The Commons, a new supportive housing project in a converted motel in Santa Rosa, provided the elevator Kadija Huggins needed to get from the street to her own apartment.
“I literally wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for them,” Kadija Huggins said St. Vincent de Paul’s first permanent supportive housing project, The House of Commonsand the services she found there.
Huggins — who lived at The Commons from January to August — was in the west Santa Rosa apartment she had moved into a few weeks earlier.
After fleeing domestic violence in her hometown of Sacramento last year and spending three months in a domestic violence shelter, Huggins ended up homeless on the streets of Santa Rosa. A case manager at The Commons, Kimberly Luis, found her in a tent on a walking trail near downtown.
Huggins, 27, qualified for The Commons, and Luis said she would help her get in, but it wasn’t open yet. So Huggins spent a few months at Sam Jones Hall, the largest emergency homeless shelter in the North Bay.
“It was scary,” Huggins said. But in January, rent receipt in hand, she moved into the newly opened Commons, in room 13.
“It was like a breath of fresh air,” she says. “You know, a lot of people are ungrateful. They’ll complain, ‘Oh, it’s a small studio.’ I thought, ‘This is great because it’s not outside in a tent.’”
But after meeting her boyfriend and becoming pregnant, Huggins decided she didn’t want to raise a child in The Commons. She worked with St. Vincent de Paul officials to break her lease and find other housing, for which the charity gave her money for a deposit.
She also now has a job, after case managers at The Commons helped her obtain her state certification to provide home support services. Now that she is six months pregnant, she enjoys her new apartment so much that she almost never wants to leave it.
“They were just helpful with everything. They were emotional expressions of support. Anything I needed, they were always there,” she said of The Commons staff.
You can reach staff writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or [email protected]. On X (Twitter) @jeremyhay