All Homekey properties close escrow: Program included housing units in San Mateo County

In the Bay Area, Homekey grants helped local governments purchase hundreds of housing units in Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Monterey and Sonoma counties.

“Homekey is possible because of federal support to slow the spread of COVID-19 and partnership from the Legislature and local leaders who didn’t settle for excuses and instead got to work to do something historic,” Newsom said in a statement.

The state initially received $550 million from the federal government for the Homekey program and later received another $200 million, all of which will fund the purchase of more than 6,000 units of transitional and permanent supportive housing for unhoused people across the state.

Several of the projects that cities and counties purchased through Homekey operated as temporary shelters in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic through the state’s Project Roomkey, a federally backed initiative to procure thousands of unused hotel and motel rooms for the state’s homeless residents during the pandemic.

The state received approval from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for Project Roomkey in early April.

“From crisis comes opportunity and that certainly has been the case for COVID-19 and homelessness,” said Graham Knaus, the executive director of the California State Association of Counties.

“Counties across the state rose to this challenge and joined the state in an extraordinary partnership to create new housing on an unprecedented timeline,” he said.

The state had to disperse the $750 million by Dec. 30, according to Newsom, because it came as a direct allocation from the federal government.

An additional $96 million in Homekey funding, coming from the state’s general fund and philanthropic sources, must be exhausted by June 30, 2022.

“The state of California, for decades, was not focused as much as we would have liked on this issue,” Newsom said of Project Homekey in September. “So we are trying to make up for that and we are trying to take responsibility and move forward deliberatively.”