Thousand Oaks gets $5.8M state grant for planned homeless shelter
Thousand Oaks took a step toward opening its first homeless shelter when it won a competitive state grant of $5.8 million last week.
On Wednesday, the California Interagency Council on Homelessness announced $38 million in funding to seven cities and counties to support shelters and other programs for homeless people. It was the last allocation of $300 million set aside for the 2022-23 fiscal year in the state's “Encampments Resolution Fund,” meant to help local governments move people from tent cities and other encampments into indoor shelter.
Thousand Oaks' $5.8 million share will help fund the development and operations of a homeless services center and a cluster of 30 tiny homes for as many as 44 residents. The Thousand Oaks City Council has chosen a city-owned vacant lot in Newbury Park for the shelter and "navigation center" and picked the nonprofit Many Mansions to build it.
Alexandra South, a spokesperson for the city of Thousand Oaks, said the shelter and navigation center should go through its final city approvals in the fall and will open sometime in 2024. The Ventura County Board of Supervisors has agreed to match the city's funding to run the center once it's open, for a total operating budget of around $835,000 per year.
Thousand Oaks has never had a year-round homeless shelter before. It's following the lead of Ventura, Oxnard and Santa Paula, which in recent years have opened their first year-round shelters, contributing to the county as a whole doubling its available beds for emergency shelter since 2019.
All of the new shelters are run by nonprofits and funded by both a split of county and city money. They also follow what is known as a "housing first" model, where the priority is to get people off the streets, and then connect them with services and an avenue toward permanent housing.
"The core belief is, once you get people safe and stably housed then they're able to enter the care system, whether that’s addiction treatment, mental health services or whatever they need," South said. "You're helping to guide people to success to a place they can live independently."
The state Encampments Resolution Fund will award a total of $700 million over two years, focused on communities where significant numbers of people live in tents along highways and other public property.
In Thousand Oaks, Caltrans and local police have cleared several encampments in recent years along Highway 23 and other public areas, South said.
When that happens, the city tries to connect everyone living in those locations with shelter and other services, but it's not easy, she said. Some refuse any help, and others don't want to leave Thousand Oaks for shelters in other cities.
"We'd rather keep them in the community, but that just isn't where the system is right now," South said.
The most recent count of homeless people in Ventura County, conducted in January, found 128 people living without shelter in Thousand Oaks. There were no sheltered homeless people in the city, as it does not have any shelter beds. Countywide, there were 2,441 people without permanent, adequate housing, about two-thirds of them without any shelter.
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Thousand Oaks' planned homeless shelter gets $5.8M state grant
