November Housing & Homelessness Update

Concord has a huge housing crisis — the lack of has kept 800 residents unhoused turning the City of Concord into a tent city with Concord residents in need of urgent help. The Homelessness Action Team has been advocating for a tiny home village, and safe tent and parking spaces with access to bathrooms, showers, waste management, and coordinated support services to get unhoused individuals into permanent housing. The shortage of affordable housing has made the city council’s task almost impossible. This is why we’re asking for temporary and long-term solutions that keep our unhousing neighbors from costly police and public works sweeps, which push individuals from one corner of Concord to another neighborhood. This is no solution!

Your support by sending emails and speaking up at council meetings has helped pressure City Council to assign the Housing and Economic Development (HED) Committee to address the issue. The HED committee proposed to the Council that the City hire a Community Services Manager and a Social Worker to work towards addressing Concord’s homelessness crisis. We’ll learn more in the next few months once those positions get posted.

What’s next? We need your support.

Join us Tuesday, Dec. 14th at 6:30PM. Concord City Council will consider recommendations from the Housing and Economic Development Committee (HED) regarding the following:

• Allocation of Permanent Local Housing Allocation (PLHA) grant funds. At the last HED meeting, we asked Mayor McGallian and Council member Birsan to include as recipients of the PLHA grant and in their “qualification category” unhoused individuals who normally don’t qualify for shelter/housing assistance via CORE, Shelter Inc, and other housing organizations. They slightly extended their category to include supporting unhoused individuals, for example, who are able to pay their own rent after receiving some initial housing assistance of roughly 6mns. This still leaves a significant amount of unhoused neighbors on the streets and exposed to costly police sweeps. The PLHA grant is limited, so we need to ask the city council to direct staff to keep looking for more grants, opportunities to acquire land to develop tiny home villages, and to stop sweeps.
• Adoption of a Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance. Let’s support Raise the Roof Concord and Concord’s tenants in ensuring they have a safe place to live, and from harassment from bad landlords. More details to come!

The Dec. 14th meeting agenda will be posted on the City’s agenda webpage on Friday the 10th before 5pm. If you’d like to join the Homelessness/Housing Action Team, and/or get more frequent updates please text Ady at 925-718-6438.