A Place to Stop and Rest

When the Wiyot Tribe decided to leverage its resources to tackle Humboldt County’s housing crisis, it didn’t just start buying land to develop. Instead, tribal officials spent two years listening.

“We spent two years studying housing,” says Dishgamu Community Land Trust Director Michelle Vassel. “We went to big events, farmers markets and just asked people about housing. We found two ends of the spectrum really suffering: young people, because their wages tend to be lower, and older people because they’re on fixed incomes. So we’ve tried to prioritize these two groups.”

The tribe — which is already moving forward with plans to build a 41-unit multi-family complex and a 42-unit senior living facility in Eureka — recently broke ground on a project aimed solely at serving local youth. With a $14 million California Department of Housing and Community Development grant, the tribe and its partners have begun work to convert two Victorian homes and an old commercial building into a 39-unit complex serving young adults ages 16 to 24 at risk of becoming unhoused.

Dubbed the Jaroujiji Youth Housing Project — with Jaroujiji meaning a place to stop and rest in the Wiyot language — Vassel said the vision is to create a layered supportive housing program that somewhat resembles a dorm or boarding house. She said each resident will have their own private space, including a bathroom and mini kitchen, within a facility that features a multitude of shared spaces, on-site management and a commercial kitchen that will provide residents daily meals.

And Vassel says there will be plenty of wrap-around services included, everything from outside groups being invited in to the facility’s shared spaces to provide mental health and social services, to tribal led social services and internal paid apprenticeship programs, like working in the kitchen to get culinary industry work experience.

While not generally envisioned as transitional housing — Vassel says 31 of the project’s units will be classified as permanent housing — it will include eight units reserved for interim housing for 16 to 18 year olds needing rapid rehousing.

Vassel says the tribe’s initial work listening to the community, and particularly young people in the community, helped shape every aspect of the project. While tabling at events, Vassel says the tribe heard directly from young people about their struggles to find housing, particularly from those who said they didn’t have a natural support system or were just leaving foster care.

“They are just released into this really tough housing market where prices are really high,” Vassel says, adding that the problem is acute for foster youth who end up receiving mental health care outside the local area and then return to Humboldt when aging out of the system. “There’s just no safety net for them.”

The Jaroujiji Youth Housing Project, which sits just north of the library’s main branch, will convert two single-story Victorian homes — one the famed Sarah Carson House, a 160-year-old Victorian where William and Sarah Carson made their first home in Eureka before building the Carson Mansion that was more recently used as a convalescent home — and a sprawling old office building into a cohesive complex complete with landscaped green spaces.

Ashton Hamm and Alice Armstrong, both worker/owners at UXO Architects, a worker-owned cooperative, say they’ve been involved with Jaroujiji almost since its inception, having worked with the Wiyot Tribe since 2020 “on various projects and speculations.”

Armstrong says the tribe came to UXO having identified the Eureka properties and with an idea of what it wanted to accomplish, and the architectural firm then helped scope the project for an initial grant application.

“They really came to us with such a clear vision of what they want to bring the community as far as deep sustainability, really involving the community and potential residents in the design process, and reaching out to specific communities that weren’t being served,” Hamm says on a video conferencing call with the Journal before Amstrong jumps in.

“I think from the beginning of this project, we identified a desire to do a lot of outreach directly to the communities that might be served by this housing, as well as local organizations that will be working with this population,” Armstrong says.

Thus, they say, began a listening tour of UXO’s own, which included Zoom sessions and roundtable discussions to ask young people and service providers about specific design features they’d like to see.

“They got really granular,” Hamm says with a laugh. “We get some really excellent feedback, everything from how you feel safe in a space to the level of light and noise in a space that residents would feel comfortable with.”

And while some firms may have been turned off by the dynamic nature of bringing so many voices into the planning process, Hamm and Armstrong say they have relished it. One theme they say arose early and continued throughout all their discussions is a perceived need for community spaces — places residents can feel safe and gather together. So they say the designs worked to maximize that inside and out.

Vassel says the tribe has put an emphasis on keeping jobs local with its projects, so it turned to Blaine O’Shaughnessy of Arcata’s Curb Appeal Construction to bring the vision crafted with UXO Architects’ help to fruition.

O’Shaughnessy says, from his perspective, the job is just one “really big remodel” that will include a lot of improvements to bring the properties into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. He says there are unique challenges in converting a commercial space to residential and remodeling century-old homes, so there are “a lot of facets” to the project, which he hopes to have fully complete in the spring.

While addressing Humboldt County’s housing crisis, Vassel notes that Jaroujiji is also supporting the local workforce, bringing money from outside the county to sustain living-wage jobs. And she notes there’s an apprentice aspect there, too.

“One of the things we’re asking of the people we’re working with is to allow us to provide people who are interested in doing construction work so they can just get that on-the-job experience,” she says, adding the hope is that may lead to some filling long-term positions.

Vassel says she also likes that Jaroujiji is an infill project, noting that it fulfills one of the Dishgamu land trust’s priorities: “Buy things that are unloved and put love back into them.”

This latest housing project puts the Wiyot Tribe squarely at the forefront of efforts to build affordable housing in Eureka, as it now has plans in process to open a total of more than 130 units by 2028.

Those include a 41-apartment project at the parking lot on Fifth and D streets, which will feature sustainable construction, units for various household sizes, exterior garden space, on-site daycare and is known as Gou’Wik Hou Daqh, or Where the Families Are. Laquilh Hou Daqh (Where the Elders Are), meanwhile, is a 52-unit project at Sixth and L streets that will feature mostly studio and one-bedroom apartments for seniors.

Each of the tribe’s housing projects has targeted a specific need, and Jaroujiji is no different. Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services Child Welfare Services Program Manager Alison Phongsavath says the “highly competitive rental market in California, and Humboldt especially, can be a significant barrier for young people exiting foster care.”

A 2024 report from the California Housing Partnership found more than 6,000 renting households in Humboldt County do not have access to a home that qualifies as affordable, while 93 percent of households classified as “extremely low income” are spending more than half their monthly income on housing costs. The report found renters in Humboldt County would need to earn at least $23.25 per hour — one-and-a-half times the state minimum wage — to afford the monthly asking rent of $1,209.

Humboldt County has historically had a disproportionately high number of youth in foster care compared to the state average, its foster care population peaking in 2019 in 432, before declining in recent years. Native youth have also historically been disproportionately represented in the foster system. According to the National Foster Care Institute, about 25 percent of youth in foster care experience homelessness within four years of aging out of care.

Phongsavath says the county has ongoing partnerships with various local agencies, including Redwood Community Action Agency’s Transitional Housing Plus program, for former foster youth, but “there remains an unmet need for foster youth exiting care.”

The county, she says, is working to apply for housing vouchers from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for foster youth exiting care who meet the definition of being at risk of homelessness.

“The more housing resources there are to help support positive outcomes for former foster youth, where the county and the community were not able to help them achieve permanency, the better,” Phongsavath says. “We know that connection to cultural identities and supports are an important part of a young person’s healing and thriving, and we are excited to see the Wiyot Tribe’s new Youth Housing Project become available.”

Vassel says she is excited about the project because it will address a clearly identified need, providing local youth that much needed safety net. Dishgamu, the Soulatluk word for love, guides the tribe’s building philosophy, she says.

“We’re trying to invest care and concern,” she says. “When I think of love, I think when you care about someone you’re investing care and concern in them.”

O’Shaughnessy, who stepped into the fold after the vision for Jaroujiji was solidified, said the excitement around the project is infectious.

“Even the guys that work on it — our laborers and framers — feel it because they know the intention of it,” he says. “It does make a different feel when you’re working on it — it’s not just for someone’s profit. It’s going to help people.”

Outgoing news editor Thadeus Greenson’s (he/him) last official day with the Journal will be July 3 but you’ll continue to see his byline in the coming weeks as the paper publishes several in-progress stories, and perhaps some of his freelance work in the future beyond that.

This article appears in A Place to Stop and Rest.