About a year after the first tenants moved into the Bayside Village, a 32-unit transitional housing project on Hilfiker Lane in Eureka, the Betty Kwan Chinn Homeless Foundation ended its agreement to operate the facility.

Chinn said she feels guilty about this, but the setup just didn’t work out for the organization. Now, the project is operated by the City of Eureka’s UPLIFT program. The city took over the site May 15.

The transition was “nearly seamless, as far as just changing over the site management,” said Jeff Davis, project manager for UPLIFT Eureka in an interview.

The village is the first project of its kind the city has run. But Davis said operations are so far so good, about a month in.

He said UPLIFT is used to taking on new projects.

“A lot of the things that we’re doing, diving into the social services realm, it’s something that cities traditionally do not do,” he said.

The 25 or so residents there now formerly lived in encampments along the Waterfront Trail, a requirement for entry tied to grant funding the city obtained to construct the project.

People moved there summer of last year into a smattering of residential pod units, which stand alongside shared showers, a kitchen, laundry facilities and group meeting areas. The site’s been conceptualized since 2017, and finally opened through a collaboration of multiple agencies with Chinn’s foundation operating it.

When asked about ending the agreement, Chinn said the tenant/landlord dynamic was all new to her.

At the village, residents would pay $200 a month in rent (mostly fundraised by the larger community). This aimed to establish rental history, and the residents were paid back the amount at the end of their year lease, $2,400.

But that also meant they have tenant’s rights, said Chinn.

“I should study more before I get myself in there. I’ve never been a landlord, so I don’t know that kind of law,” she said.

That meant staff couldn’t take steps that she said helps people detach from the homeless lifestyle, such as room inspections for cleanliness, requiring people participate in case management or preventing visitors from coming to visit overnight.

“I found out I’m unable to provide the service for them, it’s not my ability to help them,” she said.

She said she wanted to help the people because they are some of the most vulnerable, and emphasized she feels guilty she couldn’t continue running the site, but learned a lot in the process.

Davis said in retrospect, the initial model that centered around a one-year timeline on the leases may not have been the best fit for the population.

Davis said the average length of time a resident of the village had been homeless was between ten to fifteen years, with one current resident homeless for 35 years.

“For someone that had been experiencing homelessness for three and a half decades to have 12 months to kind of turn everything around, stabilize and secure permanent housing, was pretty unrealistic,” he said.

Plus, he said, getting people into programs that provide permanent housing can take years, with long waitlists. Another issue in the model was that residents lost their “chronically homeless” designation, which gives people priority on certain waitlists, because they were in transitional housing.

The transitional housing model works with some populations, Davis said, but for this one, not so much.

Now, the city is operating the village in a new model as basically emergency housing. This allows the current residents to stay as long as they need to, with the ultimate goal to move people into permanent housing. (Some already have moved into permanent housing, noted Davis). According to Davis, at this time, the city doesn’t have plans to hand off the project to another agency.

He said most of the operating costs come through California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal (CalAIM) which funds social services through Medi-Cal.

The city will honor the leases the tenants originally signed and help support them, he said.

At the site Thursday, near an art class and people grilling dinner, Aerora Fonlupt, social service manager with UPLIFT, said the program allows for an appropriate amount of time for people to acclimate being out of camps, find their footing and find placement.

As for the transition of the city taking over, “I don’t think we could have asked for it to go any more smoothly than it has,” she said.

Photo: Sage Alexander

She noted there’s people on the program’s waitlist, and staff is working to stabilize before admitting more people. She said guests often visit their friends and have expressed interest in having a spot there, kind of a natural bridge from the encampments.

Lisa Hilliard, a resident of the Bayside Village, spoke in support of the city taking over.

Hilliard, who has spearheaded adding a vegetable  garden at the site, said it’s important to give people a bar to reach for — reasonable responsibilities to slowly move forward.

“People can’t flip a coin and go from not having any responsibilities to, oh my God, here’s a $1,700, $1,800, $1,900 a month house payment, and everything that goes along with it,” she said.