In Richmond, two women traverse the transition from homelessness to permanent housing
A version of this story originally aired on KALW (91.7 FM).
California’s Encampment Resolution Fund (ERF) is intended to move the state’s most marginalized unhoused people into permanent housing. Since 2022, it has provided financial support to local jurisdictions to close long-standing homeless encampments and create pathways to permanent housing for their residents. To receive funds from the program, applicants must describe the encampments they intend to close, the short-term shelter and services for impacted residents, and the on-site partnerships with local service providers to support individuals as they search for permanent housing—whether they acquire house keys through subsidized housing programs or out on the private housing market.
The ERF program has become a big source of funding for transitional housing projects across the state. But the process of securing permanent housing is no small task for unhoused people in California, where there are fewer than 30 affordable units available for every 100 extremely low-income renters.
To better understand this process, Street Spirit spent four months with Angelina (Angie) Pena and Marcela Hidalgo, two Richmond residents living in an ERF-funded transitional housing program as they searched for a permanent home.
From Encampment to Motel
The City of Richmond has received over $22 million in ERF funding to close local encampments and move their residents indoors since 2022. Their first ERF project targeted the city’s largest encampment, on Castro Street. Angie was living there when it was abated in 2023, and at first, she was placed directly into permanent housing. But the building she moved into was soon red tagged, and Angie said she was offered a room at the Rodeway Inn, a motel and transitional housing site near the border of Richmond and San Pablo. Marcela also lived there, after the encampment she was living in on Cutting Boulevard was closed in 2024.
Transitional housing programs are short-term by design, offering residence for a few months to a few years. At the Rodeway Inn, the goal was to do this in 18 months. The program promised two meals a day, as well as care management (such as staff helping residents sign up for public benefits or healthcare) and housing navigation: designated staff to help residents find housing placements and make the final transition into permanent housing.
Both Angie and Marcela were hopeful that the program would be their ticket out of homelessness. But at the end of last year, their time there was running out, and they didn’t have any housing leads.
“I could be outside right now, it’s raining, but I’m inside,” Angie said. “[So] they do help in some ways, but in the most important ways, they don’t,” she said of the transitional housing program.
“ I don’t want to go back to how I was,” Marcela added. “It’s disappointing when this housing thing is like, not what it was supposed to be, but it’s not gonna discourage me. I just have to step it up and come outta my comfort zone and like, try to do more.”
Angie and Marcela both say they have not received the kind of support they were promised from staff at the Rodeway Inn.
“We went through like three housing navigators,” Marcela said. “We never even got to know none of them, because none of ‘em ever did anything.”
The management of the program at the Rodeway Inn has changed three times since it opened, and there have been at least four different housing navigators working under non-profit contracts with the City of Richmond to support residents there. This makes it hard for residents to know who is responsible for their care.
As a result, Angie and Marcela have largely been searching for housing on their own.
The Housing Hunt
In December 2025, Marcela and Angie were looking for housing on Craigslist, Zillow, and Facebook Marketplace, checking public postings on cork boards at laundromats, and asking friends and co-workers for housing leads.
“ Every place I’ve applied to so far has turned me away,” Angie said. “Either my credit’s bad or I don’t make three times the amount.”
Marcela and Angie both have jobs. They work at Safe Organized Spaces Richmond (SOS), a nonprofit that supports unhoused communities in Contra Costa County. Angie has worked at SOS since 2021, while Marcela was connected to her position by a case manager at the Rodeway Inn.
Because of their employment at SOS, both can afford to pay some rent, but many rental applications request proof of income to verify that rent doesn’t exceed one third of a tenant’s monthly wages. According to Zillow, the average cost of rent in Richmond is roughly $2,300 a month—more than twice what either can afford.
But just seven days before Angie was scheduled to exit the Rodeway Inn, she received hopeful news. A year prior, she put herself on a waitlist for a subsidized apartment, where residents pay just 30 percent of their income toward the monthly rent—no matter what their income is. Now, she had made it off the waitlist, had an appointment to see the unit, and would begin submitting necessary documents to secure her tenancy.
“I’ve been waiting for something like this,” Angie said. “I’ll always be able to pay my rent, so it won’t break me to make sure my rent’s paid on time, and I won’t have such a struggle.”
For Angie, the opportunity was like finding a needle in a haystack. Waitlists for supportive housing can often take years—if not a decade. And the unit Angie was going to see had two bedrooms, which would allow her son to move in with her part-time.
But after the appointment, she was overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork she needed to gather for both herself and her son.
“I don’t have his Social Security card,” she said. “I don’t have his birth certificate.”
Angie got this appointment with help from Gail Wyatt-Thomas, who works as a wellness care manager at SOS. While Angie made phone calls to track down her son’s documents, Gail provided encouragement.
“We could go get his birth certificate,” Gail said. “Hear what I’m saying to you. Okay? You go to the county building in Berkeley. I went and bought mine. Walked right in there, it’s like 30-something dollars. If you don’t got it, I got it,” she offered. “Don’t get discouraged.
But it’s easy to get discouraged. With only a week left before her exit date at the Rodeway Inn, Angie hadn’t found any good options on the rental market. And she didn’t want to end up back out on the street.
What is a Housing Navigator?
According to public records, the City of Richmond has funding for at least one full-time housing navigator to support former encampment residents like Angie and Marcela. The job entails building relationships with landlords, looking for available vouchers or supportive programs, and providing encouragement. But Marcela said support at the Rodeway Inn wasn’t this hands on.
“I get a call every now and then saying, do you still have your dogs? Has your income increased a little bit? That’s it…To me, you’re not even looking. You’re just making that call so you can say you made that call.”
After initially agreeing to an interview, the City of Richmond did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
However, Jim Becker—co-CEO of RCF Connects (RCF), one of the non-profits that manages the transitional housing program at the Rodeway Inn—described some of the challenges of finding permanent housing for the people exiting homelessness. RCF used to provide the housing navigation for residents of the Rodeway Inn, but the city changed their contracts last year, and gave the responsibility of housing navigation to another local non-profit.
Beyond these bureaucratic shifts, Jim said that moving people out of encampments and into housing comes with a unique set of obstacles.
“It’s difficult work. There’s no question about that,” he said. “We are working with people who are probably the most marginalized in our society. Our staff have dealt with things from clients threatening each other with weapons to a mom who gave birth on the Richmond Parkway.”
Jim also said his team can’t force their clients to take the help they can offer.
“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.”
Crucially, Jim adds, it can be difficult to find landlords who are amenable to working with formerly homeless people. At times, violent discrimination has gotten in the way of permanent housing placements.
“We have some great landlords. But we had one who would follow people around and spray them with Lysol because they didn’t smell good,” he said, noting that RCF immediately stopped working with that person.
There is research that shows that the best hope for people exiting homelessness is having a great support person: one consistent person who walks them through each step of the process—like Gail did for Angie.
Gail says she is committed to doing this work because she knows what it feels like to lose housing and need support.
“They know me, right? Not only do they know me, they know I’m not fake,” she says. “I’ve been in the life. I was out there with them. And they love that I got myself together and that I’m doing something different. 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.’”
Gail said there are several steps to successfully housing people, and the first step is all about relationship building.
“Some of them ain’t doing it because they don’t know how,” she said of unhoused people who aren’t actively pursuing moving indoors. “They don’t know how to do a bank account. They don’t know how to read, some of them. And they’re not gonna tell you that. Who’s gonna tell you ‘I can’t read?’ Getting to know some of us made ‘em put that pride to the side.”
Finding the housing itself comes with its own set of challenges, such as navigating 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.
While there is some training for homeless service providers in California, there is no centralized process for locating available housing or resources. Most of the time, it’s up to individual providers to build their own local resource directory.
To do this, Gail uses all of her networks. Her husband is a contractor, and does work for landlords who are often looking for new tenants. She’s also from Richmond. Many of the people she grew up with are now staffing the programs her clients need.
“I go to different landlords and I tell them about the program and I tell them what’s going on,” Gail said. “ I bring the people and introduce them. Nine times outta 10, they let ‘em have it.”
Gail insists that all this legwork is crucial. But she also said that not everyone is making the same kind of effort.
“They’re lazy,” she said. “I’m sorry! They’re lazy. Because it could be done.”
Challenges with Staffing at California Shelters
It’s possible that some housing navigators really are just lazy. But it turns out that burnout and staff turnover in California shelter programs is a systemic problem.
“[Programs] are often looking for that one person that has to be able to do it all,” said Ryan Finnigan, Deputy Research Director at UC Berkeley’s Turner Center. “And there’s just not that many people who can do it all.”
In 2024, Finnigan published “Stretched to Capacity: The Challenges Facing California’s Homelessness Service Providers,” an in-depth report that details the challenges faced by shelter programs across the state.
When it comes to staffing, he said a lot of programs require staff to do many jobs at once.
“On the one hand, you need to be able to build rapport and trust, and have empathy and humanity with people who are going through probably the hardest time in their lives, and you need to be their rock,” Finnigan said. “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.”
This is often because of funding limitations. Many shelters and transitional housing programs rely on short-term government funding. This makes it very difficult for programs to grow, let alone plan for the future, and often leads to low pay and burnout.
Ryan’s research shows that staff turnover is a major problem for homeless service providers across the state. The majority of service providers say low pay is the primary reason they struggle to retain staff.
But according to Ryan, the biggest problem does not lie with housing navigators, or specific transitional housing programs.
“The biggest challenge is often just that there’s not enough permanent housing,” he said.
Ryan explained that when all the affordable units are full, people exiting transitional housing programs have nowhere to go. And as a result, even the best housing navigator can’t find housing for everyone.
“That is not a reflection on the functioning of the transitional housing program,” he said. “If there’s no permanent housing to move to, you’re not gonna see exits to permanent housing.”
People exiting homelessness arguably feel this lack of affordable housing the hardest. Some have described the experience as climbing out of a deep hole in the ground. At every level, it’s easy to slip and fall back down to the bottom again.
For some people, it can take years to secure a room in a transitional housing program. But upon entry, they still have to face the actual summit: their transition into permanent supportive housing.
Since the Encampment Resolution Fund began, 77,168 people have received outreach, coordinated entry, shelter, and transitional housing through the program, according to the California Department of Housing and Community Development. Of those people, about 7,628 have made it into permanent housing. That’s just under 10 percent. The most common exit destinations are a subsidized rental, an un-subsidized rental, and moving in with family members or friends.
What’s Next for Angie and Marcela
By mid-February, Angie and Marcela had moved out of the Rodeway Inn, but neither of them had made the transition into permanent housing.
For Angie, bureaucratic hangups have delayed her move-in at her subsidized apartment. She’s been waiting on the unit since December, and doesn’t expect it to be ready for a month or more. Despite having a housing placement lined up, she said she couldn’t get an extension at the Rodeway Inn.
“They just made me go because my time was up. So basically I had to move out, and I was popping around wherever I could stay. All my [pay]checks had to go to motel rooms because I didn’t wanna sleep outside,” she said, noting the staff at the Rodeway Inn offered to connect her to a bed at a homeless shelter.
“I’m not going to a shelter,” she said. “I have a job and I can pay rent. I just need help finding a place.”
After the program at the Rodeway Inn closed, Marcela spent a short period of time living back out on the street. But at press time, she was on the precipice of signing a lease.
“I should be signing a lease today,” she said. “But it’s not real yet until I sign it, you know?”
Marcela said she will need to get another job to afford the rent at her new apartment. But Hope Solutions will pay her rent for the first year, giving her time to adjust.
“ I just jumped on the first thing I could and I’ll worry about the rest later,” she said.
Marcela is grateful for the opportunity to move indoors, particularly because her new landlord is letting her move in with her dogs. But she still feels frustrated by her experience in transitional housing. She says the process was crammed into the final months before she had to leave the program, and felt more stressful and confusing than it needed to be.
“ Yes I got into a place, but I think it could have went a lot smoother,” she said. “ My opinion does not change about that at all.”
Alastair Boone is the Director of Street Spirit and a beat reporting fellow for KALW covering homelessness.