CAMPBELL — California has reached its goal of securing more than 15,000 hotel rooms to get sick and vulnerable homeless residents off the streets and out of shelters, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Saturday, but filling those rooms with people is proving to be much slower.
The state has moved 4,211 homeless people into temporary hotel and motel rooms, Newsom said, filling about 38 percent of the nearly 11,000 rooms California had leased.
Standing with local officials outside a Motel 6 in Campbell, Newsom said Saturday that the state had reached an agreement with that lodging giant to lease another 5,025 rooms at locations in 19 counties, pushing past the 15,000-room goal he had set for the initiative known as Project Roomkey when it launched earlier this month.
Newsom said state officials are also looking into ways they can help city and county governments buy the hotels and motels they are now leasing to create permanent housing for the homeless after the coronavirus subsides. Details for doing so were scarce, though, as Newsom said funding would probably have to come from a mix of local, state, federal and private philanthropic sources.
The immediate goal, however, is for the thousands of hotel beds being leased across California to house homeless people who have tested positive for coronavirus or were exposed to people infected with the virus as well as those who are unhoused and are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 because they are elderly or have certain medical conditions.
But only a fraction of hotel rooms procured for emergency shelter in the Bay Area have been filled, even as service providers seek places to house vulnerable people and clusters of the virus have emerged in homeless shelters.
“We announced this two weeks ago, so respectfully I think this is a rather heroic effort in terms of being able to organize and mobilize and move forward,” Newsom said when asked about the pace of moving people into rooms.
Some cities have sought to block the emergency shelters, Newsom added, and even those that welcome the idea face challenges because the effort requires work between local, state and federal governments.
“The process is not overnight,” Newsom said. “There are a few layers here, and in each and every case there are complexities and nuances that need to be worked through.”
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