Two veterans are on a mission to build housing for the people who most desperately need it.

Sara Rubin here, after checking out a motel on Fremont Boulevard in Seaside that appears to be in pretty good shape. The Sand Dollar Inn is one of several in the area owned by the Panchal family, and if it gets a series of green lights—including a multimillion-dollar grant from the state’s Homekey program—the Panchals will sell it to a developer who will transform it into housing for people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. It got its first green light on Monday from a county committee. 

Per the state’s requirements, the project will service people with mental illness and/or addiction challenges, or veterans. 

So there’s a bit of poetry to the story of the developer, Anabasis, which is run by two veterans. That they ended up pursuing Homekey projects is mostly a story about business, but it’s also one about loyalty—both to each other and to fellow veterans. 

The friendship between these two men goes back almost 20 years. Barely out of high school, Dean Sparks was motivated by Sept. 11 to enlist in the Army. He was already an experienced truck driver, having grown up moving livestock in the Central Valley, and was assigned to a transportation unit. That included driving equipment around the U.S. for concerts on posts all over the country, followed by deployment to Iraq, where he drove humvees with mounted guns, providing security. “We took some casualties,” Sparks says. “When you saw people getting hurt and dying, it was like, ‘Oh this is real.’”

Adam Conour was just in fifth grade when the Sept. 11 attacks happened, and he met Sparks while he was still in high school. After four years in the Army, at age 23, Sparks started a direct mail design business, printing postcards and such, and hired Conour, then a high school student. Conour then found his way into the Army, and completed a year-long deployment in Iraq before getting trained as an explosive ordnance removal technician. 

Years passed before the two crossed paths again. The financial crisis of 2008 hit. “I was feeling a little lost, and wondering what I’m going to do in life,” Sparks says. “I barely could pay my rent.”

He tried his hand at real estate, and a few lucky breaks later, he had exceeded his own financial dreams of financial stability.

Meanwhile, Conour, now 34, was back in Merced County working at a nonprofit supporting veterans. It was hard work, “literally picking guys up and putting their bikes in my truck bed,” he says. “One of the continued issues we were running into was, after we got HUD-VASH vouchers, we couldn’t get anyone to accept [the voucher]. I thought: ‘Why don’t we build some units?’”

That idea led the old friends to form Anabasis in 2021, around the time Sparks, now 42, moved to Carmel Valley to raise his family. 

“It’s important to us to get a project done on the Peninsula. There’s an issue that needs to be addressed,” Sparks says. “We take some pride in doing what others may shy away from.”

We’ll keep covering the steps along their way on a possible path to getting this Homekey project done, whether it moves forward or not.