Alma stared at her phone, rattled. She had just received a text from her case manager on Sept. 30 that she’d been evicted from the Sunnyvale homeless shelter while on the way back from work. With nowhere to go, she reverted to sleeping underneath the stairwell of a school.
That week, temperatures reached a scorching 100 degrees, as some Bay Area cities logged the hottest 7-day heat wave in recorded history. While she was walking around Sunnyvale, Alma, who didn’t want to provide her last name for safety reasons, became severely dehydrated. Her feet swelled and she became confused. She ended up in the hospital where nurses hooked her onto breathing tubes, according to photos seen by San José Spotlight.
“They really did me really bad,” Alma, 60, told San José Spotlight, referring to the Bill Wilson Center that manages the homeless shelter. “We walk in there broken and then they just finished breaking us. What dignity we had, they took it from us.”
No transition plan
Alma is one of dozens of individuals who have been exited from the shelter, after Santa Clara County switched homeless service providers from HomeFirst to Bill Wilson Center on July 1. The county not only changed providers, but switched service models by converting it from serving individuals to a family shelter, leaving numerous people — including older adults — without a suitable transition plan.
The problem began when HomeFirst, which ran the shelter for years, decided to pull out following allegations of racism and concerns that it was not providing adequate services — despite county officials getting ready to award it a new contract. The county faced an imminent problem of shutting down the shelter if couldn’t find another provider of similar services by June 30.
Santa Clara County Office of Supportive Housing representatives claimed there was no other interested provider who could take on the operations. But it didn’t do its due diligence.
At a Board of Supervisors meeting in May, supportive housing officials said the Bill Wilson Center was the only qualified provider that expressed interest, with the condition it could convert the model to a family shelter.
“I was really hoping that the operation for single individuals could be continued,” County Supervisor Otto Lee, whose district covers the shelter, told San José Spotlight. “But by the time the vote came to us, we weren’t really given an option. We were told that if we do not vote as recommended, having Bill Wilson running it, then this whole shelter would have to close starting July 1.”
There was another option, but county officials never presented it to the board of supervisors for consideration, causing single and older adults at the shelter to be displaced or end up back on the streets.
Sunnyvale shelter residents and advocates said the lives of these individuals wouldn’t have been disrupted had the contract been awarded to WeHope.
When Pastor Paul Bains, founder of WeHope, learned that HomeFirst rescinded its application to continue operating the shelter, he reached out to the office of supportive housing. The county wasn’t convinced WeHope could handle the capacity “without creating risk of harm to clients, the community, and the county’s work to address homelessness,” according to a county document.
County staff also outlined concerns that WeHope wouldn’t be able to handle a $5 million contract, which was more than 50% of its total expenditures in 2022. However, officials neglected to dig deeper. Bains said the nonprofit has rapidly expanded and now operates on an annual budget of about $14 million.
“We have multimillion-dollar contracts with both San Francisco and San Mateo counties,” Bains told San José Spotlight. “We didn’t meet (Santa Clara County’s) expectations on the capacity. We clearly disagree because we run larger shelters than that.”
WeHope runs three shelters in the Bay Area: A 100-bed shelter in San Francisco, a 50-bed shelter in Half Moon Bay and a 73-bed shelter in East Palo Alto, which is being expanded to 113 beds — similar to Sunnyvale shelter, which has capacity for 145 beds. The nonprofit, founded 25 years ago, has worked with older adults with the greatest need.
“They felt we weren’t low-barrier enough, they felt we didn’t understand the population enough,” Bains said. “If you run a shelter in San Francisco, that’s the lowest barrier out of all of the Bay. We were wildly successful to the point where we helped other shelters do what we do.”
WeHope has moved 46 individuals into affordable housing in the four years it has operated the San Francisco shelter, Alicia Garcia, WeHope’s chief operating officer, said.
“We wouldn’t have been putting people out,” Garcia, WeHope’s chief operating officer, told San José Spotlight. “It would’ve been a completely different set of circumstances. Bill Wilson Center is faced with a specific challenge of transitioning people out in a short amount of time … that sets you up with complications, especially if you’re dealing with an elderly population.”
Wrong model
Santa Clara County’s decision to contract the Bill Wilson Center completely uprooted the existing longtime model. The Bill Wilson Center works primarily with LGBTQ+ youth, young adults and those in the foster system.
According to the transition plan outlined by the county, Bill Wilson Center was supposed to allow a number of homeless individuals to stay until a new Palo Alto modular tiny home site opens in February before it fully switched to a family shelter. But soon after it took over, residents were told they had to go.
More than 60 residents had their lives upended and were moved to tiny homes in Mountain View and shelters in San Jose and Gilroy. Some found permanent housing, others were moved into long-term care and treatment facilities, according the office of supportive housing. But others ended up on the streets.
Two weeks ago, an elderly lady with heart conditions was told she had to leave the shelter. With nowhere to go, she slept in the bushes until homeless advocates raised concerns. She was allowed back, but had to be hospitalized due to chest pains.
A Bill Wilson Center spokesperson told San José Spotlight all decisions on when residents should leave the shelter are at the “sole discretion of the county’s office of supportive housing” and that no one was getting kicked out by the nonprofit.
“The transition to a family shelter did not shorten anyone’s shelter stay,” a spokesperson for the office of supportive housing told San José Spotlight. “Everyone staying at the shelter on July 1, when the transition began, was offered their full 90-day length of stay at the shelter, including extensions of up to 210 days or more for those working on a housing plan.”
But that didn’t happen.
At the Aug. 13 board of supervisors meeting, Supervisor Lee directed the office of supportive housing to allow shelter residents longer stays and to forget the 90-day rule since there weren’t going to be any new intakes of single adults. Alma was not offered an extension despite working toward her housing plan.
“I’ve been saddened and disappointed in how this has been handled, particularly in light of so many of the issues, including a scabies outbreak at the shelter,” Lee said at the meeting. “There wasn’t an interim plan shared with the stakeholders on what will happen to the single adults looking for shelter basically in the northern part of our county. We’ve had clients falling out of the systems altogether and being forced to start the entire process again.”
A different beating
Alma entered the Sunnyvale shelter earlier this year after her abusive husband threatened to kill her. But she said the treatment she received at the shelter damaged her psyche to where she wished she could go back to her home, even if it meant enduring the beatings she had suffered for decades.
“I’m still getting beat down by the system,” Alma said. “I’ve gone through a lot of stuff, all I can do is keep going. We have to be strong all by ourselves, because the system fails us.”
After being pushed out of the shelter on Sept. 30, Alma reached out to WeHope. Within two weeks, her case manager got her a voucher for permanent supportive housing. The case manager also connected her to a nonprofit providing domestic violence support. At the Sunnyvale shelter, she said her case manager offered none of those resources.
“We’re all older people,” Alma said. “Two of the (Bill Wilson Center) staff members said they were not prepared to deal with people like (us).”
Sean, another former shelter resident, said he told his Bill Wilson Center case manager he needed help renewing his expired driver’s license so he could start working as a Lyft driver.
“They literally didn’t do anything for me,” Sean told San José Spotlight.
He didn’t return to the shelter for a few nights and was recently exited from the program. He’s now sleeping outside of the Sunnyvale Public Library, but says it’s more peaceful than being inside the shelter. A homeless advocate helped him get his license renewed.
Transition to family shelter
Last week, Bill Wilson Center brought its first family into the shelter. There are only about eight single adults left as the new model moves toward completion.
Partitions have been set up throughout the shelter to allow families to stay in pods. An office of supportive housing spokesperson said that some immediate renovations are happening on site, including improving the parking lot, making minor repairs to the windows and deep cleaning. Some medium-term renovations include repairing the plumbing infrastructure and redesigning the bathrooms to provide additional privacy.
“Hopefully they fixed the bathroom, hopefully there are hot showers now,” Alma said. “I can’t say that (sleeping outside) is better, but at least I have my freedom.”
Alma is now searching for apartments that will take her Section 8 project-based voucher.
“I’m overwhelmed at the steps (WeHope has) taken to help me,” Alma said. “I believe things are looking up.”
Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X, formerly known as Twitter.
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