[Updated: Fri., Apr. 11, 2025, 10:45am]
In the past three years, the nonprofit DignityMoves has built and opened three villages of transitional housing — using modular housing — throughout the county for people who are homeless. This Tuesday, the county supervisors unanimously approved a fourth — this one exclusively for families — to be located on county-owned property near the Calle Real Campus.
This one will be built on about an acre of land next to the Children and Family Services building and include 32 housing units, the largest being 700-square-foot two-bedroom units built in a duplex style and the smallest being studio apartments.
This project will differ in many key respects from any of the three prior DignityMoves projects. Because the units are built for families, all units will come with bathrooms and kitchens included, not to mention some family living space; in the other projects, there are communal bathrooms, and food is prepared offsite and then brought in.
These modular units will be built by a manufacturer in Santa Paula out of brick and mortar; the other projects deploy a form of breathable plastic. And unlike all three prior projects, this one will not be managed by the Good Samaritan homeless shelter organization out of Santa Maria. The on-site manager has not been selected yet, but among the applicants will be New Beginnings, which runs the Safe Parking program, and City Net, which has been doing homeless outreach services in Santa Barbara for about five years now.
And in the other units, the lease term with the county expires after three years. The lease contract for the family housing runs 55 years instead. That length was required as a precondition for state funding.
To date, the state has committed to funding the project to the tune of $9 million. According to Jack Lorenz of DignityMoves, another $3 million has already been raised and another $3 million has yet to be raised.
DignityMoves was initially started by a collection of successful entrepreneurs — most but not all from the Bay Area — who believed their skill sets and mindsets empowered them to build housing units in a quick and relatively affordable fashion to move the needle when it came to homelessness. Their signature concept is that the client population needs to have a door they can shut and lock. To date, Santa Barbara has provided them four sites from which to operate.
The other key ingredient is the combination of wrap-around services from providers such as county Behavioral Wellness and other social service agencies. With all this combined with their inviting abodes, the hope is that clients can get on their feet to such an extent they can land jobs and find places of their own places to live. Making that dream harder to realize is the heightened acuity of the addiction and mental-health challenges faced by people coming off the streets and encampments and how much longer more of them have been homeless.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated to remove Transition House from the list of on-site manager applicants.
