New Santa Rosa homeless shelter for individuals with drug addiction and severe mental illness

Sebastian Brown became homeless five years ago after his sister downsized from her five-bedroom residence in Santa Rosa to a two-bedroom home in Lake County.

For years, Brown, 40, struggled on the streets with drug addiction, schizophrenia and depression. And, of course, there was hunger.

“I didn’t really do anything messed up, like steal from people or anything,” Brown said. “I just kind of suffered and went without.”

Today, Brown lives in a new Santa Rosa homeless shelter, where he is being offered a robust menu of on-site services, including case management, group therapy, crisis intervention, medication support services, recovery coaching, meditation and life skills instruction.

Soon, the shelter will also be equipped with a commercial kitchen.

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Arrowood resident Alex Gonzalez talks with therapist Dawn Ramey, Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025, in Santa Rosa (Kent Porter / The Press Democrat)

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The shelter, located on Arrowood Drive in southwest Santa Rosa, is a joint project between Sonoma County Behavioral Health division and Felton Institute, a Bay Area nonprofit that provides social and mental health services.

Unlike Sam Jones Hall in Santa Rosa or the Guerneville Veterans Memorial Building shelter, with large shared bunk rooms that resemble disaster evacuation centers, the new dorm-like shelter features 40 rooms that each accommodate two people, with enough staff to provide specialized mental health services.

“They have a registered nurse on staff who monitors people’s medications to make sure they take them for stabilization,” said David Evans, acute and forensic services section manager at the Sonoma County Department of Health Services, which includes the behavioral health division.

Evans likened the new facility to something between a residential treatment center and a typical homeless shelter. To get in, candidates must meet three basic requirements: be diagnosed with severe mental illness; be willing to receive treatment; and they must be homeless.

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Grant funded

During a recent tour of the new facility, Evans spoke about the county’s partnership with Felton Institute.

Under that partnership, county health staff will provide housing navigation services and help residents get treatment for mental health and substance use. Felton provides shelter services and onsite case management.

Felton staff help residents come up with a “treatment plan” that is essentially a long-term plan for recovery, said Elizabeth Quiroz, Felton Institute’s program manager at the shelter.

“It’s kind of like the goals of their long term housing, for finding employment, their goals of developing life skills, their goals of addressing any co-occurring disorders — drug abuse or alcoholism,” Quiroz said.

Funding for the shelter comes from a state program of the California Department of Health Care Services. The Behavioral Health Bridge Housing program, or BHBH, was authorized by a 2022 state law, and allocated $1 billion in funding to programs like the one on Arrowood Drive.

A large share of people who have been chronically homeless also have related mental health challenges, and treating those people in ways that gets them off the streets — and out of jails and emergency rooms — has been a persistent and expensive dilemma for California, which has the nation’s largest homeless population, at 187,000 in 2024.

Lease of the Arrowood Drive property for the period between 2023/24 to 2026/27 is about $2 million, and the total cost of bridge housing at Arrowood during that three year period is roughly $13 million.

Evans said many of the residents at the new shelter are likely people “stepping down” from conservatorship; people transitioning from jail with mental health needs; or patients existing the county’s emergency psychiatric facility, or another psychiatric hospital or crisis residential units.

The facility will also serve at-risk youth who are transitioning to adulthood and coming out of public programs such as foster care, Evans said.

In total, there are 43 bedrooms in the facility. An initial state grant allowed for 71 beds, two in each room. However, an additional grant made possible the addition of nine more beds, as well as the future construction of pet kennels and a dog run.

New ground for Felton Institute

For Felton Institute, the Arrowood Drive shelter represents somewhat new territory in its long history of providing social and mental health services in the Bay Area. The organization was founded in 1889 as the first nonsectarian relief organization under the name Associated Charities. The organization spearheaded relief efforts during the 1906 earthquake and fire that devastated San Francisco.

It was renamed the Felton Institute in 2014, after its early executive director Katharine “Kitty” Felton, a pioneering social worker from a prominent Bay Area family. Her father, John Brooks Felton, served as a judge and mayor of Oakland.

Curtis Penn, Felton division director for justice services, said the organization continues to evolve and expand into new services, with shelters being one of the latest additions. Penn said his organization currently runs a homeless safe parking program in San Francisco and recently took over a social services program with a small housing component.

But the Arrowood project is by far the largest housing program that Felton has taken on, he said.

Evans said Felton Institute excels in recruiting and supporting staff “with lived experience” with trauma and mental illness, one of the key reasons it was selected to run the Arrowood program.

Penn, who joined Felton Institute in 2018, was formerly incarcerated and has since received a master’s degree in public administration with an emphasis on criminal justice and is currently enrolled in a doctorate program. He said housing is one of the biggest obstacles for people coming out of jail or prison.

Other obstacles include a lack of employment resources and training, as well as the trauma and post-traumatic stress that people experience in jail and on the streets, Penn said. He said that people often lose contact with family members and essentially have to “start all over” when released.

Evans agreed.

“If they don’t have family members, don’t have support, they don’t have resources, they’re going to end up on the streets,” Evans said.

A home with help

Brown, the Arrowood shelter resident, said it’s taken him a while to become stable and the new shelter has helped him. A case manager there is helping him look for a place that will accept his federal housing voucher.

The hardest thing about finding a place is being able to pay for the utilities, since he doesn’t have an income.

He applied for federal disability insurance and is still waiting to be approved. “I was on the waiting list almost five years to get the (housing) voucher,” he said.

“I get disability, I want to return back to school…get a car, hopefully, so that I’m more mobile,” he said, adding that he would like to become a certified drug counselor.

“I wouldn’t mind working or volunteering as well, being a part of the community.”

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or [email protected]. On Twitter @pressreno.