Earlier this year, we published a story on the collective effort among several leading local nonprofits to address homelessness in Marin. Recently, we sat down with Mark Shotwell, the CEO of Ritter Center, to get an even deeper dive into what it means to be unhoused in Marin County.
But first, the good news: the county’s latest Point-in-Time Count of Marin’s homeless population, released in October, shows a downward trend: overall, homelessness has dropped in the county by 3% since 2022, with the number of “chronically homeless” individuals dropping by 24%. Chronic homelessness is defined as those individuals or families who’ve been homeless for more than a year or have been without a home on four or more different occasions. Often, they have co-occurring problems such as major medical issues or mental health issues.
Unlike some other regions in the Bay Area, we are headed in the right direction, even if there’s still work to do.
Shotwell’s take on homelessness is one borne of experience. At 22 years old, he was struggling with mental illness and substance abuse, with the potential of heading towards being homeless himself. Now 35 years sober, that highly relatable experience is what’s driven Shotwell to dedicate his professional life to helping others.
Let’s start by asking what homelessness looks like in Marin. It is more “hidden” than in other parts of the Bay Area?
While many Marin residents don’t see people who are experiencing homelessness on a daily basis, like the way they might in San Francisco or other parts of the Bay Area, our county has about 1,090 individuals who are either experiencing a temporary lack of housing, or are in a state of ‘chronic homelessness.’
Our ultimate goal at Ritter Center, along with other county partners, is to end chronic homelessness in Marin. For good.
That’s quite a lofty goal to end homelessness in Marin County. How could it be done?
The key lies in housing stabilization. Or more accurately, offering housing-first services geared to both getting the unhoused into housing, and by preventing others from losing their homes in the first place.
This isn’t exclusively our own approach; it’s a county-wide mission to put housing first with all of us on the front lines working together towards that mission.
At the end of the day, it is far less expensive and far less difficult to keep people housed than it is to rehouse people who’ve been on the streets, whether they’ve been that way for a few months or many years. So we work hard to not only identify those who need housing now but also those susceptible to losing their homes.
How does homelessness happen in Marin in the first place?
Luckily, most people in Marin aren’t one paycheck away from being homeless. They have resources, so even if they are faced with a crisis, there’s probably enough of a safety net there for them that they wouldn’t fall into that situation.
There’s a common misperception that homeless individuals show up from other places and are transient. The truth is, the majority of them are our neighbors. They are our community members. And, to me, that makes sense because if I ever personally became homeless, I wouldn’t go somewhere else.
Some individuals have a combination of co-occurring circumstances: medical issues, mental health issues and substance abuse, or a combo of these factors, which contribute to them ending up unhoused.
For many of our working-class folks living here — for example, grocery store clerks, service staff and even teachers — it’s a different reality. When one-bedroom apartments are $2,600 and up, not to mention the high cost of gas and groceries, it makes it tough to afford to live in Marin — especially when you don’t know what’s going to happen next year, or even next week. There are far too many working people here who are one paycheck away from being homeless.
At Ritter Center, we get heartbreaking calls regularly from people in their 60s and 70s who have worked their entire careers, are now retired and living on a fixed income. Some of them have a little bit of money in the bank to augment social security payments, but that money is going to run out in a few years, putting them in the position of not being able to afford rent any longer.
Then some people lost everything in the stock market in the last economic crash of 2008. They had money and they lost everything. 70% of the people who were homeless on the streets during that time originally had housing in Marin County. Today, that percentage hovers around 62%.
How do you find the people you serve?
It’s an individualized approach. We have outreach managers aiming to get to know each person on the street as well as their story. At the end of the day, the job of nonprofits, cities and counties is to get to know every person who’s homeless on the streets. Some openly want help, but there are always those who are highly resistant to help. I tell my staff every day, “If they’re not participating in services, you need to make yourself irresistible. You just need to get more creative.” It is our job to figure out how to engage, not to sit on the sidelines.
When I was doing outreach work myself, I remember meeting a man in his 30s who had been on the streets for 10 years, living with symptoms of schizophrenia. He was also addicted to methamphetamines. I bought him a burger, fries and a soda, because those were his terms to sit down with me and do an assessment. That same man ended up going to graduate school, is a social worker and now lives in Sacramento with his family.
We also meet people through our community events, such as our back-to-school backpack handouts and our Thanksgiving dinners and turkey distributions. Many of them start by initially visiting our food pantry. We register everyone who visits the pantry and share with them the other services Ritter Center provides, such as helping people get insurance and securing income, getting rental assistance and finding housing. We have both medical and behavioral healthcare services. There’s a whole range of things that we can do to help. But giving out food, that’s the least controversial thing we do.
Once they are in our system, we use a ‘vulnerability index’ to determine where they are in their experience with homelessness or susceptibility to becoming homeless in the future.
Interesting. How do you decide who gets help first?
For Ritter Center, we want to house the people who are the most vulnerable first — it’s not being dramatic to say we want to get to the people who may die on the streets if we don’t get to them. If it’s somebody who has a medical condition, a mental health condition and substance use, that tri-morbidity factor makes that person extra vulnerable out on the streets.
Veterans and seniors also top the list. Marin County developed a program to provide shallow rent subsidies to seniors who have recently become homeless, and Ritter Center is actively supporting this effort by serving in an advocacy capacity. This pilot program offers small subsidies for seniors who don’t qualify for traditional housing assistance because they have some income but are still at risk of homelessness. Each qualified senior receives a few hundred dollars each month toward rent to stabilize their housing. We’re hopeful this pilot will expand, with our advocacy efforts focused on influencing the state legislature.
There’s been a lot of talk about homeless encampments and new legislation allowing city officials to clear them. What’s your take?
There’s a general idea circulating that we should abate encampments and be tough on homelessness. However, no evidence says if you clear encampments aggressively that it will have any change in homelessness if you don’t already have a place for those people whom you wiped out of an encampment to go. In places like San Rafael and Novato, there are plans to provide support and services there as well as interim housing while they work on a permanent solution.
You deal with a lot of heavy stuff. How do you stay hopeful?
I appreciate this question. I stay hopeful because I’ve been doing housing first work for 20 years, and I see how it changes lives. Housing is the first step in intervention because it provides the foundation. Since 2017, between the county, Marin’s cities and the nonprofits, we’ve housed 737 of the most vulnerable individuals who were homeless. 94% of them are still housed.
In my youth, I had never had a functional life up to the point of my own recovery. I dealt with depression and anxiety as a kid which led to drug use. I needed someone to teach me how to live my life, and fortunately, I found that. Today I have three wonderful boys and a wife of 22 years. But it didn’t happen by accident; it started with people reaching out to me when I really needed it.
What also amazes me are the people who’ve been out there (on the streets) for 20 years or more who are still asking for help. They’re still saying, “gimme a shot.” The shock they have when we reach out and tell them if they join our program, we can get them housed. And once it happens, seeing the amazing things that people do to rebuild their lives and repair family relationships.
It’s so beautiful. I get to know these people and I feel like it’s a blessing in my life to do this work.
