Cheyanne Wright felt stuck.
The 23-year-old was renting a room from her boyfriend’s mother in Stockton. Her relationship with the woman had soured during the coronavirus pandemic after an argument exploded over using the kitchen. Things became so tense that Wright no longer felt safe leaving the room she shared with her boyfriend and her 4-year-old son. Space got even tighter after she gave birth to their son, Romeo.
“It just wasn’t working and it was really stressful,” Wright said. “I just tried to stay positive as much as possible, because [kids] can feel your stress and when you’re unhappy.”
Wright had lost her job as a resident assistant at an elder care home in early 2020. She was desperate for a better housing situation, but all the rentals she found were over $1,200 a month, which was out of her reach.
“And when you have a family, it makes it really, really hard because you have to buy the food. You have to buy their clothes or diapers,” she said.
Wright grew up in the Mendocino County city of Ukiah, three hours from Stockton. She longed to return to rural Northern California to be closer to the redwood trees, the mountains — and to her tribe.
Wright is Native American and an enrolled tribal member of the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians, and thought they might be able to help her find a new job and a pediatrician for her newborn. She reached out to her cousin, Joshua Ray, who is a social worker with the tribe, to see if he knew of any rooms opening up in the area.
Ray said he had something better: Her own two-bedroom apartment in Lakeport — across the street from Clear Lake — where the Scotts Valley tribe is headquartered. And at $450 a month, the rent was something she could afford.
“I just felt blessed,” she said. “It really saved us.”
When Wright moved in mid-February, she was one of the first residents at the 10-unit apartment complex. The goal is to eventually rent out all the units to tribal members who are currently homeless or at risk of losing their housing. The tribe estimates that about 33 of its 302 enrolled members fit into this category.
From the second-floor deck of one of the units, you can see the edge of Clear Lake, once a rich resource for Pomo people to fish and hunt game. Tall tule reeds growing along the water’s edge were used to make baskets, boats and even entire homes.
The small apartment building, which the tribe just this week named the Sugar Bowl Apartments, was purchased and remodeled using funding from Homekey, a statewide effort to quickly convert existing properties into temporary or permanent housing. Since launching in June 2020, the program has created nearly 6,000 new units statewide for people experiencing homelessness.
The Lake County project is one of three awarded to Northern California tribes during Homekey’s first year of funding. In Sonoma County, the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians are converting a Santa Rosa motel into 19 apartments for people who are chronically homeless. And in Humboldt County, the Yurok Tribe was awarded $2.2 million to purchase a Eureka motel and turn it into 18 units of permanent supportive housing.
Ray oversees the management and renovation of the Lakeport complex. The units were run-down when the building was purchased last year, he says, and have since been renovated with a fresh coat of paint, laminate wood flooring, a new roof and new appliances — including air conditioning. He hopes the complex will become a small modern-day village, with Native people lifting each other up.
“The goal is for me to help you become better than you were when you moved in here. To get you a better job. You’re going to be saving money,” he said, money that could go toward a down payment.
The need for more tribal housing to reduce homelessness becomes abundantly clear when reviewing the statistics. Nationally, Native Americans have the second-highest rate of homelessness among all racial groups, behind Pacific Islanders.
For American Indians living on reservation land, homelessness often translates into overcrowding. A 2017 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development report found 16% of tribal households were considered overcrowded, compared with only 2% of households nationwide. Without enough affordable, safe housing, two or three families sometimes live under one roof — like Wright did in Stockton — often a last resort before falling into street homelessness or staying at a shelter.
In Lake County, Native Americans make up about 4% of the general population, but account for over 22% of the homeless population, according to the county’s 2021 point-in-time homeless count.
“We don’t have a big tribe, but we do have a tribe that doesn’t have housing,” said Ray.
They’re also a tribe that doesn’t have land, he adds, which further exacerbates their housing challenges.
No Land, No Home
The story of how the Scotts Valley Band of Pomo Indians lost their land is rooted in our country’s origin story. It’s a history of disenfranchisement, relocation and assimilation forged by European settlers and the federal government, with the goal of eliminating tribes and erasing native culture.
But two government policies, in particular, were most harmful to Ray’s tribe: the termination of tribal status and the voluntary relocation of Native people off their reservation and into urban cities.
For centuries, the Scotts Valley tribe roamed from the mountains surrounding Clear Lake to the Pacific coast and down to San Pablo Bay. After a series of false promises and broken treaties, the federal government, in 1911, purchased a 56-acre parcel of land near Lakeport for the tribe to live on. But the Sugar Bowl Rancheria, as it was named, lacked water and basic utilities.
The tribe then lost that land in 1965, when the government terminated its tribal status, along with that of over 100 other tribes.
Around the same time, government relocation programs ushered Native people to cities, promising good housing and steady jobs. But that didn’t always happen, and some people disappeared into poverty or homelessness.
