Efforts to shelter Salinas' displaced homeless inching forward.

In late March, the city of Salinas hired a handful of workers to pick up what was left from the encampments of some 200 homeless residents in the Salinas Chinatown area.

The city’s cleanup was backed by a city ordinance to improve the neighborhood’s safety and sanitation issues raised by encampment living. By the time the sweeps were underway, emotions ran high and protests erupted. To calm the crowd, Jill Allen, executive director of Dorothy’s Place, a nonprofit that provides homeless services in Chinatown, stepped in and addressed protesters. She grabbed a megaphone and pledged publicly that her nonprofit would shelter the now-displaced 200 residents within the upcoming 90 days.

Since then, the streets, formerly packed with tents, tarpaulins and carts with people’s belongings, have remained bare. And the homeless who lived there are sprinkled throughout the city.

“We have not solved the encampment issue at all,” Allen says. “We just made Chinatown cleaner and safer.”

The problem moved to other neighborhoods, and with less than a month until Allen’s promised deadline, the plan to shelter the displaced homeless is nowhere near fruition.

“The efforts are still going, but we’re not going to house 200 people in 90 days,” Allen says.

The promise, she says, was to shelter people by means of transitional housing, apartment leases, residential treatment programs or family reunions – in other words, anywhere but the street. Since the sweeps, Allen estimates six people have been sheltered, and a total of 23 so far this year.

But more is happening toward the long-term vision of solving homelessness in Salinas.

Dorothy’s has matched 65 people with caseworkers to help them find housing and recover from addiction, among other problems, since the sweeps. The neighborhood also feels safer, so more people are coming in to talk to services providers, and coming for meals at Dorothy’s Kitchen. In Allen’s eyes, that was the biggest benefit of the city’s cleanup.

Efforts by agencies like Dorothy’s Place and the Coalition of Homeless Services Providers are a piece of the solution. Policy also plays a big part.

In Monterey County District 1, which includes Chinatown, Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Salinas, is leading a three-way race against incumbent Fernando Armenta and City Councilman Tony Barrera, and his campaign promises include a vision to fix homelessness.

He proposes a couple short-term solutions: legalizing temporary encampments and year-round shelters.

As for the long-term solutions, he echoes a plan the city of Salinas has been working on for three years: cleaning up two fenced-off lots in the area, owned by Chevron and Pacific Gas & Electric, to build transitional housing.

He also wants to “house every homeless veteran in the county” using federal funds. But finding homes is an ongoing issue, which the Housing Authority of the County of Monterey knows firsthand.

HACM has been trying to launch a program since May to provide rental assistance to up to 100 homeless people, but finding units is tough.

“Housing is still hard to find and we are always looking for landlords to participate,” HACM Executive Director Jean Goebel says.