Staff members from Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee’s office were in Texas this week, joining a delegation of Bay Area officials visiting homeless shelters in San Antonio and Austin.
The trip was organized by the Bay Area Council, a business advocacy organization, and Beyond Homelessness, a project of the Oakland-based Independent Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
On Monday, the trip began at Haven for Hope, a San Antonio program serving about 1,600 unhoused residents on a 22-acre “campus” that has living spaces with beds and mats, and a wealth of legal, medical, childcare, housing, and substance treatment services on site. About 80 nonprofits are involved in running the campus, according to the trip organizers.
Participants then met with officials from San Antonio and Bexar counties to learn about how they coordinate large-scale programs like Haven for Hope.
On Tuesday, the delegation traveled to Austin to Community First! Village, a homelessness program run by a Christian organization. The program is also structured as a “neighborhood” or campus where tiny homes housing about 500 people are spread across a 50-acre property. In the afternoon, the Bay Area group met with housing policy professionals to discuss Austin’s recent building boom.
Lee was originally scheduled to go on the trip. Three other local representatives planned to go on the trip but dropped out. Councilmember Carroll Fife went instead to a conference in Rome on housing, labor, and land issues, her office told us. Council President Kevin Jenkins was also originally on the roster. He said he didn’t go because he had to run the City Council meeting on Tuesday. Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas was also slated to attend. She told us she didn’t end up going, but didn’t respond to a question about why.
Other attendees on the Texas trip included South Bay officials and state senators.
While the Bay Area Council and Beyond Homelessness set the itinerary, participants paid for their own travel, according to the organizations. Lee’s staffers’ trips were covered by the mayor’s office budget, her spokesperson said.
Organizers hope Bay Area leaders can replicate pieces of the campus model and the idea of collaborating among cities, counties, and service providers on larger homelessness programs.
“I could imagine a future where the Bay Area has a number of these sites that are jointly funded,” said Adrian Covert, who leads public policy at the Bay Area Council and helped plan the Texas trip. “The vision is to have a one-stop shop for the metro region, where homeless individuals’ needs can be assessed, they can graduate through the facility as they recover, then ultimately, ideally return to the housing market and become independent.”
A large central site is a “cost-effective way of scaling up services,” Covert said.
The Bay Area is not Austin or San Antonio, though. Land is more expensive and scarcer, and cities like Oakland and San Francisco have far higher rates of homelessness than their Texan counterparts.
Michael Seiler, an executive at Beyond Homelessness, said local leaders can still apply lessons from the trip here, creating “hubs” that connect existing, disparate services and housing. Some of the trip participants are already exploring potential sites for campus-like programs, he said.
Some Oakland officials have considered large-scale shelters in the past. Councilmember Carroll Fife has pushed for a tiny-home site serving up to 1,000 on the old Oakland Army Base. The city administrator at the time opposed the idea, citing legal constraints and pollution in the soil making the area unfit for habitation.
The Wood Street Commons, a group of homeless and formerly homeless people in West Oakland, has also been working with architect Michael Pyatok on plans for an elaborate affordable housing community they’d like to see established. Another former Wood Street unhoused resident, Mavin Carter Griffin, has long had a vision for a self-governed site there she also calls a “campus.”
One of the organizations behind the trip, Beyond Homelessness, has promoted an approach to the crisis that generally does not align with some practices embraced by local governments.
The blurb for the organization’s book, also called “Beyond Homelessness,” proclaims that the “Housing First” model “fails” and that permanent supportive housing “isn’t just ineffective but dangerous.” The group also shares several opinion pieces and blogs on its website, criticizing Housing First, harm reduction, rent control, and other progressive housing policies.
Housing First, while defined differently at times, is generally the idea that governments should prioritize moving people into permanent housing, instead of waiting to address addiction and other challenges or moving people through a series of temporary locations first. Proponents point to a large body of research showing that simply having housing can result in a range of positive health and financial outcomes, and they say this path can be less expensive than cycling people through shelters, jails, and hospitals.
Oakland and Alameda County have emphasized funding permanent supportive housing, including through the state’s Homekey program, which is credited with housing tens of thousands of people since it launched in 2020. Oakland has been awarded funding to create 11 housing sites through Homekey.
Asked about this, Lee spokesperson Justin Phillips said, “The mayor is committed to the housing first principles.”
At the same time, cities and counties, including Oakland and Alameda, fund plenty of short-term and transitional housing sites too. As the homelessness crisis has exploded over the past decade, there’s been a push to rapidly open more of these interim housing sites, quickly getting people away from the hazards of the streets instead of waiting months or years to build expensive permanent housing.
Despite the strongly worded materials from the organization, Beyond Homelessness’ Seiler said the Texas trip revealed a need to end the “pendulum swing” between permanent and interim housing, instead embracing more of “all of the above.” After all, he pointed out, people need some place to go once they exit interim sites.
Covert from the Bay Area Council said his organization’s stance is that some people need permanent support after they leave a shelter, while others just need help getting back on their feet and then can enter the private housing market.
After the trip, organizers said they plan to reconvene participants to discuss regional approaches, collectively applying for grant funding, and seeking out philanthropy and wealthy donors to support their efforts.
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