Cover Story Right, Dr. Patty McGann, a physician with the Palo Alto Medical Foundation who provides medical care twice weekly at the Opportunity Center, talks with Michael Cain about getting a free flu shot. Below, Mike Bates works in the computer lab.
But with adjustments in conventional thinking, many people involved with the center said the lessons learned are paying off. “I see a lot of people who are more stable,” said Lisa Douglass, director of the Stanford Law School Social Security Disability Pro Bono Project, who represents clients in disability-benefits hearings and appeals. And though it has taken time, about 120 people who have lived in the Opportunity Center since its opening have moved on to permanent housing, with scores more finding jobs and receiving help for their problems, according to staff.
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nent indoor drop-in center,” said Dr. Donald Barr, a Stanford associate professor of sociology and human biology who in 1998 convened the first meeting of what would become the Community Working Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing affordable housing and services to homeless and at-risk persons and families. But as Community Working Group members began talking with city officials about homeless services, the idea morphed into a housing-and-services center. Known as “housing first,” the idea was to provide unhoused people with the
stability of shelter so that their efforts could be directed to addressing other problems and obtaining jobs. “A ‘housing first’ model had not been done in this area at this time. It was a fairly long learning curve,” Barr said recently. It was not without controversy, as local residents feared that a fullservice center, with housing, would attract more homeless people to the city. That dire prediction has not borne out, as bi-annual counts of the city’s homeless population have actually shown a 50 percent decrease from 2005 to 2011 — from 341 sheltered and unsheltered persons to 151, according to the Santa Clara County Homeless Census and Survey.
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And yet, the road has been bumpy, Opportunity Center staff are the first to admit. Simply providing the stability of housing doesn’t in and of itself address the root causes of homelessness: medical conditions, disability, job loss, mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and lack of affordable housing. And given the instability of the population living in the center’s 88 units and stopping by each day for services, problems were bound to occur. There have been complaints about noise and disturbances in and around the Opportunity Center, and sometimes people fall through the cracks and don’t receive the available services, staff and police said.
or Kathy Kronquist, 48, and Robert McDonnell, 43, a journey that began in 2006 finally ended with a one-bedroom apartment on Emerson Street on Oct. 1. The couple has lived in a single room with a bath at the Opportunity Center since 2006 and was among the earliest tenants. Kronquist was relatively new to homelessness. McDonnell had been living in his car for four years, he said. “My husband committed suicide in 2003. I lost everything; I couldn’t afford the rent. That’s when I became homeless,” Kronquist said. McDonnell said he and his father were asked to leave a relative’s house in Pacifica. “I was working for Avis Rent-ACar to make payments on my truck so I had a place to stay,” he said. Kronquist’s situation might not have been so precarious had she been able to get disability benefits, but like many homeless people, she didn’t have a paper trail and was rejected, she said. A surprising number of people who are eligible for entitlements are
not receiving them, Douglass said. And yet, said Opportunity Center Program Director Philip Dah, the benefits are key to some people moving out of homelessness. “So much hinges on these benefits. These are monies that people have paid into. It would be very difficult for her to access that money without lawyers,” he said. The Opportunity Center helps clients such as Kronquist to obtain old high school records, medical records and testing to show they have a disability. A team involving a caseworker, medical staff and others assist in assembling a history for the client, Douglass said. Stanford Law School volunteers helped Kronquist and about 60 others to obtain benefits they were eligible to receive, she said. Out of all of those claims only two were rejected at the hearing level, she said. After three years of having their rent subsidized at the Opportunity Center, Kronquist began paying through her disability benefits. McDonnell contributed to the $707 per month rent by working as a crossing guard at Duveneck Elementary School, he said. Getting Section 8 vouchers, the next step in moving out for the couple, often takes years, Dah said. Kronquist and McDonnell recently qualified for Section 8, enabling them to move out after five years. “We’ve been on the (Section 8) list for seven years. We just picked up the voucher the other day,” McDonnell said.
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ince opening its doors, the Opportunity Center’s management has had to reconcile many times between theory and the realities of the complex human condition, Dah said.