July 17, 2018, was a busy day for law enforcement at the Palms Inn single- room-occupancy facility on Santa Rosa Avenue.

According to police records, the Sonoma County’s Sheriff’s Office was on-site on five different occasions that day, answering calls for service and following up on tenants.

At 11:30am, there was a report of a disturbance. At 12:40pm, the SCSO was there to follow up on a previous incident. An alarm went off again later in the day. Another call was of an unknown variety, according to police records. Just a few days before, on July 12, the SCSO had been on the scene four times at the Palms—to execute the eviction of several tenants. There are numerous instances over a two-year period where the SCSO was on scene at the Palms three or more times on a single day.

At first blush, the police records paint a picture of a seemingly lawless facility where the law enforcement has been called out an average of nearly once a day over the past two years. According to data compiled by the SCSO, sheriff’s deputies were at the Palms Inn an eye-popping 657 times between May 1, 2016, and mid-July of this year.

But “lawless” would be an unfair and unjust characterization. Those numbers only tell part of the story, says the owner of the Palms, along with advocates for the formerly homeless persons who now live at the Palms Inn, which was converted with support from Sonoma County from a budget motel to a federally funded supportive housing facility in 2016.

Its residents are a roughly even mix of tenants who were referred there either by the Department of Veterans Affairs or by Catholic Charities. It’s emblematic of the “housing first” model embraced by social-service advocates dealing with homelessness and its various fallouts. The core tenet of housing first is that a roof over one’s head is the first necessary step to overall stability.

Many Palms residents are suffering from acute mental-health issues, says Catholic Charities’ Jennielynn Holmes, who says the outsized number of police calls highlights an ongoing problem in Sonoma County when it comes to outreach for mentally ill persons: the county’s mental-health crisis unit can’t be deployed unless and until there’s a call first to the sheriff’s office.

And there’s no on-site mental health facility for tenants at the Palms—and no budget in a cash-strapped county budget that’s facing down post-wildfire fiscal fallout.

The reported crimes and calls for service provided to the Bohemian range from burglary to robbery, to reports of suspicious persons and vehicles, endangering a minor, battery, domestic disturbances, illegal fireworks, illegal dumping and others. Two calls over the two-year period led to serious felony charges of assault with a deadly weapon. By far the No. 1 code violation in the extensive list of police reports are 415 calls, which are broadly defined as a “disturbance.”

“There’s a variety of calls, as you mention,” says Holmes, who chalks the number up to the fact that “this is an extraordinarily vulnerable population, and this is the first kind of project of its kind that’s looking at these kinds of people.” The numerous and varied calls for service, she adds, “would likely be happening whether they are at the Palms or out on the street, because many of these are about a tenant having a mental-health crisis.”

Still, Holmes says that there is a lot of police “over-servicing” going on at the Palms, and places the solution in the hands of county mental-health advocates. On the micro level, she says those police reports create an impression that “it looks bad,” but on the macro level, she highlights that the Palms Inn has created “a huge positive impact in our community.”

Now Holmes is looking to tweak the mental-health services to drive those police calls down. “We really need the emergency response system to improve a bit. When there is a mental-health or psychological issue, there’s nobody to call but the sheriff. Then they’ll get the mobile mental-health team. We really don’t have another option other than calling [the SCSO] to mitigate these responses. The [county’s] emergency response system needs to evolve in terms of dealing with mental-health crises.”

Akash Kalia, the 26-year-old owner of the Palms, says that despite the seemingly large number of police calls to the Palms, he has no regrets about his decision to convert his family’s budget motel into supportive housing for about a hundred of the formerly homeless.

Just down the road, the formerly low-rent Astro Motel has been converted into high-tone hotel accommodations geared to millennial wine guzzlers. When it comes to upgraded motels such as the Astro, Kalia chuckles and says that’s not for him. “It’s not about the money. The real value for me is the ‘opportunity cost,'” he says.

Kalia has been trying to export his hotel-conversion package at the Palms to other regions with big homeless problems, namely Oakland and Solano County. “I want to take it a step further as an example to the rest of the county, and to the nation,” he says, “that nonprofits, in order to really have an impact on social issues—there has to be a liaison with business.”

Even if he’s not raking it in with $200-a-night reservations, Kalia sees economic viability for other mom-and-pop type hoteliers willing to convert their hotels into supportive housing. “That’s what I want.”

Along with the introduction of supportive-housing standbys such as on-site case managers and AA meetings, the Palms conversion includes a community garden, and Kalia says he’d like to expand that to a tenant-run commissary featuring local produce and food. “I would want the satellite mental-health clinic on site, too,” he says. “The county has budget issues at the moment, and that’s unfortunate.”

A mental-health clinic would only serve to enhance what he says has been a resounding success in its first few years. Despite all the police activity, the Palms, he says, fields a tenant-retention rate of 95 percent. “That’s huge and unprecedented for supportive housing.”

And the calls for police service have been tracking downward as the Palms has settled in to its revolutionary role in Sonoma County.

Sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Spencer Crum says that between Jan. 1 and July 30, 2017, the SCSO had 154 calls for service to the Palms and took 25 crime reports. Over that same span in 2018, he says, “we had 102 calls for service and 19 crime reports taken at the same location. So while the calls for service are high, it is not our biggest user
of law-enforcement resources in the county, and the calls for service are trending downward.”

There’s a poignant reminder of shared mental-health duress potentially wrought by the October 2017 wildfires on all county residents, rich and poor, housed or otherwise. On Oct. 12, 2017, days after the fires broke out, the SCSO was called out to the apartment complex to respond to a 1056T call for service—that’s a person making suicidal threats. The SCSO answered the call, as it did many dozens of others since the Palms Inn opened its doors in 2016.

“There is a mobile support team the county funds that can be called out for mental-health issues,” says Crum, “but usually we have to come first and make the scene safe, and then we call them out to deal with mental-health-related issues.”

Meanwhile, incoming Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick made a priority of mental-health issues and their intersection with law enforcement during his winning campaign this year. Holmes plans to set up a meeting with him in coming days, she says.

Less than a week after the conclusion of a three-hour trial to decide the fate of a deal to develop housing on county-owned acreage surrounding an abandoned public hospital complex called Chanate, a superior court judge has issued a deal-breaking decision.

On Thursday, Judge René Auguste Chouteaur ruled that the Sonoma County Board of Supervisor’s approval last year of an agreement to develop Chanate with developer William Gallaher must be “vacated.” The controversial deal cannot go forward as planned.

A lawsuit filed by the 200-member grassroots organization Friends of Chanate called for the development agreement to be overturned on several counts. Chouteau agreed with only one of the counts, but that was enough to send it back to the board of supervisors for the indefinite future. The deal can only be revived if the county and the developer conduct an environmental review of the proposed project, which is a lengthy, expensive process that doesn’t guarantee the housing and commercial project will be approved.

Attorney Noreen Evans successfully argued the case for the Friends against Gallaher’s Santa Rosa attorney, Tina Wallis and Deputy County Counsel Debbie F. Latham. Evans argued that the less than $12.5 million price that the county accepted for the land was so far below its fair market value that it was a “gift of public funds.” Chouteau disagreed.

It is true, he said, that a 2016 appraisal projected the worth of the Chanate improvements at $275 million, and the land at more than $30 million. But he was more comfortable with a 2014 appraisal of the property that did not consider the projected value of the improvements.
He declined to value the land at its fully developed market value because, he wrote, the improvements are not guaranteed to occur. Therefore, there was no gift of public funds.

Evans then argued that the supervisors had violated the Brown Act by holding secret deliberations on terms of the development beyond its price. Chouteau’s 25-page decision does not seem to disagree that the proceedings may have violated the spirit and letter of the Brown Act. But the proceedings were held behind closed doors, so there is no public record of what transpired, he noted. Because Evans could not present evidence of wrongdoing, such as a transcript of the secret session, she could not prove the facts of the suspected mischief.

Evan’s final and fatal argument was that the deal is invalid because the county sold the land to Gallaher based on his proposal to develop nearly a thousand homes in a forested, riparian area riffling with wildlife without doing an environmental review of the impacts.

The county’s and the developer’s lawyers argued that the supervisor’s approval of the Chanate development “agreement,” signed last year, is not the same thing as approving a development “project.” And since it is not a “project”, they parsed, it is not subject to environmental review. The judge laughed that argument out of court last week and in his written decision he eviscerated it. And that is enough to spike the deal for the time being.

We are reaching out to Gallaher, Wallis, Evans and the supervisors for comment and will keep you posted.

More than 20 labor, environmental and social- and economic-justice organizations banded together July 19 to endorse the Alliance for a Just Recovery’s 25-point plan to ensure a “just recovery” following last October’s unprecedented wildfires.

The self-described grassroots organization called for unity and action from community members and politicians to address problems plaguing Sonoma County, such as lack of affordable housing, good jobs, living wages, environmental sustainability and equality across language divides.
Local city councilmembers and representatives of Congressmen Mike Thompson and Jared Huffman joined more than a hundred other attendees in Santa Rosa’s Christ Church United Methodist multipurpose room, where chairs were added to accommodate the crowd.

In their mission statement, the Alliance for a Just Recovery (AJR) demanded Santa Rosa take immediate action to address income inequality by adopting rent control and implementing the state-mandated $15 minimum wage three years earlier than required. It also proposed penalizing construction contractors for exploiting immigrant labor and establishing a worker’s rights clinic to protect disenfranchised workers.

Marty Bennett, co-chair for North Bay Jobs with Justice and spokesperson for AJR, said the fires, which destroyed 5 percent of Santa Rosa’s housing stock, also caused a 36 percent increase in rents.

“Our Alliance for a Just Recovery is fundamentally about building a multiracial, democratic, grassroots movement for a just, equitable and sustainable recovery,” Bennett said. “Only through building a people-powered movement and a coalition from the bottom up can we address the root causes of inequality, the housing and homeless crisis, racial and gender discrimination, exploitation of immigrant labor, the climate crisis and the increased threat of more devastating wildfires.”

Sonoma County was already fraught with income inequality and skyrocketing rents when last year’s North Bay wildfires killed 42 and turned the region on its head. The loss of 5,550 homes across the North Bay exacerbated the already unstable housing market, which, according to a report by the Sonoma County League of Women Voters, posted a 1.5 percent vacancy rate pre-fire, a .5 percent vacancy rate post-fire and a lack of affordable housing.

According to the AJR, median-income families cannot afford to purchase median-priced homes; 44 percent of Sonoma County’s Latino families and 35 percent of total families are “working poor,” making less than $50,000 each year.

“We can start here in Santa Rosa to build a movement for a just recovery during the 2018 election cycle,” Bennett said.

Fire victims gave testimonials of their plight, some accompanied by translators; Spanish-speaking attendees received translations of English speakers through portable headsets.

Ofelia Alcala, housekeeper of 28 years at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Santa Rosa, spoke through a translator about the plight of Spanish-speaking workers in the hospitality industry. She said she recently attempted to unionize Hyatt employees, but the company refused to negotiate.

“My daughter has a dream,” Alcala said. “Her dream is to be able to go to Sonoma State University. I want to make sure that I’m able to help her achieve her dream, but I make so little wages that I don’t think I’ll be able to help her.”

A representative from the Graton Day Labor Center, which created the donation-based UndocuFund last fall to provide financial relief for undocumented residents not entitled to public assistance, said the undocumented still fall prey to wage theft and exploitative, illegal housing arrangements.

Laura Neish, executive director of the environmental advocacy group 350 Bay Area, said the wildfires were caused by climate change and underscored the need for sustainable policies in the recovery.

“The fires in Santa Rosa and the North Bay brought climate change right to our doorsteps,” Neish said. “Climate change has left its fingerprints all over these disasters. We must address these root causes now.”

Other speakers decried the insufficient insurance payouts for low- to moderate-income homeowners trying to rebuild and the increasing rents driving many Sonoma County citizens, including retired seniors, out of the region.