Goleta City Council Gets Report on Buena Tierra’s ‘Challenging but Extremely Rewarding’ First Year

County Housing Authority Addresses Concerns over Evictions, Security at Housing Project as It Prepares to Break Ground on Two New Housing Developments

About a year after Buena Tierra’s official ribbon-cutting, the City of Goleta heard a report on the supportive housing project on Tuesday, as well as two more very low-income housing developments in the works from the county Housing Authority. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom File Photo

The City of Goleta has three new projects to provide housing for residents on the very low side of the income scale, people who are either homeless, elderly, veterans, or families with special needs. Altogether, the city expects to see 128 new units at two projects nearing groundbreaking on Patterson Avenue and Los Carneros Road, if all the funding comes together for the Housing Authority of the County of Santa Barbara. The third project, Buena Tierra at the corner of Fairview and Hollister avenues, is the sixth set of homes providing permanent supportive care for homeless individuals that the agency has put together since 2014.

Buena Tierra opened just about a year ago, and the county Housing Authority and Goleta City Council met on Tuesday to discuss the complaints that have arisen. Under the Housing First set of rules that guide Buena Tierra, tenants may be sober or not sober, some without a home because they just aged out of foster care or because they’ve been on the streets for years, but the goal is to provide stability in a permanent home and make available the choices of seeking a job, education, counseling for addictions, or simply living indoors for the first time in a long time.

In March, the Committee for Social Justice, a coalition of homeless rights advocates, sent the county Housing Authority a letter expressing concern that 21 people had been evicted and arguing that Housing First principles were not being followed. The Housing Authority responded with an explanation of why tenants had left voluntarily or involuntarily, an explanation that John Polanskey, the county Housing Authority’s director of housing development, updated to the council on Tuesday.

Calling the work “challenging but extremely rewarding,” Polanskey described the Housing Authority’s homeless tenants as representing 20 percent of the agency’s 1,700 affordable housing units. “Over 40 percent of our supportive services goes to the 20 percent for lots of reasons,” he added.

At Buena Tierra, eviction notices had been served on four tenants, he said, two for violence against staff or other tenants — “There’s no going back into our housing after a physical attack,” Polanskey said — one person was jailed for selling drugs onsite, and the fourth had not paid their rent in eight months. “Good Sam kept trying to work with them,” Polanskey said, adding that all programs, including Section 8, required people with income to pay 30 percent of the rent. The individual received social security, but despite many conversations with staff, they did not pay their portion of their rent. Not everyone took advantage of the services on offer from Good Samaritan and Americorps counselors, Polanskey noted. (Americorps grants were slashed by about half by the Trump administration; California has filed suit.)

Altogether, 14 people left Buena Tierra, willingly or unwillingly, Polanskey reported: Seven residents sought a different type of housing and remained housed, two were in jail, three are back living rough, and two had passed away. Of the deaths, one man was the victim of a pedestrian-versus-car accident on Hollister. (In another agenda item, the city is seeking a grant to add new high-visibility crosswalks there). The second person died very recently of cancer. Polanskey explained that “being unhoused causes a lot of stress, and the body goes through things it’s not meant to go through.” The only light in this darkness, he went on, is that the person was housed instead of suffering from cancer and dying in an encampment under a bridge.

The first year is often a difficult one for new permanent housing like Buena Tierra, explained John Polanskey, the county Housing Authority’s director of housing development, at Tuesday’s Goleta City Council meeting. | Credit: Courtesy

The fence surrounding Buena Tierra and the security guards at the gates had alarmed the housing activists. Polanskey’s explanation was that the fence was not to keep residents in, but to keep bad influences out, “often drug dealers,” he said.

After the report, Councilmember James Kyriaco observed that another way to look at the information was that 77 percent of the original tenants remain at Buena Tierra.

The first year is often a difficult one for new permanent housing like Buena Tierra, Polanskey answered. He recalled that their first facility — Pescadero Lofts in Isla Vista — had a similar first year with tenant turnovers. Now, some of the same tenants are still there, 10 years later.

For those who weathered the first year at Buena Tierra, the staff held a one-year celebration, awarding plaques for a full year of residency, very much an achievement for people who’d been chronically homeless before, said Evan Baumann, the county Housing Authority manager in Goleta. Some of the tenants were former foster children, now ages 18-24, who were working, building their lives, and paying their rent. Some of them were looking at full-time jobs or moving to rejoin their families. “These are some of the success stories,” Baumann said. “It’s not all negative.”

Of the two projects that the county Housing Authority has yet to build, Patterson Point will use modular units to construct 24 studios. The funding of $6.8 million was secured, and the homes at 80 North Patterson Avenue should be finished by the end of the year.

The Heritage Ridge development occupies land at Los Carneros and Highway 101 where the last of Michael Towbes’s Willow Springs projects was sited. It is both a market-rate housing development by Red Tail developers, and a veterans, seniors, and special-needs families development by the county Housing Authority. While the two developers stay in contact, the two developments proceed separately for the most part.

Polanskey was upbeat as he told the council that the state’s Housing and Community Development staff had given their request for Homekey+ funding a positive recommendation, but it now awaits a meeting of the commissioners in a couple of weeks. He asked the councilmembers, “Think good thoughts for Homekey+!”