This story aired in the March 5, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
Why is it so hard for people to move from homeless encampments to housing? California spends a lot of money trying to get people off the street — $27 billion since 2019. The state’s Encampment Resolution Fund in particular has invested over $700 million into moving people from encampments, to shelter, to permanent housing. There are still thousands of people living on the streets across the state, and in the Bay Area, it can feel like there’s little progress to show for it.
KALW’s homelessness reporter Alastair Boone takes us to Richmond, California to learn more about what it really takes to find permanent housing.
REPORTER: It’s pouring rain, and I’m at the Rodeway Inn. The motel is being used by the City of Richmond to host a transitional housing program, the kind that’s intended to have wraparound services, like case management and housing support. I’m here to talk with two current residents.
ANGIE: My name is Angelina Pena, born and raised in Richmond, and I recently am transitioning from the Castro encampment in North Richmond, trying to find a place for stability, still.
MARCELA: My name is Marcela Hidalgo, and I am in transition I guess as well, trying to move out of this hotel room.
REPORTER: The Rodeway Inn has that classic u-shape layout around a parking lot. It’s two stories tall, with a flat roof and orange walls. The City of Richmond is using about 30 rooms for transitional housing for people like Angie and Marcela, who used to live in homeless encampments. The rest of the rooms here are still rented out by motel guests.
Marcela and Angie go way back — they’re both from Richmond, and met each other long before moving into the motel. Angie has bright eyes and long, dark brown hair with highlights. Her sweater is covered in stars, and she’s wearing sparkly silver eyeliner. Marcela wears long, red braids and a green jacket that matches her pants.
We’re sitting on the floor in Marcela’s kitchen while her dogs rest in crates outside in the bedroom. The dogs are listening to the radio, which Marcela leaves on for them when she’s not around. They’ve all done their best to make a home here at the motel during the time they have here.
But that time is limited. They’ve both been given move-out dates that are just weeks away.
MARCELA: I don't want to go back to how I was. So like, it's disappointing when this housing thing is like, not what it was supposed to be. But it's not gonna discourage me because I just have to step it up and come outta my comfort zone and like, try to do more.
REPORTER: The purpose of programs like this is to move people from homelessness to housing. At the Rodeway Inn, the goal is to do this in 18 months. The program promises two meals a day, as well as care management — that is, staff to help residents do things like sign up for public benefits, or healthcare. It also has funding for housing navigation: A designated person whose job it is to help residents find places to live, and make the final transition into permanent housing.
But Angie and Marcela say they haven’t received the help they were promised, particularly when it comes to the housing stuff. And this is frustrating, because if they don’t find a place before the deadline, they could be kicked out, and end up at a shelter or back out on the street.
ANGIE: I could be outside right now, it's raining, but I'm inside. And, you know, they, they do help in some ways, but in the most important ways, they don't.
REPORTER: I spent some time with Marcela and Angie to get a better sense of what it takes to exit homelessness. I wanted to see the final step in the process up close — this final stage, of moving from a transitional program into permanent housing.
When I meet them, Marcela and Angie have taken matters into their own hands. They’re searching for apartments on their own, on the private rental market: On Craigslist, Zillow, Facebook Marketplace, they’re searching cork boards at laundromats, and asking friends and co-workers.
ANGIE: Every place I've applied to so far has turned me away. Either my credit's bad or I don't make three times the amount.
REPORTER: Which is a requirement from many landlords.
Marcela and Angie both have jobs. They work at the same non-profit. It helps other unhoused people in Richmond, providing mobile showers, laundry services, job training, stuff like that.
Angie has worked there for five years, but Marcela got connected to the job through a care manager at the Rodeway Inn. Because of their jobs, both women can afford to pay some rent. But high rental prices, income requirements, and rules about pets set a lot of places out of reach.
Over the next couple weeks, I keep in touch over the phone as they search.
ANGIE: I go look at another one today. It was a studio. It was a studio that was way too small and way too much money. So I'm just still looking and still pushing.
REPORTER: According to Zillow, the average cost of rent in Richmond is more than $2,300 a month. That’s more than twice what Angie can afford. Which is why it’s so exciting when she finds out that after a year of waiting, she made it off a waitlist for a subsidized housing program. Just seven days before she’s supposed to leave the Rodeway Inn, I ride over with her to check it out.
REPORTER: Thank you for letting me ride with you.
GAIL: No problem. Get my phone from under there
ANGIE: Your phone where?
GAIL: Yeah it’s right there laying on my purse. Thank you, ‘cause they might call me.
REPORTER: There’s someone else in the car with us: Gail Wyatt-Thomas.
Gail is a care manager at the non-profit where Angie and Marcela work. She’s the one who made this appointment for Angie: She’s helping her out because they know each other from work.
REPORTER: All right Angie, where are we headed?
ANGIE: We're headed to the St. John's Apartments over on West McDonald Avenue.
REPORTER: And how do you feel about this place? Is it somewhere you would wanna live?
ANGIE: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've been waiting for something like this because it's subsidized housing.
REPORTER: The St. John’s Apartments require residents to pay just 30% of their income in rent — no matter what their income is.
ANGIE: And then I'll always be able to pay my rent, so it won't like break me, you know, to make sure my rent's paid on time.
REPORTER: And, there’s another perk: The unit Angie is seeing is a two bedroom, which would allow her son to move in with her part-time. They go in to see the unit on their own while I wait outside.
REPORTER: All right. See you on the other side, good luck.
REPORTER: When they come back about a half an hour later, Angie is on the phone, looking stressed. She’s overwhelmed by the paperwork she needs to gather, for both herself and for her son. She’s already on hold, trying to track down an old social worker who might have access to some of the documents. Gail is leaning in — encouraging her, and walking her through the next steps.
GAIL: So first of all, we could go get, listen to me.
ANGIE: I don't have his social security card, I don't have his birth certificate.
GAIL: We could go get his birth certificate.
REPORTER: Angie’s frustrated. Because she only has a week left at the Rodeway, and she doesn't want to end up back out on the street.
GAIL: Hear what I'm saying to you. Okay? Hear me. You go to the county building in Berkeley. You go pay for it. I went and bought mine. Walked right in there
ANGIE: How much is it?
GAIL: It's like $30 something. If you don't got it, I got it. Don't get discouraged.
REPORTER: But I can see how it would be easy to get discouraged. Opportunities for subsidized housing are rare — really rare. The waitlists for these programs can be years or even over a decade long. And Angie hasn’t found any good options on the rental market.
I head home. A week goes by, and then a month and when I call, Angie stops picking up the phone, so I can only guess how her housing search is going.
According to public records, the City of Richmond has funding for Housing Navigators to support people like Angie and Marcela. The job is to do what you just heard Gail doing: finding housing leads and driving people to meet up with landlords. But Marcela says, they haven’t received support like this.
MARCELA: We went through like three housing navigators. So we never even got to know none of 'em because none of 'em ever did anything.
REPORTER: Actually, they’ve at least five different housing navigators since the program opened over two years ago. And the reason why has to do with the fact that the program is funded, and managed, by a complicated web of state agencies and service providers.
Let me break it down. The funding comes from the Encampment Resolution Fund — or ERF — that program Gavin Newsom championed to close encampments, and move unsheltered people indoors. Cities can apply for grants to close encampments, and get funding for services to help their former residents, like Angie and Marcela.
ERF has made three grants to the City of Richmond — over $22 million in the last three-and-a-half years. That money’s supposed to help the city close encampments, and open up programs like the one here at the Rodeway Inn. In Richmond, these funds were projected to employ five housing navigators and about 20 total support positions to serve nearly 400 encampment residents.
The City contracts with various non-profits to do the work.
And at the Rodeway Inn, this gets even more complicated, because the staffing and management has changed at least five times. That makes it hard to know who is responsible for making sure the program is doing what it should.
But from the residents’ point of view, it’s simple: When I moved in here, I was told I’d get help finding housing. And the person who is responsible for doing that keeps leaving.
MARCELA: I get a call every now and then saying, "do you still have your dogs? Has your income increased a little bit?" Um, yeah, that's it. To me, you're not even looking. You're just making that call so you can say you made that call.
REPORTER: The City of Richmond initially agreed to talk to me for this story, but then they cancelled our interview, and stopped responding to my emails.
But I was able to sit down with Jim Becker, who helps run one of the non-profits that manages the program at the Rodeway Inn.
He says that even in the very best circumstances, helping people transition out of encampments and into housing is difficult.
JIM: It's difficult work. I mean, there's no question about that. We are working with people who are probably the most marginalized in our society. So, you know, our staff have dealt with things from, you know, clients threatening, threatening each other with weapons to, you know, a mom who gave birth on the Richmond Parkway, right?
REPORTER: Jim helps run RCF-Connects, a community foundation in Richmond. He says his staff can’t force their clients to take the help they offer.
JIM: So my staff has focused on really bringing services and resources to them and encouraging them to take them up. Now, whether they do or not ultimately is on them.
REPORTER: And, it’s not easy to find affordable units, or landlords who are willing to work with formerly homeless people. At times, violent discrimination has gotten in the way of housing placements.
JIM: We had one landlord who would follow people around and spray them with Lysol because they didn't smell good. Right. Things like that.
REPORTER: Jim says they stopped working with that person right away.
Another thing that can really slow the process down: bureaucracy.
JIM: We had the ability to place people in housing, and we did that with a couple of folks, but then the project changed again. The city made a decision, some point at that time that they wanted to contract with each organization directly.
REPORTER: So one non-profit would do the overall case management and provide the food, and the other would deal with housing navigation. He doesn’t know why the city changed their contracts.
But that kind of change can complicate what we know is essential for successfully moving people indoors. There’s research that shows that the best hope for low-income people is having a great support person: one, consistent case manager, or a housing navigator, to walk them through the whole process.
Someone like Gail, the person you heard earlier in the car with Angie. When I refer to her as a housing navigator, Gail makes a funny face at me. For one, that’s not actually her job title these days: She’s a care manager, helping people get connected to resources and employment. But for her, this is not a job that she clocks out of at the end of the day. It cuts to the core of who she is.
GAIL: That's why when you say "you're a housing navigator," I kind of looked at you. No, I'm somebody that care.
REPORTER: Gail knows what it feels like to lose housing and need support, and she says this helps her connect to the people she works with now.
GAIL: They know me, right? Not only do they know me, they know I'm not fake. I've been in the life. I was out there with them, you know what I mean? And I got, and they love that I got myself together and that I'm doing something different and that it makes them want it too. So it makes it easy for me to say, I will help you, but you gotta help yourself too.
REPORTER: The first step is about helping people get ready to move inside. And that’s about relationship building.
GAIL: Some of them ain't doing it because they don't know how. You know? They don't know how to do a bank account. They don't know how to read, some of them. You know, how to go in there and fill out an application, you know what I mean? And they're not gonna tell you that. Who gonna tell you, "I can't read?"... They're not gonna tell you that.
REPORTER: So it’s important to tread really carefully, supporting folks without compounding their shame.
Another big hurdle for navigators is actually finding housing. This means traversing a complicated landscape of vouchers, supportive programs, and waitlists — many of which have different rules, requirements, and applications. And, fielding the kind of negative bias that Jim spoke about.
I’ve been covering homelessness for eight years, and I always just kind of assumed that this was a more streamlined process: That there was some big binder of housing programs and resources in California — and maybe a list of phone numbers for landlords who accept vouchers. But it turns out, this doesn’t exist. At least, not in the simple way I had imagined. There are some trainings for the people who work in these jobs, but it’s largely up to navigators to build their own local resource directories.
GAIL: I go to different landlords and I tell them about the program and I tell them what's going on and I introduce 'em to the people. I bring the people and introduce 'em to 'em, and there, and, and nine times outta 10, they let 'em have it.
REPORTER: Gail uses all of her networks: Her husband does landscaping, and does work for landlords who are often looking for new tenants. And, she’s from Richmond. Lots of the people she grew up with are now staffing the programs her clients need.
All this running around though, Gail says it’s crucial to meet with landlords in person to reassure them that they’ll get their rent — and basically endorse the people’s she working with. But she also says, not every navigator is doing all this running.
When I ask her why, she answers quickly.
GAIL: They're lazy.
REPORTER: They don't, they don't know how, they don't think that they have to? I mean…
GAIL: They're lazy. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. They're lazy. Because it could be done.
REPORTER: Sure. It’s possible that some housing navigators really are just lazy. But it turns out that staff burnout in programs for homeless folks is a systemic problem in California.
RYAN: They're often looking for that one person that has to be able to do it all and. Like there's just not that many people who can do it all.
REPORTER: This is Ryan Finnigan, Deputy Research Director at UC Berkeley’s Turner Center. He’s studied California’s homeless service providers.
RYAN: On the one hand, you need to be able to build rapport and trust and have like empathy and humanity with people who are going through probably the hardest time in their lives and you need to be their rock.
You also need to be great at paperwork. You need to be great at compliance. You need to be great at finances and billing. You need to be great at navigating these complicated systems and emails and waitlists, and this combination of skills, you know they’re not often the kinds of things people get trained to do all at once.
REPORTER: Ryan says that a lot of the time, all of these specialized skills are packaged into one job. When in reality, this should be more than one job: Some people working with clients, and others doing the paperwork. But most programs just don’t have the funding to hire more people.
RYAN: If they don't know that that money is gonna be there, like they hire a bunch of people, they train them, and then there's no more money and they have to let them all go. That's actually a very counterproductive use of the funds.
REPORTER: That’s because a lot of shelters and transitional housing programs rely on short-term government funding. Grants that last one year, two years, or maybe three. Which makes it very difficult to grow, or plan for the future.
It also leads to low pay, and burnout. Ryan’s research shows that low pay is the primary driver of staff turnover at these programs across the state.
And then there’s the big, looming elephant in the room.
RYAN: The biggest challenge is often just that there's not enough permanent housing.
REPORTER: He says, if all the affordable units are full, people exiting transitional housing programs have nowhere to go.
RYAN: And that is not a reflection on the functioning of the transitional housing program. The best shelter or transitional housing program in the world can do everything right. And if there's no permanent housing to move to, you're not gonna see exits to permanent housing.
REPORTER: I’ve heard people say that exiting homelessness feels like climbing out of a deep hole in the ground. At every level, it’s easy to lose your grip, and fall back down to the bottom again.
Making that ultimate “transition” to permanent housing, it only happens for a small percentage of people. Out of about 80,000 people who have received services through the state's Encampment Resolution Fund, only about 7,600 have made it into permanent housing. That’s a little bit less than 10 percent.
Marcela is determined to be part of that 10 percent: To be one of the people who moves into permanent housing. I catch up with her at work. Today, she’s staffing a mobile shower cart, and doing outreach at encampments nearby.
PARTICIPANT: Thank you!
MARCELA: You are welcome. Feel better?
PARTICIPANT: Do I?!
MARCELA: Go back and tell everybody where we're at!
PARTICIPANT: No, I'm not telling them because they…
MARCELA: Share! You gotta share!
PARTICIPANT: I won't be able to get my…
MARCELA: You gotta, yes you will!
REPORTER: She cruises around to nearby encampments on an electric bike wearing pink sneakers and a shiny silver motorcycle helmet. She’s got this warm, easy way with people. She’s a natural at making them feel comfortable and supported. That’s because Marcela has been homeless on and off since she was 12.
MARCELA: I kind of left home early, uh, by choice. I wasn’t kicked out I wasn’t, my parents weren’t, you know, bad or nothin’ like that, they divorced but, my dad died and I kind of just did what I wanted after that.
REPORTER: She learned how to survive on her own, by any means necessary. But now, she doesn’t just want to survive. She wants to move into the next phase of her life.
MARCELA: People deserve second chances, third chances, fourth chances. You know what I mean? They deserve chances, you know. 70 times seven. You know what I mean? For real.
REPORTER: “Seventy times seven” is a Biblical reference: Matthew 18:22. It’s about boundless forgiveness, the kind God is said to give his believers. Marcela says some people just need longer than others to figure everything out.
That’s actually one of the things she appreciates about transitional housing. Early on, when she was in and out of jail, the program held her room for her so she didn’t have to start all over again when she was released. Now, she’s had this job for over a year, and she’s ready to take the next step.
A couple of months go by, and I don’t hear anything. But when we do get back in touch, Marcela has exciting news.
MARCELA: I should be signing a lease today.
REPORTER: Today?
MARCELA: Mm-hmm.
REPORTER: Wow! Congratulations!
MARCELA: Yeah.
REPORTER: She tells me that after her transitional housing ran out at the Rodeway Inn, she spent a little while back out on the street. But she says she hounded some new housing navigators, who connected her with a landlord who would rent to her, and her dogs.
MARCELA: It's perfect for me. Uh, the, it's a little pricey, like, I gotta definitely find another job because I cannot afford it with my income now. I just jumped on the first thing I could and yeah, I'll worry about the rest later.
REPORTER: Her rent will be paid through the program for the first year, giving her time to adjust. Still, she has reservations about her experience in transitional housing.
REPORTER: Do you feel like the transitional housing program did what it was supposed to?
MARCELA: No. No. I don't, I feel the same way, but I feel about, like I felt before, um, yes I got into a place, but I think it could have went a lot smoother.
REPORTER: When I get back in touch with Angie, she shares some of these feelings. By now, she has also left the transitional housing program at the Rodeway Inn.
REPORTER: So what's, what's been happening since the last time I saw you?
ANGIE: Um, well, I am still waiting on my apartment.
REPORTER: She got approved to move into that apartment she really wanted, but her move-in date keeps getting delayed. She thinks it will be another month or two before she can move in. In the meantime, she says she has put the bulk of her income toward renting motel rooms.
REPORTER: Did they offer you any resources when you moved out?
ANGIE: Yeah. Shelter. They said, "shelter," I said, "no." I'm not going to a shelter. I have a job and I can pay rent. I just need help finding a place.
REPORTER: Care manager Gail Wyatt-Thomas says her job is to help her clients help themselves. But she also says she tries to keep the hope for them when they feel like giving up.
By the time they find a place, unhoused people have already left home so many times. There’s losing your housing, initially, and learning to live out on the street. Then there’s leaving your encampment and getting acclimated to a shelter, or a motel. And then finally, if you’re lucky, there’s leaving that environment, finding your own, permanent place in a cutthroat rental market.
It’s a steep climb. I can see why you’d need hope to reach the summit.
