Sacramento County to close 3 Roomkey motels serving hundreds of unhoused people
Sacramento County this spring plans to close three motels used to shelter homeless individuals when federal funding for the service ends.
The three motels have been housing homeless individuals since early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration released funding for a program he called Project Roomkey. The sites currently are sheltering 333 people.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency took over funding for the program in December 2020, and Newsom did not provide more money for Project Roomkey in the state budget.
The FEMA funding for the program is expected to end March 30, Ethan Dye, the county’s director of human services, told the Board of Supervisors Wednesday.
The supervisors had an opportunity to direct staff to keep the hotels open, though they would have had to find money to continue paying for the program. The program costs about $1.6 million per month, covering leases, meals, rehousing and health care services, Dye said.
Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, said the county, which has a budget of more than $6 billion, should have found the money, especially with the coronavirus case numbers still high.
“It’s unacceptable that the Board of Supervisors is going to make people who were housed homeless again,” Erlenbusch said.
The motels were meant for short-term quarantining, but become de facto apartments for some. A quarter of the Roomkey guests have been there for more than a year, Dye said.
More than 2,500 people have spent time in the motels since they opened in spring 2020, Dye said. Officials got 425 of them into permanent housing and more than 300 into temporary housing, Dye said.
The deal did not work out for everyone. More than 250 people were kicked out of the motels in the first year they were open over reported violations of the program’s rules, The Sacramento Bee reported.
Staff will work with the remaining guests to try to get them into housing, and into other hotels, Dye said.
“I want to make very clear we are not looking to put mass folks out on the streets just to close the motels,” Dye told the supervisors. “We are going to be trying to make sure we’re doing it right, methodically and that we’re doing it with thought.”
The La Quinta in the River District is set to close first, March 15, followed by Vagabond Inn in downtown, on April 15, then by Comfort Inn in Rancho Cordova on May 30, the staff report said.
Instead of Roomkey, the state budget provides funding for Project Homekey, which converts hotels into permanent housing for homeless individuals.
The city last year opened apartments under Project Homekey in South Sacramento’s Parkway neighborhood with about 110 units, but it’s essentially full. The state approved funding for two new Homekey hotels in the city, but they are not yet open. A Homekey motel in Natomas for homeless families is set to open in April, followed by one in midtown in the fall.
Apart from Roomkey, the city has six hotels where it is sheltering unhoused people, but like all shelters in the county, all are typically full on any given night.
This story was originally published February 9, 2022 at 5:50 PM.
