New housing administrator has history of work with homeless
The issues of affordable housing and homelessness go hand in hand.
At least that’s how Stephen Sotomayor, Healdsburg’s new housing administrator, explains it.
Sotomayor has worked extensively in California on both issues, and is acclimating himself to the specific needs of the city.
After leaving the U.S. Army at the rank of captain, he worked in Fresno and in Los Angeles on housing and homelessness in a variety of ways.
While in Fresno, he worked in the private sector during the boom immediately preceding the bust of the Great Recession in 2009. While there, he said the company began seeing the writing on the wall for what was to come, and he couldn’t stand selling houses to those he knew wouldn’t be able to afford them in a couple years.
“It wasn’t who I was,” he said.
So he moved onto the public sector.
In LA, he worked to help homeless veterans find housing.
“Being a veteran, that meant a lot to me,” he said.
That effort went well, housing many veterans in a week or less after he began working with them. He recounted meeting one homeless veteran in the city streets while going to a concert. After reaching out, he said it was only days until the man had a roof over his head.
He also worked with both the county and city to come up with an engagement protocol for police and deputies to follow when contacting homeless residents.
“We trained the county and the city in LA. That’s around 20,000 officers,” he said.
He said that the work helped illustrate how education can help ease tensions between the two groups. Police encounters with the homeless are frequent, he said, and without a guide for these interactions, frustration can take hold. Addressing homelessness as a problem and not a crime also keeps jails from being used as housing and issuing fines that are unaffordable.
Now that he’s here, he said he wants to use the county and city’s first-responders as a contact point for people to navigate to solutions for their needs. That is, a homeless man who comes into contact with a deputy on unincorporated land can learn about the nearest shelter in the city, as opposed to being told to move along. Sotomayor said he wants there to be no “wrong way” to begin down the road to finding help.
Sotomayor also has experience going over legislation on these issues, having poured over city codes in Fresno and LA. He said he wanted to make sure that Healdsburg’s legislative goals were able to be met while making sure homelessness isn’t criminalized.
“Sleeping shouldn’t be against the law,” he said, but people with no place to go are often faced with ordinances that make it seem that way.
As with any job, money is a central problem. Deciding what programs to fund to ease homelessness and housing costs is a difficult matter, but Sotomayor said there is precedent for certain programs that show what more practical options are. He said one of his goals is to increase affordable housing as a preventative measure against homelessness, as many people are one missed paycheck from being without a roof.
He’d like to see a healthy mix of market-valued and affordable housing, and said this overall view paints a better picture of the health of a community.
Finding what works for Healdsburg will take a lot of listening, he said. He already has meetings with community members to gather their input. He will also be part of the homeless count this year, and hopes to meet with homeless residents to get solutions from them.
No matter the answers, Sotomayor said it is important to keep things local. Local money has fewer restrictions on it, and municipalities shouldn’t have to worry about federal or state grant money still being available for services it will need. This local-first thinking isn’t just about local taxes, he said, it’s about private efforts that the city can work with, such as Reach for Home.
It all starts with the will to do something about it. Upon beginning his new position, he said he was happy to see that willpower shows not only in city council but residents in general.
He said permanent housing is something that can happen for everyone, even if it sometimes feels like pushing a boulder uphill.
“I don’t think anything’s impossible,” he said of solving homelessness.
