Housing-Focused Responses to Unsheltered Homelessness: Spotlight on Monterey and San Benito Counties, CA

Salinas/Monterey and San Benito CoC’s Response to Homelessness During COVID-19 

The Continuum of Care received large increases in state and federal resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ways the CoC leveraged these resources offer useful lessons to policy makers and practitioners at all levels of government seeking solutions to unsheltered homelessness.

To respond to the COVID-19 emergency, policy makers in Salinas/Monterey counties:

• Trusted Key Partners: County and city agencies like Salinas’s Office of Homeless Services gave the Continuum of Care’s network of homeless service providers flexible but coordinated resources to support their clients. 
• Invested in Outreach: The CoC drastically increased their capacity to identify people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, especially in remote regions. 
• Resisted Harmful Policies: During the pandemic, jurisdictions like Monterey County did not evict encampments. They also did not arrest or fine people for not having a place to live. This made it easier for providers to connect with people in need.

With this cooperation from county and city policymakers, the CoC effectively used these additional resources to:

• Coordinate existing and new partnerships to expand street outreach services, especially across a larger street outreach program. These partnerships included organizations like hospitals, universities, businesses, and city services. 
• Convert hotels into accessible, non-congregate shelters through Project Roomkey. 
• Fund additional Rapid Re-Housing, Permanent Supportive Housing, and housing vouchers for unsheltered community members. They also initiated landlord incentive programs. Organizations that are a part of the CoC then distributed these vouchers and incentives in their communities. 
• Listen and respond to the needs of people who are experiencing homelessness. This includes reducing barriers to stability and expanding voluntary services like transportation, haircuts, and healthcare catered to the individual. 

Coordinating Street Outreach

The CoC covers a large, remote geography and has a high rate of unsheltered homelessness. To meet the needs of all their unsheltered community members, the CoC needed to coordinate to ensure that the influx of resources provided during the COVID-19 pandemic were reaching unhoused people in cities and in remote areas. This required working with the various cities, counties, and organizations that contribute to the work of ending homelessness. 

Spotlight on Salinas

Many people experiencing homelessness in the CoC live in the City of Salinas. In 2021, The Coalition created a partnership with the City that expanded their outreach capacity: previously, street outreach capacity was scarce, with just a few workers in the region.

Working with The Coalition, the City of Salinas’ Office of Homeless Services created a dedicated role for a city-funded street outreach coordinator. The coordinator built up the City’s street outreach program from four part-time workers to six full-time workers using COVID-19 relief funding from the federal government. This helped reduce each staff member’s workload and expand access to programs.

The CoC also funded additional street outreach teams outside of the Salinas Office of Homeless Services, and required these teams to attend coordination meetings twice each week. This helped workers abide by best practices, including those related to data-sharing. Prior to this coordination, providers were keeping data in silos, causing confusion and repetitive conversations with clients. The CoC worked with these outreach workers and the City’s coordinator to create a unified approach to inputting data into their Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). They also backlogged data that had previously not been entered due to a shortage of resources and capacity prior to the pandemic.

Both within the City of Salinas and in more remote areas throughout the CoC, The Coalition coordinated these outreach teams to create encampment maps and spreadsheets that matched unsheltered community members’ names with the location and appearance of their tent or shelter. The CoC used confidential systems in this process, and they trained staff to protect the individual’s identities and locations. The spreadsheets noted the person’s specific and/or immediate material and health needs so that new workers and workers on different shifts could provide continuous care without asking for redundant information. While workers also added the unsheltered community member’s information to HMIS, the spreadsheet served as a quick reference to keep track of who was living in the encampment and what their most immediate material and health needs were.

This coordination allowed outreach workers to plan accordingly and bring supplies or make referrals to meet these needs. Because of the CoC’s especially large size and remote geography, careful data tracking helped save time and resources by ensuring that providers traveling to unsheltered people were prepared to serve their specific needs. Most importantly, cutting down on the time and resources spent traveling to community members and identifying their needs expedited pathways into housing, shelter, and/or health services. Workers could spend more time delivering services that moved clients toward their long-term goals.

Creating Comprehensive Support for Outreach Providers Throughout the CoC

During the COVID-19 pandemic, additional funding from the state and federal government also helped numerous outreach organizations throughout the CoC compensate and support their workforce adequately, including through training opportunities. In practice, this meant that all outreach workers in the CoC were trained to assess people experiencing homelessness for Coordinated Entry. After being equipped with tablets and phones, staff received training on how to use this technology to accurately enter data into HMIS. By preparing staff with the skills to maintain unified, high-quality data, providers helped prevent poor recordkeeping from being the reason someone continued to sleep outside. 

CoC leaders also cultivated a partnership with California State University Monterey Bay’s Master of Social Work students, using increased emergency funds to train these students to conduct street outreach. Providers noted how these students have developed a strong reputation in the unhoused community for their commitment and knowledge of the homelessness response system. 

Increasing staff capacity in this way reduced full-time outreach workers’ caseloads, allowing them to provide more robust support to their clients. For example, outreach workers had the time and resources to drive people experiencing homelessness to critical appointments like doctors’ visits, social service programs, and job interviews. By accompanying their clients to appointments, outreach workers built trust while providing emotional support, guidance, and case management. With more staff, the CoC could also conduct outreach more frequently, including at night, when unhoused community members were most likely to have returned from work or appointments. This helped ensure that people received the resources, including shelter and housing, that they needed. Unfortunately, this partnership was paused near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. The CoC is hopeful that it may begin again in the future. 

Building Critical Partnerships

Lived Experience

Leaders from the CoC and City of Salinas said that people with lived experience of homelessness were key partners in street outreach during the pandemic and contributed to the CoC’s street outreach strategy. They also were embedded as street outreach workers. This built trust with unsheltered community members and helped to improve the CoC’s ability to identify those living in remote geographies.

Federal COVID-19 funding also made it easier for the CoC to support peer workers interested in becoming certified as community health workers through CalAIM, an initiative to improve California’s Medicaid program. Leadership within the CoC, county, and city governments appreciated how workers with lived experience of homelessness helped to improve trust and engagement with unsheltered community members and expanded access to life-saving health care.

While The Coalition noted that they are committed to maintaining these programs into the future, federal and state COVID-19 assistance was reduced. This meant that The Coalition was forced to limit the number of additional staff and consultants they could hire, as well as the types of monetary, health, and human supports they could provide to their staff. The Coalition continues to pay people with lived experience for their work as frontline staff and consultants on the CoC’s boards, but they explained that funding reductions forced them to cut back on their work throughout the region. This has led to fewer partnerships with people who have lived experience of homelessness. 

Voluntary Health Services

The Coalition recognized that people experiencing unsheltered homelessness needed easily accessible healthcare. Numerous hospitals discharged patients to shelter without warning CoC partners and without knowing if shelters had capacity, forcing some back into unsheltered homelessness.

Beginning in 2020 when COVID-19 spread across the country and exacerbated these concerns, the CoC tried to make health services more accessible to ensure that people experiencing homelessness were being discharged from healthcare settings with resources. The CoC knew that people living in encampments were often nervous about leaving their belongings behind and traveling to a clinic. They added a more robust mobile outreach clinic, staffed by students from the universities and hospitals they developed partnerships with. By involving medical professionals in outreach, clients were more likely to engage with life-saving health care before their health challenges became acute.

One of the CoC’s providers, Interim Inc., is also specifically funded to care for people with severe behavioral health needs and provides Permanent Supportive Housing in Monterey County. During the pandemic, Interim expanded their MCHOME program, which utilizes outreach services to screen people experiencing homelessness for behavioral health conditions and helps to connect them with shelter and treatment. By providing people experiencing homelessness with an official diagnosis, Interim helped to expand the housing and services that they could access, both within and outside of the homelessness response system. This included medical services paid for by Medicaid.

Together with Monterey County’s public health department, Interim also worked in the CoC’s non-congregate shelter funded through Project Roomkey, screening people for COVID-19 and providing physical and behavioral health care. This was possible because of federal COVID-19 relief funds, as well as a pilot program through CalAIM.

Together, these resources significantly expanded the department’s ability to bill Medicaid for housing-related needs and helped address underlying health conditions that people were experiencing in shelter. This made shelters safer and more accessible, and made it easier for them to take care of health challenges that could pose a barrier to maintaining permanent housing. Critically, this was possible because the CoC recognized an opportunity during the COVID-19 pandemic to coordinate and partner with health professionals.

While some programs primarily funded through Medicaid have continued, the end of pandemic relief funds meant that some programs were not able to continue. Without sustained funding from federal and state sources, providers noted that many more people, especially those with underlying health conditions, would lose access to permanent housing.

City Departments

During the pandemic, the City of Salinas tried to offer shelter or housing to every person experiencing unsheltered homelessness, requiring close coordination with the CoC and relying on the CoC’s robust outreach data. This data helped to identify people in need and ensure that when the jurisdiction decided to close an encampment, all of the community members were connected with an outreach worker. While ideally the outreach worker would try to place a person experiencing homelessness into housing, sometimes they could only do their best to offer shelter or work with the community member to find an alternative, temporary location. 

In addition, while the state of California required housed residents to stay at home except to provide essential services, the state recognized that people experiencing homelessness did not have anywhere else to go. California did not evict people from encampments or fine them for sleeping outside. Since people living unsheltered were not being forcibly displaced, the CoC and local governments could more easily provide sanitation, restrooms, and personal protective equipment. In areas with multiple unsheltered community members, the city installed portable toilets, water stations, medical tents, and meal stations.

These services helped keep people safe and built the trust required to sustain providers’ connections with unhoused people. Providing these hygiene and food services also helped address severe medical needs that could have limited their ability to move into permanent housing. Unfortunately, due to reductions in funding and a shift toward aggressive state efforts to evict encampments, many of these improvements have stopped. Providers have been forced to scramble and try to help people who were already evicted from encampments, rather than have time to plan and coordinate new living arrangements for unsheltered community members well in advance of the eviction. As people are forced to move from one location to the next, staff spend additional time and resources trying to track them down, ultimately delaying their placement into a shelter or housing unit.

Nevertheless, the CoC continues to urge collaboration. The City of Salinas has a police officer specifically responsible for responding to phone calls from housed residents and businesses about people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. The Coalition tries their best to work with the officer, city public works director, code enforcement teams, city manager, and city outreach coordinator to try and address the unsheltered community members’ needs before an eviction takes place. 

Reducing Barriers

Project Roomkey — An Accessible Interim Strategy

As providers identified more people in need, the surge in capacity offered by additional funds from Project Roomkey allowed them to offer more accessible beds with fewer barriers. Specifically, these non-congregate beds were in motel and hotel rooms, which providers noted was extremely important for helping people experiencing homelessness feel safe and comfortable moving inside. 

The Coalition also coordinated with medical professionals to certify some unhoused community members’ pets as emotional support animals. This empowered people with pets to bring them into shelter and housing. In addition, providers did not require people experiencing homelessness to be sober to enter and remain in shelter. Lastly, the CoC hired more case managers and staff, allowing shelters to remain open 24/7.

Having additional resources also increased the CoC’s capacity to cater housing navigation services. Unsurprisingly, it was easier for case managers to check in with their clients when they were staying in a hotel rather than in remote, outside locations. Despite the challenging housing market, housing specialists visited the shelters and learned about their clients’ needs and goals. The CoC also embedded additional voluntary services in shelters, such as hiring community partners to help fix unhoused community members’ cars or cut their hair, and case managers also bought new clothes for their clients. These small additions helped people feel confident applying for a job, benefits, or a permanent lease. As a result, they helped people experiencing homelessness feel like shelter contributed to their goals, rather than only providing a temporary bed. Having a professional provide this person-centered support also helped people feel safe and comfortable: providers used robust funding to break down roadblocks to permanent housing. As one provider noted, “I would say, tell me all of the reasons you can’t be housed and then we would address these one by one.” 

This level of attention and detail required coordination. The CoC helped direct funding for these services to ensure that different providers were not paying for redundant programs. The CoC also required every provider organization to meet with CoC leadership multiple times a week. Doing so ensured that providers were working together to connect with landlords, health services, and housing programs, rather than competing for the same resources or repeating each other’s work. This coordination created more unified, efficient pathways to permanent housing for people staying in the hotels. Staff from the City of Salinas also noted that many of the housing navigators visiting Roomkey shelters had experience doing street outreach. When searching for housing placements, this experiential knowledge made it easier for them to understand and respond to the individual’s needs. 

In large part because of this effort, during the pandemic, the CoC permanently housed 83 percent of clients enrolled in Project Roomkey in 2021.

Permanent Housing Strategies

Every provider consulted for this case study emphasized how challenging it is to connect people with affordable, permanent housing. During the pandemic, increased funding for rental assistance and housing vouchers kept people housed, helping to prevent large inflows into homelessness. During the first two rounds of the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention (HHAP) Grant Program, the CoC also allocated large portions of these funds to Rapid Re-Housing (RRH) and Permanent Supportive Housing.

Regardless of if a person entered shelter, outreach workers offered to enroll them in Coordinated Entry, then helped them apply for housing vouchers and RRH subsidies. This reduced barriers and cut down on the amount of time people were waiting for housing. The CoC’s providers also used resources to build and maintain strong relationships with landlords. They offered regular case management to address challenges between their clients and landlords if they arose. If a client broke their lease, the case manager quickly worked to find the client a new placement where they could be successful, and offered to find the landlord a new client for the unit. These relationships helped mitigate risk for landlords while ensuring that people did not reenter homelessness.

The County of Monterey’s Housing Authority also allocated more housing vouchers to low-income residents. According to one provider, “before the pandemic, over 5,000 people were competing for just a few hundred vouchers set aside for people experiencing homelessness.” By setting aside more vouchers for people experiencing homelessness, providers had an easier time connecting their clients with permanent housing. Some of these vouchers also went to people sheltered in hotels through Project Roomkey. Despite source of income protections, providers still noticed that private landlords were not willing to rent to households receiving subsidies. To help address this, the CoC offered incentive bonuses to landlords who signed leases with their clients. 

As Project Roomkey and other COVID-era funding ran out, local officials expressed concern about unsheltered homelessness, and the CoC diverted more HHAP funds to emergency shelter. This meant that less permanent housing placements were available; without more permanent resources, other systems became less effective. For example, providers noted that even though they continue to assess people quickly through Coordinated Entry, this process is not helpful when they do not have permanent units to place people experiencing homelessness into. 

These efforts helped, but CoC leadership also knew that their clients faced intense barriers (like discrimination and unaffordability) in the private market. The State of California’s Project Homekey was intended to allow Monterey County, in partnership with the CoC, to buy and renovate vacant homes. The County received four awards dedicated to building or renovating units for formerly homeless households. However, the private developer unexpectedly foreclosed the properties before they could open. Now, the County is helping recover the units in partnership with the impacted cities. This outcome is disappointing, but does not change the fact that the community needs sustained investments to build and preserve deeply affordable housing. 

Looking Ahead

The Salinas/Monterey and San Benito Counties CoC continues to face an affordable housing crisis that forces thousands of people into unsheltered homelessness. During the COVID-19 pandemic, federal, state, and local governments treated this crisis as an emergency and responded in kind. By coordinating with The Coalition of Homeless Service Providers and trusting the CoC to implement the solutions in this case study, jurisdictions helped to address their community’s immediate and long-term needs. This included adding short- and medium-term, non-congregate shelter options that adhered to best practices, while staying focused on the need for a larger supply of permanent housing and long-term subsidies that would end homelessness.

Unfortunately, the context in the region has shifted and as a result, the CoC has seen a 28 percent increase in homelessness from a single night in 2023 to a single night in 2024. Even as more people enter homelessness, the CoC is not receiving the additional resources that they received during the COVID-19 pandemic. As entries into homelessness outpace the supply of emergency services and affordable housing, lawmakers are expressing frustration and diverting resources to criminalization to hide — not end — the crisis.

To continue making progress, the CoC needs renewed robust investments in permanent, subsidized housing and services. This will ensure that people experiencing homelessness can exit the homelessness response system and enter permanent, stable housing. The CoC also needs state and local policymakers to end the counterproductive practice of criminalizing homelessness. While other homelessness service providers should learn from and build on Salinas/Monterey and San Benito Counties CoC’s work, decision makers should also be clear-eyed about how their policies constrain the homelessness response system’s efforts and impacts.