Redwood City – Amy Davidson learned early in her career that simply moving people indoors is not a solution to homelessness.
“The shelter I worked at had been a hotel at one point with a big ballroom with mats on the floor and blankets we would hand out,” Davidson said.
“I met a lot of elderly and seriously mentally ill people who I understood were going to be living in the shelter for the rest of their lives,” she said. “It’s great if it’s an alternate to being outside but I didn’t want people to spend the rest of their lives sleeping on the floor on these mats. That’s what got me really excited about permanent supportive housing.”
Davidson will now combine her compassion with two decades of experience as she charts a new path for the San Mateo County Center on Homelessness.
The Center has been elevated to a division of the County’s Human Services Agency with Davidson – formerly the deputy director of the Department of Health, Housing and Community Services for the City of Berkeley – as its head.
Claire Cunningham, director of the Human Services Agency, said the Center on Homelessness “has matured into the nerve center of the County’s efforts to achieve functional zero homelessness.”
“Functional zero” is achieved when the homeless services system is able to prevent homelessness whenever possible and ensure that when homelessness does occur, it is rare, brief and one-time.
“The intertwined issues of homelessness, the lack of affordable housing and the high cost of living are particularly acute in the Bay Area and must be met with increasing urgency,” Cunningham said. “The biggest challenge our homelessness system is facing is the lack of housing options to enable our clients to leave the shelters.”
That’s due in large part because no one person or agency is in charge.
The County plays a large role by funding many homelessness services as well as shelters. But many of those dollars come through the state and federal governments with their own expectations while land use, including the production of the vast majority of housing, is controlled by San Mateo County’s 20 towns and cities.
Davidson sees her role as bringing people with different ideas and alliances together to solve what everyone can agree is a crisis that defies jurisdictional boundaries.
“What strikes me is that San Mateo County seems super collaborative and people are trying to do their best and work together,” she said. “I think that’s a real strength.”
The commitment to ending homelessness includes opening San Mateo County’s first Navigation Center in April 2023, providing 240 units as a stepping stone to permanent housing.
“We know that housing ends homelessness. What I hope to be able to do is support more housing opportunities for people who are homeless and what role the Center on Homelessness can play in that,” Davidson said.
To further address homelessness, the Board of Supervisors has adopted the Hopeful Horizons: Empowering Lives initiative, which prioritizes providing services and shelter before enforcing a prohibition on encampments on public property in unincorporated areas.
The County also has secured state funding of $14.1 million to expand intensive homeless services across the county, which will aid chronically homeless individuals in transitioning to permanent housing.
“If there was one solution for homelessness, we would have it already and it wouldn’t be an issue. It’s very complicated,” Davidson said. “Everybody’s different. It takes all of these different systems and people looking at things together and working together to figure out what to do.”
Michelle Durand
Chief Communications Officer
mdurand@smcgov.org