As the homelessness crisis in Oakland and throughout the Bay Area becomes increasingly desperate, Blase Bova and her army of volunteers are on the front lines providing emergency aid to the community’s most vulnerable residents.
At Catholic nonprofit St. Vincent de Paul’s Alameda County branch, located in West Oakland, Bova and her team provide beds, meals, showers, clothing, laundry, haircuts and other services to the area’s swelling homeless population. The shelter offers 100 beds (and rarely turns anyone away), serves 800 meals a day and generally has between 45 and 50 volunteers on its campus. The organization also gave away more than $900,000 last year to help families pay their rent and other bills, and avoid getting evicted.
After spending nearly two dozen years in this work, Bova has plenty of thoughts on how to best tackle this crisis, as well as worries about some of the current methods being deployed in the Bay Area. She shared some of that insight — including why sometimes having a home isn’t enough, and why encampments shouldn’t be allowed to sprawl unchecked on city streets — during an interview with this news organization, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: There are more than 8,000 people experiencing homelessness throughout Alameda County — up from about 5,600 two years before. Why is that number skyrocketing?
A: I think that over the years we’ve taken our eye off of short-term solutions and focused on the very true long-term reality that until you build more permanent housing and find ways to subsidize housing permanently, you’re not going to solve homelessness. That’s all well and good, but if you focus all of your attention on the long term, the problem on the streets is going to get worse when you don’t put enough resources into those short-term emergency solutions like our emergency shelter. Like the cabin communities that Mayor Schaaf’s office is really promoting.
And I fear that allowing the encampments to proliferate is taking people who are somewhat addicted and just helping them get more and more and more addicted, and their problems get more difficult to solve. We need to focus resources on helping substance abuse recovery happen and we need to treat these people with compassion. But ignoring the whole idea of drugs and alcohol, to say homelessness is just about housing, it’s not about substance use or mental illness, I think that can cause greater problems. And combining that with the attitude of “let them camp wherever they want to camp because we don’t have enough housing,” creates a bigger and bigger problem with whole communities of addicts not having any access to help. It’s wound up, especially in Oakland, with these growing encampments you just can’t ignore.
Q: Are there any myths and misperceptions about homelessness and homelessness prevention that you’d like to dispel?
A: Having agreed that housing-first is a great solution, and having agreed that the solution to homelessness is more housing, and more affordable housing, I still have doubts about how that may play out. I think we tend to focus just on coming up with public resources to help things get built. But if you’re talking about a population that is not going to be able to afford that housing and you have to subsidize it forever, I don’t know that anybody has ever tried to look at that price tag. And I’m afraid that when we do, there are a lot of people who are just barely getting by themselves that are going to say, “I don’t think I want to pay for that new tax increase to help somebody when I don’t have the money myself to stay in my own housing.” That’s what brings me back a little bit to trying to put more resources into ways that we can help people really change their lives, and not just put a roof over their head.
Q: In addition to the county’s staggering homeless population, what about residents who are housed, but struggling? Has St. Vincent de Paul seen a spike in residents who fall into that category?
A: In some ways numbers are going up, but they’re not as much as you might think. I think in the Trump administration, people who have an undocumented family member are really hesitant to reach out, even to us, for help. So many of our local chapters are noticing that they’re getting fewer calls from Spanish speakers.
We have seen in all of our local chapters that when people come and ask us for help who are housed, they need more help than they used to. People are not asking for $100 to finish paying their rent — they’re $1,000 behind or $2,000 and they have water bills that are in the thousands sometimes.
Q: Local leaders have made many efforts to address this crisis. Oakland, for example, launched a $9 million homelessness-prevention program, added $8 million to its budget for homelessness this year, opened new shelter beds and built “cabin communities” to house the homeless. Is all that helping?
A: I do think it’s helping, but I still think the problem is getting worse. I think that without these things, it would be getting even more worse. It sounds to me that the cabin communities are a really good thing and that they are, just like we are, trying to get people some space where they can get some resources. The money that the city of Oakland is trying to put toward eviction prevention I know is helpful.
Q: Before you came here to Oakland you were executive director of the St. Vincent de Paul in Marin County. How is the homelessness crisis in the East Bay distinct from what’s happening up north, and how did you have to adjust what you’re doing to meet the community’s needs?
A: Marin was a little bit of a shock because the environment was somewhat different: In a lot of communities, there were people who thought St. Vincent was part of the problem. Homelessness in San Rafael, especially, is very visible. And a lot of aspects of the Marin and San Rafael community are focused on ”how do we get this problem out of our sight?” There was often a minority who said if you just get rid of St. Vincent de Paul, all these homeless people will go away.
So coming to Oakland it was back to familiar territory where almost everyone agrees that we’re providing a really essential service.
Q: What does St. Vincent de Paul need most right now from its Alameda County community members?
A: Our biggest challenge right now is keeping good employees here. We are a nonprofit, we don’t have a ton of money, we can never pay as well as most for-profit companies. With housing costs rising the way they are, and people’s commutes to work getting longer and longer because they can’t afford to live here, or their rent’s getting behind because they’re trying to afford to live here, fewer and fewer people have the luxury of choosing a career that’s a vocation. And so we’ve seen just in the last six months or less that many of our employees are tempted to look elsewhere, and many of them are taking jobs in other for-profits and even nonprofits that are able to pay them more.
We’ve actually had to temporarily close our community center, kind of our front door, because we lost the community center coordinator. We later lost an HR manager, so it becomes even tougher to fill that position.
What it really comes down to is our donations from individuals need to grow along with that situation. When the job market is that good for people and our wages are becoming so problematic for us, we really need a budget that would allow us to pay a little better. We can’t start to pay those kinds of wages until we see our donations increase.
Q: In addition to transforming the lives of the homeless people you work with every day, you recently underwent your own transition. Would you like to share a little bit about that?
A: It took me until age 55 or so to really realize the fact that all my life, if you had asked me if I was glad I’d been born a boy, I would have said, “no, I wish I’d been born a girl.” But I never thought of that as anything one could do anything about — until recently I realized that what’s underlying that is that I’m transgender. And that was such an amazing discovery for me and helped me change my whole outlook on life. And when I made the decision to live my life as my authentic self I felt even better, but with one exception: I had no idea what was going to happen at St. Vincent de Paul. I’m the face and the leader of a large 81-year-old Catholic organization that has a lot of elderly supporters, very traditional Catholics, and we’ve never had a woman executive director, not to mention a transgender woman as an executive director. And I had no idea how I was going to be accepted here.
The reaction has been amazing and it really touches my heart to see this community of often elderly, Catholic volunteers and board members and elected presidents who have never dealt with something like this — it’s way out of their comfort zone — and yet they’ve come forward to say “we believe in you, Blase, we really support you.”
Blase Bova
Age: 59
Position: Executive director of St. Vincent de Paul of Alameda County
Prior job: Executive director of St. Vincent de Paul of Marin County
Hometown: Burbank
Current residence: San Rafael
College: Earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in sociology from the University of Missouri
Five facts about Blase Bova
1. She lives on a 30-foot sailboat docked in San Rafael because she can’t find a marina in the East Bay that will accept it.
2. She doesn’t own a car, and instead relies on public transit and her bicycle. Her commute to work takes up to an hour and a half.
3. Bova began at St. Vincent de Paul 22 years ago as a volunteer in Phoenix. She was pedaling around the country on a recumbent tricycle and made what was supposed to be a brief detour to work at the nonprofit, never suspecting the work would become her life-long occupation.
4. She has a history of getting sidetracked on long cycling trips. She once spent almost a year working at a hotel in a tiny, rural village in Wales that she stumbled upon during another bicycle trip.
5. Bova got her first name from the Catholic St. Blase (sometimes spelled St. Blaise), who is said to protect believers from throat ailments. Her father was born on St. Blase’s day, and was also named Blase. Though St. Blase was a man, when Bova transitioned her gender, she decided the name was androgynous-enough that she could keep it.
