforcement agency or city in Northern California. We are extremely progressive in how we do this,” said EPD Commander Leonard La France. La France said that between the city’s Community Safety Engagement Team (CSET), Crisis Alternative Response Eureka (CARE) and Uplift Eureka, three programs dedicated to addressing homelessness, the city and department have made a concerted effort to understand and address its unhoused community in a way that many other municipalities have not.

Earlier this year, La France received the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Law Enforcement Executive of the Year Award from CIT International, an award that he attributed to the city’s team effort via those programs and to an approach that strikes the appropriate balance of care and accountability.

“We have amazing programs. We have a lot of compassion. We know our homeless very well, and it’s a good relationship,” La France said.

Providing resources

This January, the city celebrated the opening of its Uplift Eureka Community Resource Center at 1111 E Street.

“We’ve, since January, had 1,400 visits to that resource center,” said Jeff Davis, project manager for Uplift and Community Access Project for Eureka. “We’ve helped with 329 housing applications that have been submitted. We’ve worked with dozens and dozens of folks to connect them with job opportunities and resume help. We have a rapid rehousing program; the city has helped around 250 people get … that were experiencing homelessness get into permanent housing and provide them with supportive services.”

“We’re here Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.,” Homeless Services Supervisor Sierra Wood said. “527 people have already stopped by the resource center, everyone from students to seniors. We have hygiene supplies. We have diapers. We have food. We have water. We have Narcan. We have a lot of different things … to provide for those folks free of charge. Then we also have multiple really knowledgeable resource center coordinators and associates that can help guide them … whether they’re looking for an identification card or housing or anything in between.”

Robert Schaulis can be reached at 707-441-0585.

Hence then, the article about state of homelessness no new housing money lack of federal funds hamstring efforts was published today ( Sunday 21/09/2025 - 01:53 AM ) and is available on Ukiah Daily Journal ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.

Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( State of homelessness .. ‘No new housing money’: Lack of federal funds hamstring efforts )

Also on site :

• Naval Base Ventura County Port Hueneme on lockdown for active shooter
• The Men I’ve Slept With All Have the Same Complaint About My Birth Control. I Didn’t Even Know This Was Possible.
• Roads in north suburb closed after pedestrian, struck, killed while crossing street