Monterey County's homeless services director on what it takes to house people

KAZU asked Monterey County's Director of Homeless Services, Roxanne Wilson, to sit down for an interview a year ago. She wanted to wait until two major projects were completed. Now, they finally are.

Hope Village in Watsonville and Sendero in Soledad are transitional housing facilities with support services for a combined 50 people.

Wilson recently spoke with KAZU's Elena Neale-Sacks.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and is an extended version of the interview broadcast on KAZU.

Elena Neale-Sacks: Why are these projects necessary, and what did it take to get them up and running?

Roxanne Wilson:  Both of those projects are specifically to serve people who are living in pre-identified encampments. We'll actually start with Watsonville—or Pájaro, I want to start with Pájaro.

Historically what's happened is either the County of Monterey, the County of Santa Cruz or the City of Watsonville would do an encampment cleanup, and people would just go to the other side [of the levee]. That's been going on for like a decade. And when I first got to the county, one of the first tasks that I was assigned was to prepare for us to do our annual cleanup of the Pájaro levee. And if anybody knows me, I hate cleanups. Like, I get it, I understand. But I hate them, especially when it comes down to people just not having alternative resources. That was kind of the beginning of those conversations, of, we can't do it like this anymore, because it's, 1.) very costly, 2.) ineffective. So, how are we going to move forward in a more strategic way?

ENS:  For both of those projects, when were each of them proposed? And then, why did they take so long?

RW:  The Pájaro levee, that one we submitted in 2023. And then we submitted the application for Soledad in 2024, and they opened about two weeks apart from each other. The difference is, honestly, it's politics. There was a lot of opposition in the city of Watsonville. The Watsonville project was appealed twice. That was rough to get through. We had really relied on new state legislation, and, unfortunately, the State of California had to get involved in a way that was fairly aggressive, to just let everybody know, like, no, this is gonna happen. And eventually we got there.

In Soledad, there's also multiple jurisdictions—it's Caltrans, County of Monterey and Soledad that all touched this encampment along the Salinas River. The difference between Soledad and Pájaro is the city was such an incredible piece. They really held it down.

ENS:  What insight do the Watsonville and Soledad projects offer about the broader challenges that cities, counties and organizations face while trying to eliminate homelessness in their communities?

RW:  There's not any legislation that says who's in charge of addressing homelessness. So that's the first big problem. Especially when we were talking about different jurisdictions, if you don't have enough rapport to really delineate who's responsible for what, it can get pretty messy. I think in the future, I would certainly wanna make sure that we have written agreements with the city so that everyone knows that these are our roles and responsibilities.

ENS:  If you're comfortable sharing, I also want to hear how your own experience with homelessness has shaped your approach to your job.

RW:  Yeah, I think I'm starting to get more and more comfortable talking about that. So, for everybody who does not know, Roxanne Wilson at one point was living inside of her car with her daughter. I didn't even know homeless programs existed. So that is a crazy problem. I was in my mid-twenties, and I had no idea what a shelter was or transitional housing programs. I just didn't even know this world existed.

I think even though I never thought that I was gonna land here, my own personal experience has shown up throughout the whole entire time, and the amount of compassion that it takes, and understanding. When I fell into homelessness, I was working two jobs. And I was living in my car. So I hate that narrative that everybody is lazy. They just need to strap up their bootstraps. There's a lot of people who are working and do not have somewhere to live, and I think that that has been a big driver for me, is we are focusing on the wrong things. We need to focus on the real lived experience of individuals—trying to catch them early enough in their homelessness, and then also building specific programs for people who [have] been experiencing homelessness for a really long time.

ENS:  What are the main projects right now that you and your team are working on?

RW:  I'm still focusing a lot on taking care of our rural parts of our county. We are exploring doing a safe parking program in North County at this time. You know, oftentimes [when] people fall into homelessness, the first step is living in their cars. And, when you're living inside of your cars and you're racking up tickets or you go to work and you come back and your RV is taken, that is detrimental to people. So just really looking at exploring the potential of doing that in North County.

ENS:  How would you characterize where the state has been in recent years and to what extent do you agree with that approach and to what extent do you wish it were different?

RW:  Under [Gov.] Gavin Newsom, we've seen unprecedented investments from the state. From their perspective, I can see the frustration, right? They have put so much money into this, and there are many communities that are just trying to do the bare minimum.

I'm grateful to work for a county where our board of supervisors had adopted a policy that says we will try at least to get people connected to services. I think for the state the hard part is that they don't understand how crazy bureaucratic it is on the ground. It takes them like a year to create a law on the state level. It could take two, three years for us to figure out how to implement it locally.

ENS:  I do also want to talk about the federal changes.

RW: Oh, that's a fun one.

ENS: Yeah. Very quickly, the federal government has decided to abandon ship on Housing First as a strategy. And now the focus seems to be mostly temporary shelter and criminalizing homelessness.

RW:  I'm gonna tell you, it took me like 17 years to make enough money and figure out my life and clean up my credit and do all of those things that I needed to get into this position where I can breathe freely. Having this expectation that people can fix everything in six months is absurd. It's absolutely absurd.

What I'm learning is that there are those two different types of people, right? You have the people who are very much looking at it from the social component. They're more empathetic, more compassionate. You talk to those folks in a very specific way, like what I was just sharing with you—you humanize the individuals. And I think that what we did in the homeless sector where we failed is that we tried to speak that language to people who don't speak that language. So, for the other side, we need to talk more about numbers. We need to talk more about the impacts of allowing people to remain homeless. Not just what's gonna happen to that person, what's gonna happen to the infrastructure of the bridge.

Honestly, everyone is like one paycheck away, one horrible thing happening. And it happened to me, so it can happen to anyone.

ENS: What's your favorite part of the job?

RW:  Meeting people that something we did changed their lives. I'm gonna get emotional. That's my favorite thing. Favorite thing. I have been walking in public spaces and just a random person will come up to me and say, "you probably don't remember me, but...." Like, that is it. That's it. Because somebody believed. And that's all it takes for a lot of people. Humans are like that. You just need someone to believe that you can do it. We will have attrition. We will have people who are not ready to take the steps, and that's okay, because I just want to make sure we have a system that's there when they are.

ENS:  That feels like a good place to leave it. Do you have anything else that you wanted to say?

RW:  I'm gonna end on this. The last time we counted and there was a published number, it was, what, 2,436, something like that, number of people experiencing homelessness. Even if 2,436 people were perfect, we don't have 2,436 places for them to live, so we would still have homelessness. And I just ask that everybody really sit in that and understand that it is a very complex problem and it requires all sectors to move in the same direction, which is a beast to get done, but we're working on it.

ENS: Thank you, Roxanne.

RW: Thank you.