One two three. We're on the island. The island beat. There are stories on every street from the West Side to the East Side all around town.
Laura Thomas:Hello, Alameda. This is Laura Thomas. I'm sitting in for Angie Watson -Hajjem. I'm another member of our Island City Beat podcast collective. I'm stepping into this role as host and interviewer this week.
Laura Thomas:As other members of our group may do from time to time. We'll give Angie a break, but you can be assured Angie will be back next week. So today we're going to talk to Doug Biggs, who, just retired as director of the Alameda Point Collaborative after how many years? Twenty years. Twenty years.
Laura Thomas:Oh, boy. Yeah. Okay. So, welcome to the Island City Beat, Doug.
Doug Biggs:Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
Laura Thomas:Good, good, good. And I've known you for years. Yep. Yep. Two decades I've spent trying to get affordable housing built in Alameda, so we were often
Doug Biggs:Working together.
Laura Thomas:Same city council meetings speaking in favor of the same projects.
Doug Biggs:Fighting off the same opponents.
Laura Thomas:Absolutely. Trying to get, you know, trying to make it easier for people to stay in Alameda. So, I ask you about the Wellness Center, could you tell us briefly, for those who may not have caught Angie's interview with Andrea, what does APC do?
Doug Biggs:Sure, APC, the Alameda Point Collaborative, is a permanent supportive housing program, which means it provides permanent housing for families and individuals who have been homeless and were homeless at the time of application. In addition to the safe housing, we also provide case management, job training, career development, and education and activities for the youth that are in our housing as well. We're located primarily out at Alameda Point, but we do have two other projects underway, one, the McKay Avenue Wellness Center, which we're going to talk about today, and then in collaboration with the housing authority, the Estuary one and two projects up on North Housing. The unique factor in the connectiveness of all those is those are all federal conveyances of property. And we've done more federal conveyances of property than probably any other jurisdiction in The United States.
Laura Thomas:Really? Yep. Really? With those two?
Doug Biggs:Well, three. This, North Housing and Alameda Point.
Laura Thomas:Oh, okay. Right. The original project taking over those. So what did you take over originally?
Doug Biggs:We took over about 200 units of Old Navy housing on the Eastern Side Of Alameda Point and some warehouses and other commercial buildings.
Laura Thomas:Okay. So they were the houses of families?
Doug Biggs:They were the houses of families, primarily enlisted and some officer housing. Right. We're now, and that'll be another story.
Laura Thomas:Right.
Doug Biggs:But we're starting on the process of rebuilding all that housing and adding on another additional 139 units of housing.
Laura Thomas:Right, and I know how far that goes back because I remember talking to the staff like fifteen years ago.
Doug Biggs:And advocating with the city around making sure that enough affordable housing was built on Alameda Point.
Laura Thomas:Right. Oh, gosh. That's another story. We'll have to go back to that the other But, you know, so anyway, with the wellness center, which is here at McKay where we're talking to each other, it was a federal government site and it had a lot of different functions. Could you just briefly tell us what was here?
Doug Biggs:Sure. So the site was built in towards the end of World War two at by the Maritime Department or division. It was a Maritime school teaching captains and engineers to be able to to run the liberty ships that were being churned out, you know, in Oakland and up in Richmond and whatnot. And they the campus was over 100 acres, including everything that's Crab Cove, all the way up to Central Avenue where the strip mall is up there and then the condominiums that are across the street from here were all part of that military complex, had administrative offices, had a gymnasium, a swimming pool, large parade grounds. And then it had a, you know, it had the boathouse, which is still in existence down by the water, which was a practice conning bridge for the captains to practice on and also on the roof of that, they would practice semaphores.
Doug Biggs:And there was actually a jetty that came out from Crab Cove that Liberty ships could come up to at that time, and then they would practice. They got to practice on the Liberty ships, they were practicing in rowboats. And you'll see old pictures of these ship captains rowing back and in Crab Cove in rowboats. Anyway, that's how it started out. And then after the war, one of the pieces of history that's interesting and maybe not surprising in Alameda was that the intent of the federal government was to transform this into a halfway house.
Doug Biggs:And that was roundly defeated.
Laura Thomas:Oh, boy.
Doug Biggs:Yeah, that sounds Yeah. The community, much to our surprise. Yeah. Yeah. But it's kind of interesting that this, you know, there was this history of wanting to use this as kind of a recovery place that's been fought every year.
Laura Thomas:You know, don't think I've ever heard that before.
Doug Biggs:No. There's a lot of history that people haven't heard about this site. For example, after the war, it was turned into offices for a variety of different agencies, from the Marines to the Environmental Protection Agency to the Bureau of Indian Affairs
Laura Thomas:Okay.
Doug Biggs:In the seventies during the the very contentious era when BIA's mission was to kind of assimilate Native Americans in the Western culture and Western religions. You had the boarding schools and you had, you know, the occupation
Laura Thomas:Alcatraz, right.
Doug Biggs:Well, a branch of that same group bombed this building that we're in now, which which is where the BIA was was located.
Laura Thomas:What? In 1970 or '69?
Doug Biggs:Somewhere around then. Yeah. There's an old article that I I came across. And that was one of the things we did in in the conveyance of this, is we really dug deep into the history of this site so that we would know what it actually was, what was important here. And it's things like that that, you know, people kind of glommed on to, oh, it's historic.
Laura Thomas:Oh, yeah.
Doug Biggs:But totally ignored the really important stories that have gone on here. Right. And particularly in the case of, you know, the BIA bombing, I think it has to be acknowledged, And we do have plans for some street art that'll talk about the various components of the history, including that. But it doesn't have to be maintained, you know, in some ways, it's better that any remembrance of that is
Laura Thomas:Yeah, I was going to ask you about that a little later in the interview. So maybe hang
Doug Biggs:on
Laura Thomas:for that for a Yeah, you talk about
Doug Biggs:that, sure.
Laura Thomas:Just because if I could stay on my course, it'll be, we'll cover everything.
Doug Biggs:Just to finish kind of the background of So after all of the agencies had a part of
Laura Thomas:it. Yeah.
Doug Biggs:In latter years, it was turned over entirely to the US Department of Agriculture. And they used it as a site for testing contaminants at dairy and poultry no, dairy and meat production facilities. And so the main building, Building 1, was turned into laboratories, and Building 2, where we're sitting now, was all the administrative and technical offices for the site. And then they were here until 2017 when a brand new laboratory up in Richmond was opened up, and that's when the federal government declared it suitable for conveyance to homeless. We applied.
Laura Thomas:Okay, so I'm right. I was going to ask you, so the buildings were abandoned or I don't know if the word abandoned is proper, but released in 2017. Yep. Okay, and so at that point, when did you get this idea?
Doug Biggs:Well, so we actually got a notice from the city saying, you know, they received this flyer from the federal government saying it's building surplus. The city had no intentions on asking for its conveyance, and they reached out to us and some other providers to see if we were interested in pursuing it. And so that kicked off this process that ended up being very challenging and a lot of work. The simple way to start is we just sent an email to the federal HHS Health and Human Services Department, which is they're the agency in charge of conveyances, which is kind of interesting because it used to be HUD. And for whatever reason, the federal government switched it over to HHS, who has no expertise in real estate or anything like that to be in charge of conveying real estate.
Doug Biggs:So it's kind of problematic. But we just sent a simple email saying we're interested. And
Laura Thomas:But what did you have? What was when did your idea, your vision
Doug Biggs:for it were? They opened it up for a tour. We came down with a tour. And we had we invited I mean, I remember I invited everybody from the president of the College of Alameda to the superintendent to a number of different providers and folks, you know, locally, the other homeless service providers, staff in the county. So there were about 10 or 12 of us.
Doug Biggs:And we came down to this site. You know, it kind of coalesced very quickly. We were all sitting around a picnic table over at the Crab Cove, and everybody had the sense that this is a really restorative site. It's just you feel peaceful when you get on-site. Almost everybody is commenting.
Laura Thomas:So you were you thinking of housing when you walked down that day or did you have a bigger
Doug Biggs:We kind of plan idea? We kind of scaled it down. We were thinking of housing because this site is zoned as administrative professional, so you're not allowed to have housing. But we'll circle back to that in a little bit because some things have changed subsequently. And we knew we didn't want a high impact use, like a drop in center, a day drop in center, or a parking center, just because we knew what the neighborhood was like.
Doug Biggs:And we knew kind of, you know, because I don't know if you remember, but a few years prior to this, there was another piece of federal property that was sold, and that went into a whole lawsuit.
Laura Thomas:I remember that.
Doug Biggs:So we knew that, any high impact use would be challenging. And folks from the county said, you know, two things. We really need a respite. We have people dying on the street all the time.
Laura Thomas:So it's county health people?
Doug Biggs:Yeah, county health and homeless services. Okay. And then, you know, that also acknowledging that, you know, people 55 and older are the fastest growing homeless population in the county and the most likely to die while they're homeless. So and other folks that were involved in some of the discussions, like College of Alamo said, it's a beautiful site. We can't use it.
Doug Biggs:You know, school board, their school district also, same thing. So it kind of we winnowed down the players, and it the county and a couple, you know, organizations that provide medical services for homeless. And very quickly, that's what we settled in on because it just, it made the most sense and the highest and best use of this site.
Laura Thomas:Yes, I can understand So, can you tell me, you know, so the county identified respite care. So that means there's a need for people that are elderly to get respite care. But then you didn't describe the type of person that could
Doug Biggs:Yeah, I mean, respite care is for people of all ages. But just imagine. And so I could use a real life example.
Laura Thomas:Yeah, that I'd like
Doug Biggs:Of myself. So, you know, after I retired in December, I decided the best thing to do was to need to have open heart surgery. So in March, I had open heart surgery. And when I got home, I had a lot of care. I had a very safe environment.
Doug Biggs:I was able to store all my medicines. I had somebody checking in on me all the time, access to doctors. If you're homeless, you don't have any of that. So, you know, that creates problems on two fronts. One is hospitals have a hard time discharging somebody who's homeless because they don't have a place to discharge them to.
Laura Thomas:And they're required to.
Doug Biggs:Yeah, and they're required to have a place. And so that takes up emergency room beds and intensive care beds that could be used by other folks. And then, you know, on the other side of the thing, it's harder for homeless to get that level of care. You know, in some cases, can't get dialysis or things like that unless you have a place, steady place to stay or an operation like mine. You know, even that, it would be almost impossible to do that.
Doug Biggs:So there's a huge need for respite. And there are respite beds in Alameda County. They are, for the most part, they're located in shelters. So they're kind of adapting existing spaces to that, and they're not really fully suitable for a respite setting. And that was one of the other things that became obvious to us is we had a really unique opportunity to build to suit a facility for respite care.
Laura Thomas:Respite care for seniors or for the and also with support for people who had been homeless.
Doug Biggs:Yeah. And it's not just for seniors, but it's any age. But most of the people that that are, you know, taking up space, not I don't want to say taking up space, but who struggling in hospitals and don't have a place to go are elder. But there's, you know, there's also some younger folks that
Laura Thomas:are Oh, I see. So this respite center will be open to people of all ages who don't have any place to go.
Doug Biggs:Right. And there will be really, you know, a couple of different pathways here. One will be from the hospitals. So we'll have a nurse on-site that is in charge of enrollment and bringing people in. So they'll do the case management to see if the person is suitable for this type of service and work with the hospitals.
Doug Biggs:But we're also going to be working with street medicine teams so that people who are on the street in order to avoid hospitalization, let's say they have a wound that needs care, they can come directly to the street and get the care here at a lower level.
Laura Thomas:In other words, they really don't need. This is actually a rehabilitation facility, this respite care.
Doug Biggs:In many ways, yeah, yeah, yeah. To recover, I don't want to say recovery because people think of drug recovery. Right. You know, after you've had surgeries or like that, you need a safe space to recover. Right.
Doug Biggs:And rehabilitate, yeah. Right. The average stay will be about sixty to ninety days. And while they're here, they'll be connected with a permanent health care provider, whether it's Lifelong Medical is our medical provider here on-site, and they have clinics all over the Bay Area, as do other providers. So one of the key things they'll be doing is connecting respite patients with those medical providers so that when they leave here, they're no longer dependent on emergency rooms for primary care.
Doug Biggs:They'll have a primary care
Laura Thomas:visit. That's important.
Doug Biggs:Yeah, that they can connect with and stay on top of things. And then also, a lot of work will be done on trying to secure housing, you know, more permanent.
Laura Thomas:Because you assume most of these people will be homeless. Will there be some people that risk losing
Doug Biggs:their homes? Not in the respite center. They'll all be homeless.
Laura Thomas:Okay.
Doug Biggs:Yeah.
Laura Thomas:All right. Cause I understand that sometimes people that have are, you know, living on the edge, if they end up in a long hospital stay, does the government use that money that they get for their hospital stay and then they end up not being able to make the rent?
Doug Biggs:Well, that's more if you're in like long term disability. Know, the federal government requires you to use your own resources and
Laura Thomas:Oh, okay. Yeah. All right.
Doug Biggs:I mean, if somebody was at risk of becoming homeless and went into the hospital, they would probably get put onto the county coordinated entry list, which prioritizes people. And if they were at a priority level, then they would probably come to our attention.
Laura Thomas:Okay, okay.
Doug Biggs:All
Laura Thomas:right. So it's quite the process and what are some of the other agencies that are working with you or are they? Because I assume that you're getting funding from?
Doug Biggs:Well, we got funding from a lot of places. Our largest funder is the state of California. We got both from Department of Health and Social Services a large grant, which was actually put through the general fund by our assembly member at that time, Rob Bonta and Senator Nancy Skinner sponsored a bill to get that funding. And then we've also got major funding about, I got to get it right, 20,000,000 from coordinated or community care expansion grants from the Department of Health, the State Department of Health. And that's a grant that goes towards building new facilities.
Doug Biggs:And then the county has been a major funder. And then a lot of different foundations, a lot of the foundations, the healthcare foundations, Kaiser, Alameda Alliance, Sutter Health, California Wellness Foundation have been funders of the program.
Laura Thomas:So is any of this threatened under the big beautiful bill?
Doug Biggs:Well, we've already spent that. No, and we didn't get any federal money for that, for the respite center.
Laura Thomas:Oh, okay.
Doug Biggs:We have significant federal money funding for the senior housing, which will be the next part of the project, and that's 106 units of permanent supportive housing for seniors. We got a large grant at the beginning of the year from HUD. Every time we call and we get the same person, we're thrilled that they're still working there.
Laura Thomas:Oh my But,
Doug Biggs:you know, with the current administration, you just have no way of knowing with the long term.
Laura Thomas:But most of your funding is not federal, it sounds like.
Doug Biggs:No, it's not. And the funding we do have, I mean, nice thing about HUD funding is that was from last year's budget. Okay. So it sounds like the administration is focusing more effort on next year's budget. And that's okay with us because
Laura Thomas:Okay. Well, we can exhale because it's been a long process anyway. And so, let's talk about the struggle to get it approved, which I remember somewhat well. There was a lot of, I mean, when you proposed it, the council was happy. There was quite a bit of community support, but there was some pretty stubborn opposition.
Laura Thomas:Can you remind me what happened?
Doug Biggs:Sure, I mean, yeah, let's talk about the local opposition, and then I'll come back and talk about what the real not opposition, but barriers to success were on this project. The local opposition started from the neighbors across the street who assumed because they'd been so successful in stopping this other piece of property turned into housing, that they could use the same tactics and stop this from being turned into housing. Right. And so they, just as they did with the other one, they launched an initiative campaign and to put, you know, language on the ballot that would require this space to be open space. To be a park.
Doug Biggs:Ignoring the fact that East Bay Regional Parks and the City Park Department said, we don't want it, we can't use it, we wouldn't take it.
Laura Thomas:There would be no money for it.
Doug Biggs:Yeah. It was the primary funder of that was the gentleman that owns Neptune Plaza.
Laura Thomas:Right.
Doug Biggs:Mr. Mall up here who lives up in Danville and who made no secret of the fact that he really wanted more parking for his plaza. Ironically, he's now got plans to put housing up on top of Neptune Plaza. So he's, maybe he's becoming You mean create
Laura Thomas:a story or something?
Doug Biggs:Or more. Really? Three or four stories.
Laura Thomas:So maybe he's That is very ironic.
Doug Biggs:A housing advocate. I don't know. Maybe we brought him over to our side. So they lost the initiative. It was They told law, I remember some of It was extremely ugly.
Laura Thomas:Signature gatherers said, well, we'll block all high rise housing there.
Doug Biggs:Right, they had paid signature gatherers. Really? Some of their, they photoshopped homeless encampments in front of this building. They put articles in the paper saying that if this got built, there would no longer be concerts at The Cove. Just some amazing, amazing, you know, fabrications of the truth.
Doug Biggs:They weren't successful. We a counter measure on the ballot that won.
Laura Thomas:Yeah, I think the city council was very clever when they put that countermeasure because it was more the measure asked us to approve it. Right. And then the other measure asked for a park.
Doug Biggs:Well, I mean, they were both that's basically what they did. The city measure actually just asked the community to reaffirm the decision made by the city council. Exactly. And that decision was just to not rezone the property, or actually to rezone it from government to non government. That was the only change they made.
Doug Biggs:The neighbors also launched the CEQUA lawsuit, which took a lot of time, almost a year and a lot of money to fight and finally defeat. And during the during the campaign, the the initiative campaign, the one nice thing about it is it gave us opportunity to to get out a lot of information. So we held a lot of town hall meetings here. We had Wilma Chan come to one and talk about why this was necessary. And even though it was county supported, that it was going to benefit everybody, including this community.
Doug Biggs:And so it was a great opportunity to educate the community about what we were doing. And also a great opportunity for us to hear from the community about what their concerns were, safety being a primary one, and how we could address some of those. After the lawsuit, then kind of the last gasp that was done by one individual who I think wanted to talk to the manager because she couldn't went totally crazy on this. But she fabricated a proposal to the state to have this turned into a historic site. And by fabrication, mean she portrayed that she was head of the Alameda Architecture and Historic Society which she wasn't even
Laura Thomas:Yeah, architecture. What do we call it? Yeah. Oh my goodness.
Doug Biggs:Architectural preservation Yeah. Association
Laura Thomas:or something. Yeah.
Doug Biggs:And that also got denied at the state level. So every one of the attempts to stop it was denied. You know, the bigger piece of it though is the folks that were involved in that abused the process so much that they really broke it. It
Laura Thomas:got a lot because I thought this is really not the intention of architectural preservation legislation to block a modified social welfare And there's
Doug Biggs:laws going through the legislature now to not allow, you know, the historic preservation process to be used to stop affordable
Laura Thomas:Yes, I'm really glad to hear The
Doug Biggs:city has limited the number of appeals and reviews that could be done on any given project. We've seen the city put in place time limits for council members. Almost all of that was due to the abuse of the process. At the state level now, a lot of there's some legislation that's been passed, others that are underway that require somebody filing a sequel lawsuit to put up a bond of $500,000 if it's against affordable housing or other homeless service programs. And a lot of that comes from the same very small but vocal group of people that were so abusive and so willing to bend whatever process they could to try and stop this, that they broke it.
Doug Biggs:So,
Laura Thomas:you know Yeah, exactly. And I wanna bring up the fact that it was particularly, I don't know what you could call it, stark abuse in the sense because really the community of Alameda very widely supported this project. Yeah,
Doug Biggs:yeah, there was really no, it wasn't like, well, maybe they do, maybe they don't. It was a very clear all along. I mean, you know, at city council meetings, the number of supporters were just, you know Yeah,
Laura Thomas:people were not afraid. Was very impressed with a way Alameda matured in a way.
Doug Biggs:The community really showed up for this. The largest obstacle, though, has been the federal government. So they again, as I said, it's managed by HHS. Since the law it comes from a law called the Title V of McKinney Vento, and that governs all federal commands as a property of homeless services. And basically, it requires the federal government to compile a list.
Doug Biggs:HUD reviews the properties to see which ones are suitable for homeless services and which ones aren't. And if they're suitable, then it goes to HHS and a notice goes out. And HHS has this process for it's like a three stage application process. And each stage gets much more complicated and expensive to do. So since that law has been passed, there's been 40,000 properties declared surplus.
Doug Biggs:10,000 were considered suitable for homeless services. But only 88 sites have successfully gone through the process and turned that 88 out of Doctor. 10,000
Laura Thomas:have
Doug Biggs:become homeless service sites. And we have three here in Alameda. That's three out of 88. That's for any jurisdiction, that's The Us. And it's because HHS makes the process so difficult.
Doug Biggs:They they don't try and, you know, bring organizations in. They try to weed them out however they can. And they set the bar really high. The level of detail they require, it probably costs us about $1,000,000 to do the entire application process. And most organizations wouldn't have that fund.
Doug Biggs:We were very fortunate that the county was so committed to this site, they said, Here's the money.
Laura Thomas:So they helped, they paid for Yeah.
Doug Biggs:Wow. And, you know, like I said, locally, that people, you know, bet the process so much they've broken it, and it's now gotten better. The same thing is happening at the federal government, although not nearly fast enough. There's been a strong movement over the last couple of years to change the Title V language to make it much more accessible to organizations.
Laura Thomas:When was that put in place at Title V?
Doug Biggs:I want to say the latest language was back in so it was put in place in the '80s or '90s, but it changed to HHS in 2017 from HUD. And since 2017, there's only been a handful of properties conveyed.
Laura Thomas:I see.
Doug Biggs:They were
Laura Thomas:supposed to be So they really don't know what to do with real estate, so they just sit there and
Doug Biggs:Well, whole focus is on how do they protect the government and not, you know, not how do you get housing or whatever for homeless people. Wow. Anybody that's a provider in the homeless sector knows this is really challenging work. It's high risk work. You know, it's not hard to fail in what you're doing when you're serving the homeless.
Doug Biggs:So you walk into it prepared to do that. But HHS's perspective is, well, we can't have any of this. We can't have the government on the hook for any of this. So. So that's what they're worried about.
Laura Thomas:Yeah. So that's why it's taken so long. Really, it hasn't been, you know, people trying to challenge it based on historical. Right.
Doug Biggs:Right. I mean, that's added to it. COVID added to it. One of the measurements that I use personally, unfortunately in our progress, is that during the time that we were in the lawsuit and the initiative and historic process, fourteen homeless people died on our streets here in Alameda over those periods, over that period.
Laura Thomas:That's how many years was that?
Doug Biggs:That was like almost three years.
Laura Thomas:Okay. Yeah. So, we do have homeless people dying even here in Alameda on
Doug Biggs:our streets. On very regular basis. Okay.
Laura Thomas:So, we've covered funding and I'm interested in something too that you said early on that this would be a model for the country. Is it still a one of a kind conceptual project?
Doug Biggs:Well, there's been a couple other respite centers built over the last couple of years in other parts of the country.
Laura Thomas:For a home that's similar.
Doug Biggs:They're homeless similar and have been built from the ground up. But this is still a model very much so in the I mean, have put a lot of work into the design itself so that it's very trauma informed and really nurturing of the patients who will be here. But also the fact that we've put it together at the campus so that the senior housing will also access the clinic that's being set up in the respite center for their health needs. It's just a very
Laura Thomas:So there's a clinic. Is the clinic and the respite center one That's one facility.
Doug Biggs:Okay. Yeah.
Laura Thomas:And the housing will be permanent housing?
Doug Biggs:Yes.
Laura Thomas:For people who come through the respite center?
Doug Biggs:Not necessarily. I mean, will, but they'll come out of the county coordinated entry.
Laura Thomas:Okay, so it'll be for seniors.
Doug Biggs:Seniors and with medical conditions.
Laura Thomas:Oh, they have to have medical conditions. Okay, so they've got some ongoing debilitating medical condition, aside from being old.
Doug Biggs:Right, besides from being old. And we'll have both in respite and at the both of the respite center and here in senior housing will have hospice capabilities
Laura Thomas:as Okay, okay. And isn't there one other facility you planned? There is a resource center.
Doug Biggs:A resource center in the corner of the respite center that'll have two case managers, a computer library and some other facilities. And that's really focused on what you were talking about earlier, is people who are either at risk of becoming homeless or newly homeless. Reason we're targeting that, and this is really an experiment, but the entire coordinated entry system now, both here in Alameda County and in most places, is focused on people who have been homeless the longest, chronically homeless. And there's such a shortage of services, such a shortage of housing, that all of those resources are exhausted on folks that are chronically homeless. So somebody who's just becoming homeless has to wait a long time.
Doug Biggs:We're talking years and years and years before they'll come to the top of the coordinated entry list. And so the thinking is, well, everybody talks about it is let's stop homelessness before it occurs or at least, you know, make that time on the street as short as possible. And they're really, it's just all the resources are going to the chronically homeless. There hasn't been that opportunity to do that. So we want to try that here.
Doug Biggs:There's been, you know, since we started the planning, a lot has changed and there's now, I don't know if it'll be next year, but now, you know, some of the Medi Cal Medicare money can be used for like short term, mid term rental subsidies.
Laura Thomas:I see, because I was gonna ask you what resources will these people have? Know, And all the other shelters and everything else are taken. Know, we're gonna be,
Doug Biggs:you know, our case managers are gonna be really innovative and looking out for what's the best opportunities out there. It's gonna be a whole menu of opportunities. You know, could be that somebody's just barely making rent. And so maybe they need a better job additional so they'll get referred to an employment
Laura Thomas:I see. See. That's pretty comprehensive.
Doug Biggs:May be, you know, somebody needs to reunite with their family, and so we'll work on family reunification. That may mean that there's a need for, you know, like lighter subsidies for six months to a year. So we'll put in place those. There's a lot of interest in, from different folks, you know, from the city, from the county, in having this kind of as a pilot project and seeing what can be done.
Laura Thomas:Okay, very good. Very good. This is, I mean, we've been looking forward to it for a So what's the target date?
Doug Biggs:So the target date right now is March the next year. Initially, it was supposed to open in August of this year, but we've had some construction delays, unavoidable construction delays. Fortunately, the project is not going over budget. Okay. So well within the budget, which is good.
Doug Biggs:Okay.
Laura Thomas:So this isn't due to any more problems at the federal level?
Doug Biggs:No this is due to the weather, due to the tiles we need not being available.
Laura Thomas:Oh, well, never know what that's all about.
Doug Biggs:Different things like that.
Laura Thomas:Okay. Well, that's great, Doug. I mean, we've I think we've probably covered oh, what will the name be?
Doug Biggs:Good question. And I'm glad you asked because I keep it. So the campus as a whole has been named the Beacon.
Laura Thomas:Oh, okay.
Doug Biggs:Just kind of as a, you know, Beacon
Laura Thomas:That's a nice word. It does kind of imply it's a place that's gonna draw people.
Doug Biggs:Then the respite center is being called Arnold's Place. And it's named after Arnold Perkins, who is an amazing man. He was department or executive or director of the Alameda County Health Department. He was the homeless director for Alameda County. He was the executive director at the San Francisco Foundation, is a longtime community advocate, and he's everybody's baba.
Laura Thomas:Really?
Doug Biggs:He just he knows everybody in Alameda County. And he very early on became interested in this project and and would would call up the members of the Board of Supervisor he knows very well and he says, You don't fund this. You don't deserve to be on the Board of Supervisor.
Doug Biggs:He said, This is our chance to really help, as he refers to them, our unhoused neighbors. Right. And our unhoused relatives. So he has been adamant that this project has to happen. And it's really been a driving force, not just for the funders, but for us as well and keeping us going.
Doug Biggs:So he shuns honors. He doesn't have a lot of things named after him, so we finally Is
Laura Thomas:he retired or is he
Doug Biggs:Yes, he retired. He's been retired a long time, but he's still extremely active in the community, both as a mentor for young people starting out. Just a lot of things he's involved in.
Laura Thomas:The respite center will be called ...
Doug Biggs:The respite center will be called Arnold's place. The whole project and The resource center, we're still looking for a name. Okay. So we haven't settled on that yet.
Doug Biggs:Well if If your listeners know of a good name, please let us know.
Doug Biggs:Yeah.
Laura Thomas:Okay, well thank you, Doug. It's been a pleasure to talk to and get caught up on where we're going with a project that the city of Alameda and so many people were really, really passionate I
Doug Biggs:I promise there will be a wonderful grand opening. We're already beginning to plan that now and we'll let everybody know when that's gonna happen.
Laura Thomas:Okay. Well, thank you. Okay. Again, this is Laura Thomas and it's the Island City Beat Podcast. Thanks for listening and we will see you next time.