Developers have begun construction on a new interim housing project in Palo Alto for homeless people, with financial assistance from Santa Clara County.
The county is contributing $4 million to Homekey Palo Alto, a shelter with the capacity to provide temporary housing for more than 200 people a year along with on-site support services.
The shelter, expected to open in early 2025, seeks to address a pair of closely related crises in Silicon Valley: housing affordability and lack thereof.
Homekey Palo Alto is the tenth project in Santa Clara County to receive funding from the State of California’s Homekey program, launched in 2020 to rapidly expand housing for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness across the state.
Additionally, the Palo Alto project is one of the first to receive funding from the county's Challenge Grant program, which committed $40 million to build 1,600 units of transitional housing to support people experiencing homelessness.
County Supervisor Joe Simitian, who led the creation of the Challenge Grants in 2021 with Supervisor Otto Lee, stressed that the challenges of housing affordability and homelessness “are dire, but every step of progress provides significant benefits to county residents.”
“I’m one of those who believes it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness,” Simitian said. “Homekey Palo Alto represents 88 candles, 88 units that, for all the people who live here, will make an absolute difference in their lives.
In that sense, she said that the project will make a difference for elderly residents “whose only constant companion may have been their dog: now they will have a safe place to play.”
“It will absolutely make a difference for the person who is just down on their luck and just needs help getting their resume together and navigating the Valley job market. And it will absolutely make a difference, in the spirit of today, for the parent or parents whose children finally have a place of their own, maybe for the first time, to sit down and count and compare all the candy they got trick-or-treating,” he explained.
Homekey Palo Alto, located at 1237 San Antonio Road near San Francisco Bay, will feature 88 guest rooms, as well as showers, a kitchen, on-site laundry facilities and outdoor spaces including a playground, a garden, a dog park and a picnic area.
The city of Palo Alto and LifeMoves, a nonprofit, are co-developers of the $37.2 million project, which received funding from a variety of sources, including $21.7 million from Homekey, $5 million from private donor John Sobrato, $4.5 million from Palo Alto and $4 million from the county’s Challenge Grant program.
The project will be built using modular construction, which is faster than traditional construction methods.
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