Antioch Receives 5 Homeless Trailers, Possibly to be Located on Fitzuren Road

On Saturday, the City of Antioch received its five FEMA trailers from the State of California to help assist in its efforts to reduce homelessness in the city. The city was selected to received five of the 100 trailers available.

In his State Budget proposal, Governor Newsom formally announced more than $1 billion in homeless response funding, including $750 million for this new Access to Housing and Services Fund, and a major new investment to reform Medi-Cal so that health providers transform health care to deliver integrated physical and behavioral health.

Last year, the Governor signed 13 bills into law to help confront the homelessness crisis and others to fuel new housing development.

Antioch City Manager Ron Bernal confirmed Saturday that it could take up to two months for the trailers to be placed at a site located on Fitzuren Road between Skipolini’s Pizza and the car wash. Between 6-to-10 people could fit in each trailer. The item would go before the planning commission and then the city council.

“What is happening today is we are receiving five trailers from the state that the governor’s office has given cities for the purpose of emergency housing for homeless. The city is looking at locations for placing these trailers,” said Bernal. “One of the locations under consideration is a property on Fitzuren Road and its in the process of being transferred from the county to the city.”

Bernal pointed out the final location will be up to the City Council, but currently the Fitzuren location made the most financial sense and at this time no other properties were under consideration.

Fitzuren has many reasons why it was selected according to Bernal.

“The ability to quickly get it ready to receive the trailers is the primary reason we’re looking at it. It has electricity there; it has access to water and sewer close by. It has gravel that’s already down in the parking lot,” explained Bernal.  “Economically, it makes the most sense but it’s a process that has to go through the city council.”

Antioch Mayor Sean Wright thanked the Governor for the trailers.

“We thank Governor Gavin Newsom for trying to help us solve the homeless population in the City of Antioch and the five trailers are just a start,” said Wright. “We are pushing towards a care center that is $6.8 million that has been set aside to build it. Again, this is just a start to hold us over until the care center is built.”

Antioch City Councilmember Lamar Thorpe, who served on the ad-hoc committee on homelessness, highlighted receiving the trailers was an important milestone.

“Seeing them is an important milestone because we’ve set aside over a half-million dollars in homeless services. So having this opportunity from the Governors office is important because it will serve as an important test pilot,” explained Thorpe. “Whatever we learn from this experience is hopefully we will be able to utilize the funding we have set aside to model it. I think it will work and I am hopefully, but we still have to use this as an opportunity to learn.”

He further highlighted how this was only a single item on a list of things they are working to achieve.

“What we don’t want to lose focus on is that our initial mission for the homeless encampment task force was to focus on encampments because we didn’t want to do everything under the sun because it is an undertaking well beyond our capacity as a city,” said Thorpe. “This is new to us and going outside our scope we have got to do it right but while there are a lot of things we want to focus on like showers, port-a-potties, now those are all public health concerns we are trying to deal with now. But the overall objective is to try an eliminate as many encampments that we have on our streets to ensure that everybody’s quality of life is being taken into consideration.”

When asked what his proudest moment in this process was, Thorpe explained it was getting beyond his own narrow-minded understanding of what homelessness was.

“Being able to broaden my understanding and being able to take that to my colleagues (Joy and I) and have them embrace some of the things we learned and really put our leadership to test,” explained Thorpe. “

Thorpe further highlighted that regardless of the communities opinion on homelessness, they are impacted because of the amount of police calls, fire department calls, businesses are impacted saying those impact tax dollars while broken sprinklers in businesses so people can take showers were an astronomical cost to local businesses. Even people waiting for a bus can be impacted through sight and smells.

“There is a cost to everybody, we are being impacted regardless,” says Thorpe. “Our efforts are to eliminate those impacts. There will be people who have a very narrow minded scope of understanding about homelessness, I understand that, but we are trying to eliminate those impacts and people disagree and that is fine.”

He added there are two sides, people who come at it from a “very compassionate” side and those that come at it from a “tough on crime” perspective and they tried to work on a solution in the middle.

“I am not interested in those ideologies, we saw public health concerns that were raised that raised our awareness and sought out to address those issues and not get caught up in politics of what people believe,” said Thorpe. “The reality is that everyone is being impacted by this whether they want to acknowledge it or not, or turn a blind eye and say it doesn’t impact me, it impacts you because it impacts your pocketbook because we’re wasting money on things that we shouldn’t be wasting money on.”

Thorpe also added that the solutions offered were not based on compassion or being tough on the homeless, but rather for public health related reasons and they addressed those issues.

Councilwoman Lori Ogorchock said Saturday that she is hopeful this program will work and get people off the streets and become the first step in temporary housing.

“I see individuals coming off the streets, maybe families who are living in cars. The opportunity to place them in temporary housing until housing becomes available for them. Maybe seniors that are now the number one homeless population,” said Ogorchock. “This is an opportunity for individuals to get off the street and to have somewhat of a normal life,”

The item will go before the City Council in the coming month or two to finalize the location of where the five trailers will be placed. It is also unclear who the city plans to allow to be housed in these trailers or what the application process will be or what qualifications will be used.

The trailers come after the Antioch City Council in January approved hiring an “unhoused resident” consultant for $73,000.

Focus Strategies will assist the City of Antioch to identity and help the City implement strategies that provide immediate and long-term solutions to those experiencing homelessness. The contract is set to end by July 28, 2020.

According to the council discussion and direction, Focus Strategies would be used as a consultant to help craft a new Request for Proposal to assist the city in hiring an Unhouse Resident Coordinator position which the mayor called “worker bees”.

In total, the city of Antioch has allocated $517k towards its homeless services account, plus another $100k on their yet to be hired unhoused resident coordinator position for a total of $617k after utilizing one-time monies.