photo credit: Marc Albert/KRCB
The gate is briefly open at Horizon Shine for trash removal, allowing a peek inside.

With less than two months to go before he must clear out, Randy Wallace was taking advantage of Friday's sunshine to torque down the last head bolts on the 1994 GMC 4 wheel drive he uses to pull his trailer.

With the sun still high, he was confident he'd finally have a partial engine rebuild done by sunset. Wallace was eager to start her up after being out of commission for six-months.

One of twenty-two residents of Sebastopol's Horizon Shine RV Village, Wallace says he hopes to hit the road before the deadline for Spokane and Coeur d'Alene, where family and other connections have offered a spot for him and his trailer.

It's kind of a hard deadline. On March 3rd, the lot is set to close permanently---to make way for permanent supportive housing for people with little if any income.

Those are the same people, demographically, living there now.

Before being moved to Horizon Shine's gravel lot, Wallace had been parked along Morris Street for about a year and a half. The village, more of a fenced gravel lot with utilities, is operated by Sonoma Applied Village Services, a local nonprofit.

Wallace said he and the rest of the residents knew all along that their oasis along state Route 116 was temporary, though he said few found the energy or motivation to prepare for the inevitable.

"It wasn't the staff's fault, it was a lot of the people here, they were slowing things down too..."

Asked to speculate why most chose to procrastinate, Wallace surmised,  

"I don't know, I don't know, [they] figure['d] it was never going to end," he said, trailing off, "I guess here...It's going to be coming to an end shortly"? Wallace asked, prophetically. 

Adrian Brumley is executive director of Sonoma Applied Village Services, also known as SAVS, which operates Horizon Shine. He said his organization is committed to doing everything it can to help residents relocate.

"Eight of them are fully document ready to get on a voucher waiting list or any kind of housing program list, and then, the other 14 are one or two documents away from being prepared, so we're sitting pretty good, the only problem we're having is, the waiting lists are pretty long," Brumley said.

Brumley acknowledged though, that people can't live in a voucher.

"Even if you have a section 8 voucher, you still have to get a on waiting list for apartments, and those waiting lists can be twice as long or longer than the wait list to get the voucher. It's tough for everybody out there. All the barriers they face, the limited housing, the limited affordable housing, the limited transitional housing, limited emergency housing, its just , there's not enough," Brumley said.

As to why people are applying now, and not when the parking site opened in February of 2022, Brumley said his organization can suggest and recommend, but can't by law, compel residents to complete paperwork.

The compound, with individual trailers, a food preparation tent, porta potties, and a shower trailer, is fairly orderly. Behind its wooden fence and gate, its easy to pass by and be unaware of its existence.

Despite concerns and a lawsuit and heated debate that the site would bring ill-repute, noise, crime and a host of problems, neighbor William Ricciardi, also taking advantage of the sunshine for an afternoon walk with his wife Nancy, said as far as he was aware, none of the fears materialized.

"It hasn't borne out, that that was the case, yeah, we've heard nothing," he said.

Observing that apprehensiveness over safe parking proved overblown, "We all need to calm down a bit and just give people a chance," Nancy Ricciardi added.