photo credit: City of Rohnert Park
The Roberts Lake Park and Ride lot sitting empty following the closure of the city's
safe sleeping program.

At times controversial, a Rohnert Park safe sleeping encampment at the Roberts Lake Park and Ride lot is no more.

On April 4, the city announced the site is officially closed as a safe sleeping camp.

The safe sleeping site has been vacant since the last homeless resident departed on January 31st.

It's a big change from where homelessness within the city stood just three years ago.

That's according to Rohnert Park Mayor Susan Adams.

"We had about 82 homeless encampments around Rohnert Park in January of 2021," Adams said. "The point in time count was 369. Now we're under a hundred."

The full wind down comes less than two years after the city sanctioned the encampment, said Adams.

"In October '22, the city began a coordinated effort to recognize that there was a large, unregulated, homeless encampment," Adams said. "We partnered with HomeFirst and Defense Block Security and designed a safe sleeping program that was basically put in place to stop the growth of the encampment, increase safety of the people who were there and manage the encampment to closure by transitioning the unhoused individuals to stable housing."

Since October of 2022, 87 of the 122 homeless individuals who stayed at the Roberts Lake camp have moved into interim or permanent housing - some at the city's Labath Landing interim housing project. That's according to city figures.

The 2023 Point-in-Time count found a 43% decrease from 2022's homeless count. But it still found some 210 unhoused individuals within Rohnert Park.

Adams said the city isn't done with efforts to achieve functionally zero homelessness.

"We're opening up a social services contact point in Rohnert Park so that we can help people avoid getting into homelessness in the first place," Adams said.

Rohnert Park, like Sonoma County in general, has seen a decline in people experiencing homelessness from 2022 to 2023. 2024's findings are yet to be released.