SLO homeless shelter is changing the way it houses clients. How will new approach work?
San Luis Obispo County’s largest homeless shelter is trying a new approach to helping its clients find housing.
After five years of operating as an overnight shelter that features services during the day, 40 Prado Homeless Services Center will adopt a transitional housing model for its clients that increases focus on connection to housing, with stays limited to 90 days, Community Action Partnership of San Luis Obispo County homeless program manager Cecil Hale told The Tribune.
CAPSLO has operated 40 Prado since it opened, using a lottery system to determine who got a bed at the shelter each night, Hale said.
Under the so-called “housing-focused shelter” system, clients will have beds at 40 Prado for a total of 90 days so they can “focus on securing permanent housing, working on their recovery, finding income and getting their documents ready to be housed,” he explained.
“To start, we’re going to grandfather in participants that are already currently working with case managers or are medically vulnerable and meet our priority system as it stands,” Hale said.
According to Hale, similar 90-day transitional housing programs have been implemented across the country in recent years, including at El Camino Homeless Organization’s shelter in Atascadero and 5Cities Homeless Coalition’s Cabins for Change program in Grover Beach.
Here’s how 40 Prado’s new system will work — and why CAPSLO felt it was time to make a change.
Why is SLO homeless shelter moving to a new system?
Under the current system, everyone who doesn’t make the shelter’s list of priority clients — including seniors, medically fragile people, families and people actively working with case managers — put their names into a lottery each evening to see if they are allowed to stay the night, according to Jack Lahey, CAPSLO’s director of homeless services.
40 Prado also gets new clients via referrals from CAPSLO’s partners, further filling the lottery pool and reducing individuals’ chances of being selected.
In preparation for its new program, Lahey said, 40 Prado analyzed the stays of existing clients.
On average, a client stays at 40 Prado for 60 days, he said.
At the end of that time, the person is either matched with housing or considered “self resolving” — meaning they secured housing on their own, reunited with family who can house them or returned to the street.
The rollout of the new system may take some time, Lahey said.
“We’re in an implementation period. We didn’t flip a light switch and say, ‘Okay, now we’re all in a 90-day system,’ ” Lahey said. “We’re allowing ourselves 60 days to, for lack of a better term, socialize the idea with current participants.”
Slowly changing the status of shelter beds from being open each night to being dedicated to 90-day stays has the added benefit of staggering the availability of said beds, Lahey said.
“We don’t want to have a moment where every three months, all the beds go up for grabs,” Lahey said. “It’s probably going to be a few beds every week turning over.”
Once the program is running, eight of 40 Prado’s beds will continue to serve as emergency shelter beds that CAPSLO’s outreach team can fill, or as overflow for 40 Prado’s recuperative care program, Lahey said.
The recuperative care program shelters and cares for homeless individuals who have been recently discharged from hospitals, who would otherwise have to recover on the street.
The housing-focused shelter program will consist of 87 individual and 28 family beds, he said.
What will stays at 40 Prado look like?
Hale said he pushed for a new approach to the shelter’s housing model from the start of his tenure working at the shelter.
“To watch staff struggle with the lottery (and) sending people away, and to see participants that had a bed the night before have to pack their stuff up and go back to the streets was really hard for me, and for my staff,” Hale said. “Very early on, I asked (Lahey) if we could think of some another way of securing beds to help people move forward.”
Hale said the new model brings 40 Prado in line with Housing First policies, which many homeless service providers use to quickly place homeless individuals into housing.
Having a secure place to sleep every night ensures clients have more time and energy to dedicate to working with 40 Prado’s case managers, Hale said.
Though the new beds will be available for 90-day periods, some 30-day extensions will be given for clients who were unable to meet with a housing navigator, and for individuals who need slightly more time to finish their housing search, Lahey said.
During stays in the housing focused shelter program, participants will develop a housing plan, working with a housing navigator and homeless service worker, who will act as the participant’s “point person” for moving toward housing, Hale said.
While not focusing on their housing search, the participants will be able to stay at the shelter full-time, and will participate in “chore elections” to tailor duties and schedules to a participant’s availability, Lahey said.
If a client is unable to find housing within their 90-day stay but is working with a case manager, CAPSLO and 40 Prado workers will offer a 30-day extension, Lahey said. If a client disengages from case management during an extended stay, the bed will no longer be reserved, he said.
After that extension, if a client is still unable to find housing, Prado will not hold a bed for them anymore, but will still work with them through its outreach team to set “realistic and attainable” goals, Lahey said.
What’s next for 90-day program?
Lahey said he thinks the housing-focused shelter program could make 40 Prado more efficient by utilizing its resources better.
Currently, the shelter has four vacancies at its housing navigator position, while employing a full-time housing navigator and one part-time navigator, Lahey said.
As a result, some clients at the shelter have experienced waits up to three months before they’re connected with housing resources, with 68 people currently on the shelter’s case management referral list, Lahey said.
‘’We’ve been pushing up the caseload limit of the navigators as we can, but it’s it’s hard,” Lahey said. “When we first started tracking it in August of last year, the average time in housing navigation was 248 days, meaning you got (your case) opened by a case manager, and then you got housed. Now, our average time is 161 days, which is still not great, but we’ve really improved it.”
The shelter accomplished that reduction in time by narrowing the definition of what case managers are supposed to do, Lahey said.
While case managers will still help clients with “almost anything,” from tracking down missing documentation to making referrals to other service providers, connecting clients to housing is now the core goal, he said.
As 40 Prado transitions to the new housing-focused shelter program, the shelter will reinstate its pre-COVID-19 practice of hosting monthly town hall meetings with clients to inform them of the change and get feedback, Lahey said.
40 Prado will then form a participant advisory committee to “restart conversation” with people who use the shelter’s services, Lahey said.
Lahey said 40 Prado will also host quarterly meetings with its community partners such as Community Health Centers/Services of the Central Coast and the People’s Kitchen of San Luis Obispo to provide regular updates.
Lahey said he expects the program to successfully place people into housing despite SLO County’s notoriously tight and expensive housing market.
While it’s easy to say there is no available housing, “It’s not really a helpful point in the conversation of how we resolve homelessness,” Lahey said. “If we weren’t housing anybody, and there wasn’t any housing, we might as well close.”
This story was originally published July 15, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
