Anson Stevens-Bollen
The city announced a handful of immediate action items to address homelessness and public safety on the Cerrillos Road corridor.
More pallet shelters. Trauma-informed street outreach. A housing service center. These are some of the priority actions Mayor Alan Webber identified Oct. 18 to address homelessness and public safety with a specific focus on the Cerrillos Road corridor.
City officials announced the forthcoming actions—which also include a master lease program to prioritize housing for vulnerable groups and an internal city team dedicated to the area—that form part of a larger Homelessness Emergency Action Plan to be revealed at a later date.
Webber tells SFR ongoing safety concerns from residents regarding activity in the Cerrillos Road corridor make it “the first order of business.”
“The Cerrillos Road corridor is in an emergency situation, and we need to call it for what it is,” Webber says, noting the area accounts for roughly 3% of all calls for service to city police. “That’s already an enormous commitment of time and resources, but I do think we need to have a steady, stable and predictable level of eyes on the street and people on the scene, so that we change the feeling as well as the facts on Cerrillos Road. It’s not just the optics, it’s what goes on there.”
In order to address both security and continue efforts from the Built for Zero team to achieve its goal of establishing a by-name list of unhoused individuals, Webber says the city is already in the process of working up a contract for the trauma-informed street outreach team. The city joined the efforts in March 2019.
“This will provide a physical presence up and down the Cerrillos corridor of people who are very well skilled in interceding with individuals who may be having the worst day of their life. They may be homeless, they may simply be mentally ill. They may have no other place to go. They need to be engaged with, and they need to have treatment options offered to them,” Webber says. “It’s a real skill to do that. You don’t just send well-meaning people out there, because it really does take a lot of work to build that trust and level of engagement.”
The city also announced it would use a month-to-month lease with the Interfaith Community Shelter’s Pete’s Place after a years-long lease expired Oct. 14. The city now plans to phase out the shelter.
Residents, however, have questions about new proposals and feel out of the loop about efforts, they tell SFR. Bill Adrian, a member of the Casa Alegre Neighborhood Association who lives within a half mile of Pete’s Place, says he’d like to see increased communication from those leading the project, perhaps in the form of a monthly newsletter.
“So as a citizen, I’ve got these trauma-informed outreach people, I’ve got alternative response units, I’ve got park rangers that respond to encampments, and I’ve got police,” Adrian says. “Who the hell do I call? Do I call 911, and then they decide? It’s very confusing.”
Furthermore, Interfaith Community Shelter Executive Director Korina Lopez tells SFR while she was aware of several aspects of the immediate action plan, city officials did not communicate that the emergency shelter would phase out.
“The phasing out—I don’t know what to say to that. It’s not like we were approached by the city,” Lopez says. “Everybody’s out of the loop, in my opinion, so some of this is new to me, and it would be great if we knew what the city was planning.”
The Interfaith Community Shelter and the city have collaborated on other efforts to help the unhoused in recent months. In March, Interfaith launched a mobile-hygiene unit leased from the city at three locations to provide showers and services.
Webber says the new plan to phase out the Cerrillos Road shelter represents “a much more agile and nimble approach to rehousing people” where people using Pete’s Place will have discrete alternatives.
“We know that there are roughly 80 individuals who are guests at Pete’s Place, and probably among those 80 are at least a couple dozen people who have been living at Pete’s Place every night for several years, which was really never the mission or the purpose,” he says, noting the shelter was initially established to prevent folks from freezing in winter weather. “The goal now is to reduce the density of people who are unhoused who are at Pete’s Place to something more stable and then ultimately to supportive housing.”
City officials approved a plan in March 2023 to purchase 25 pallet homes it intended to utilize for SOS sites using up to $1 million from the American Rescue Plan Act.
In April, the city launched its first pallet home location—coined a Safe Outdoor Space—in collaboration with Christ Lutheran Church and The Life Link, which the City Council and Webber approved contracts totaling $828,368 to establish in December 2023. The church hosts 10 pallet shelters, which house 11 people and five pets, and include electricity, heating and cooling. Life Link helps run the site and connects people to additional services.
Now, Community Health and Safety Director Henri Hammond-Paul, who took over the role with the city last month and will lead the larger plan to come, tells SFR the planned program expansion will create several new “micro-communities” across the city over the course of the next few months as officials identify city-owned land and close out on a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) process city leaders began in August to select a second private host site and service provider for one of the additional pallet shelter communities.
The RFQ released by the city seeks host sites and services providers for up to 50 standalone structures. City officials recently approved a budget amendment resolution that dedicated $812,325 to fund the purchase of additional pallet shelters and hygiene units, which formed part of one-time investments Webber announced during his annual State of the City address in May.
Yet Webber couldn’t identify how much the city’s Cerrillos Road corridor plan would cost or what the specific timeline is.
“There are a number of steps that all have to come together,” the mayor says. “I don’t want to go on record as saying it will be exactly this much or it’ll be exactly this time, but we’re going to focus on this.”
Lopez, however, pushed back on the notion that there is a density issue at the shelter, noting Pete’s Place is currently not at capacity. Furthermore, she adds the phasing out plan is better on paper than in practice, as many of the long-term guests of Pete’s Place are “much more complex cases” of homelessness. Interfaith staff, she adds, does try to engage people and connect them to services—often unsuccessfully.
“It’s almost like there’s this idea that there’s not an effort on our part to engage those people, which isn’t accurate, but a lot of them are people with memory care issues or early stages of dementia; other people with undiagnosed mental or physical health issues who won’t engage. And we’re low barrier, so we’re not going to deny people’s shelter because they don’t want to engage,” she says. “So for those individuals, they are the hardest to engage because I, again, cannot force anybody to, and the city knows that…why am I being asked to consult in other places around the state if my own city isn’t even asking me how I feel about all of this?”
