Vallejo opens 125-bed navigation center after years of delays

VALLEJO — Vallejo city officials celebrated the grand opening of a new 125-bed homeless shelter on Monday after a year of construction and a series of delays and budget overruns that lasted for nearly a decade.

The shelter at 1937 Broadway St. is intended to be a "one-stop-shop" which will allow people experiencing homelessness to stay up to six months and receive case management to connect them to social and medical services. 

Participants will also have access to job training and be assisted in securing permanent housing. The center has a kitchen that will offer breakfast, lunch and dinner, a computer lab, basic wound care and help with substance use disorder. 

Assistant City Manager Gillian Haen thanked a list of people including businessman Scott Foster, who sold the property to the city for $950,000 in 2022 and Vallejo Together founder and unhoused advocate Maria Guevara, who died in 2020.

“This was all her idea,” Haen said of Guevara, “she ignited all of you and all of us to get this thought into fruition.” 

The realization of the project, which spans “10 years in the making, three mayors, six different councils,” is “the epitome of it takes a village," said Councilmember Diosdado Matulac who represents North Vallejo. Matulac hopes that this project will help “get past a lot of the negativity that the Vallejo narrative typically holds.”

The project has been badly delayed for years. In May 2021, the city’s housing manager told the City Council that the project was millions of dollars over budget. She resigned a short time later. Later that year, city officials revealed that the parcel selected was contaminated and unfit for human habitation. It took nearly a year for the city to identify a new location for the project and even longer to secure funding.

It’s one of two projects to tackle homelessness that the city has struggled to open over the last few years. The other, a 47-unit permanent supportive housing project on Broadway, required a $6 million bailout last year. City officials now expect it to open at the end of July.

Construction of the navigation center began in April of last year and cost around $12 million. Much of the funding came through federal grants and Solano County, and the three local hospital systems – Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, and Northbay Health – which collectively gave $6.2 million for operations. 

“Housing is health, it’s that simple and that important,” said Juanita Jularbal-Walton, chief nurse executive from Kaiser Permanente’s Vallejo Medical Center, “being homeless is having a 25 year shorter life span.”

Councilmember Helen-Marie “Cookie” Gordon, who represents South Vallejo, said “today is a turning point, not just in policy but in how Vallejo shows it cares. It is not just a shelter, it’s a bridge to permanent housing, to hope.” 

The center is to be run by Five Keys, a nonprofit that primarily offers adult education and housing services in San Francisco and Alameda County. In early June, the City Council unanimously voted to award Five Keys a $6.3 million operational contract meant to cover the next two years.

The center will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and will include three care coordinators in charge of guests’ social cases. They hope to soon expand that number to five to achieve a more manageable ratio of one care coordinator per 20 guests, although future funding remains to be secured. 

“It’s not a robust budget,” Five Keys COO Elyse Graham said in an interview. She said they will have to go back to the city for more funding, echoing concerns of councilmembers in previous city meetings. The city is currently exploring whether it can find $365,000 to hire the additional care coordinators for the next two years.

“As long as we manage our time, it’s do-able, but we want to be able to give them time so guests can be heard,” said the center’s director Dana Pine.

Assistant to the City Manager Natalie Peterson said in an interview that securing future funding for operations is the next priority. “Me and my team and the city start looking towards how we make sure that we keep it operational past that two year contract,” she said. 

An additional $1.88 million could be granted from the American Rescue Plan Act, but it will have to go through the City Council, potentially in September. 

“With how tight our budget is, we're really looking at outside funding sources, whether that's continuing partnerships with our healthcare partners, looking for other grant funding, looking for philanthropic donors,” Peterson said. “It’s going to be a hodgepodge of funding to really just keep this moving forward.” 

The center will begin accepting guests this Thursday at a rate of 10 per day max and hopes to reach capacity within two weeks, according to Pine. 

With more than 720 people experiencing homelessness in Vallejo, the center is expected to help a large portion of them. Incoming guests will first have to be referred from Resource Connect Solano, the county agency that handles coordinated entry for homeless services.

Once in the shelter, care coordinators will help people connect with resources, take care of documents as well as getting “emotionally and psychologically ready to transition” to permanent housing, said Pine. That will be challenging for many as homelessness is “rarely just about money,” Pine said, but center staff hopes the transition to permanent housing can occur for most in under 90 days.

“It’s a long time coming,” said Pine about the center, “anytime we can create space for the unhoused folks, it’s a good thing.”