Even before the pandemic, some large homeless shelters in and around San Francisco were not cutting it.
The dormlike settings offered no privacy, no room for possessions and no place for pets — “the three Ps,” said Charles F. Bloszies, an architect and engineer whose namesake firm worked on the Embarcadero Navigation Center in San Francisco and other congregate facilities in Northern California.
Another drawback was that essential services were often located elsewhere, so that someone who did spend a night in a shelter often had to take a bus or subway to a clinic or government office and might decide not to complete the trip, instead falling back into life on the street.
The upshot was that many people in need stayed away or would not stick around long enough to get their lives back on track.
“We had more homeless on our streets than in our shelters,” said Mike Callagy, the executive of San Mateo County, an affluent area south of San Francisco.
Then the pandemic made living with strangers in congregate settings even more problematic.
So San Mateo and three other Silicon Valley localities are trying a different approach. Working with LifeMoves, a nonprofit service provider, and using a concept conceived by the Office of Charles F. Bloszies, they are building tidy campuses with modules containing individual sleeping units so that each person has their own tiny room — with a door that locks.
These modules are arrayed around conventionally constructed buildings that provide medical care, meals and case management, so there are services on hand to help people recover from setbacks, get whatever treatment they may need, and find employment and permanent housing. Canopies stretched between structures offer shady areas for mingling outdoors. Each campus has storage for possessions, a recreation area and even a dog run.
And because the modules can be cranked out in a factory while the site is readied, these compounds can be built faster than if traditional construction were used. Although they are more expensive to build than bare-bones congregate shelters, early data suggests that the outcomes for their occupants are better.
“When folks are successful, it’s sticky — they’re able to maintain the permanent housing outcome for at least 12 months,” said Paul Simpson, the chief financial officer of LifeMoves, which operates a variety of facilities for the homeless in Silicon Valley and cites data from one of its modular campuses showing that last year, 94 percent of families that moved on to permanent housing remained there and 87 percent of singles and couples did. “We believe we’re on the right track in finding ways to crack the cycle of homelessness rather than just a temporary reprieve.”
A record 653,100 Americans were homeless in January 2023, with California having the highest unsheltered population of any state. The issue has recently come to a head in the state after a Supreme Court ruling that has given government more latitude to clear homeless encampments.
The ruling has paved the way for the removal of encampments by Gov. Gavin Newsom and some local leaders, including Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, while other leaders and advocates for the homeless have pushed back against the more aggressive approach.
In California and elsewhere, the proliferation of people who lack a place to live — often triggered or worsened by the acute shortage of affordable housing — has prompted experiments with housing types from tiny homes and backyard sheds, to repurposed hotels and motels.
But people often need more than a roof over their head to regain their footing. They may require mental health care, counseling for addiction or help securing benefits. The modules-in-a-campus model is one form of interim supportive housing for these populations — “a new tool in the tool kit,” Mr. Simpson said.
And it is a particularly flexible one. The modules, most of which measure 10 by 40 feet, can be divided into sleeping units or outfitted as bathroom and shower facilities. Or they can simply provide storage for belongings that do not fit in the sleeping units. And they can be stacked and arrayed in multiple ways, which means they work on sites of varying shapes and sizes.
The first city to employ Mr. Bloszies’s modular model, which he calls Step(1) — as in first step off the streets — was Mountain View in Santa Clara County. Construction began in 2020, and the campus now offers accommodations for 112 people on the one-acre site of a former vehicle maintenance yard.
Most of the modules at Mountain View are divided into four, 100-square-foot sleeping units for individuals who use shared toilets and showers. Six modules have two larger units with en suite bathrooms; these are designed for families. The campus, which cost $17.7 million, including land, was built in six months, opening in 2021.
By the time the San Mateo County Navigation Center got underway the same year, on a 2½-acre county-owned site in Redwood City, Mr. Bloszies’s team had figured out how to stack the modules and zip them together to form what resemble clean-lined, Modernist low-rise apartment buildings. The complex, which took a little over a year to complete, has 240 units — 72 for individuals and couples with shared baths and 168 with en suite bathrooms.
“If we’re going to attract people off the street we wanted to give a dignified way to live,” Mr. Callagy said.
The complex cost about $57 million, including $46 million in funding from the state’s Homekey program, which provides funds to increase housing for the homeless, and $5 million from John A. Sobrato, a local real estate developer and philanthropist who visited the Mountain View campus and decided to donate to subsequent projects.
In the works now is a 204-unit compound that is replacing a tent encampment in a suburban neighborhood of San Jose. It is expected to open this year with modules that are 12 by 40 feet, large enough to contain kitchenettes and bathrooms. A project in nearby Palo Alto, scheduled to open next year on the edge of an industrial area, will have 88 modules, all with bathrooms.
Whether more such campuses will follow may depend on funding from the state, which has channeled about $24 billion into homelessness since Mr. Newsom took office in 2019 but has been experiencing budget difficulties. Then, too, there has been criticism of the way the Mountain View campus operates and concerns that it has not been as successful as other interim shelters in Santa Clara County at placing residents in permanent housing.
Sarah Fields, the director of community engagement and public affairs at LifeMoves, said the facility had an exit rate to permanent housing of 38 percent for singles and couples and 50 percent for families from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024, in line with or better than other nonprofit emergency shelters in Santa Clara County.
The installations of the modules have not been without hiccups, either.
The modules are mostly made of wood with a steel carriage that allows them to be picked up and transported; the interiors are lined with Sheetrock. But modules that were delivered to the San Jose site before it was ready sat there during a particularly rainy period, and the Sheetrock got wet and had to be ripped out and replaced.
Still, proponents stress the positives. The modules can be clad in a variety of materials so they fit in with their surroundings, and they are sturdy enough to be disassembled, relocated and reused, Mr. Bloszies said.
Each sleeping unit has built-in shelving, a heater and an air-conditioner, plus furnishings that have evolved over time.
At Mountain View, each unit included a bed, desk and desk chair. But not everyone wanted or needed a desk, LifeMoves learned. More recent projects have multipurpose tables and sectional seating.
The San Mateo County Navigation Center recently added an on-site dental clinic. The center’s commercial kitchen now trains residents for restaurant jobs.
Just having one’s own room is a big advancement, said Brandi Andino, an administrative assistant for LifeMoves, who for a time lived in a congregate shelter in a former jail near San Mateo’s new complex.
She shared one of six bunk beds in a room for 12 women, and although she has sleep apnea, she was not always able to plug in her CPAP machine because there were not enough electrical outlets. And she said the setting was not secure, which meant she had to lug her belongings everywhere — a challenge when she enrolled in college and had to borrow a computer to do homework.
The jail turned shelter was recently demolished. And Ms. Andino has her own apartment in San Jose now.
“We all take for granted the ability to close and lock a door and be safe inside,” she said. “But a lot of these clients haven’t had that in a long time.”
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