Santa Rosa’s Caritas Center named Best North Bay Community Impact Project
The recently completed Caritas Center replaces Catholic Charities' aging on-site Family Support Center and Homeless Services Center located on Morgan and A Streets in Santa Rosa. The former facility served some 2,000 people.
Incoming Catholic Charities CEO Jennielynn Holmes said at the Sept. 8 ceremony to mark the project’s completion, “We love our kids but we don’t want to see them here as adults.”.
Officials told The Press Democrat that the facility is the largest homeless services center in Sonoma County, replacing the 138-bed family shelter Catholic Charities runs out of the aging former General Hospital building next door.
Donors to the project include billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose charitable fund gave Catholic Charities a $5 million grant to operate the shelter.
The new center is a comprehensive support services facility addressing growing homeless concerns in the community, adding facilities to more than double the previous number served.
The center’s 47,848 square feet provides an emergency shelter, a center for day services — including showers and laundry — a full commercial kitchen and dining area, overnight areas for different needs and user groups, a kid’s area, a secure inner courtyard, kennels for dogs, a medical clinic, transitional living space, wraparound services, access control systems and administrative offices.
This three-story structural steel building with concrete foundations has walls and interior framing utilizing metal studs and drywall, with very little wood in the building except for finished and interior trim.
An important seismic stabilization factor is the use “Buckling Restrained Braces” a proprietary system developed in Japan comprised of composite steel diagonal braces that extend and compress during an earthquake while supporting the building core to prevent failure.
These braces also allow for smaller steel elements in the rest of the structure, and a faster on-site construction schedule. Some 451 deep drilled displacement columns under the building foundation densified the sandy clay soils to a depth of approximately 30 feet to prevent excessive differential settlement of the structure due to soil liquefaction during a seismic event.
The project utilizes rigid insulation on the building exterior under the stucco, special low-E and treated window glass, window shading to limit and enhance solar heat gain depending on the season, all electric heating and cooling systems with centralized digital controls, solar water heating, provisions for future solar panels, permeable paving and storm water retention and infiltration to limit runoff and recharge the groundwater. Construction waste stream management is also an important Cal-green requirement.
Caritas Center is a long-term solution to the crisis of homelessness in Sonoma County, and one that will help get twice as many people off the streets and into permanent housing each year. Caritas has been designed with enhanced neighborhood safety in mind including 24/7 security, onsite management and improved lighting.
Unsheltered residents will be able to access shower and laundry facilities, receive mail and connect with case workers at a 6,000-square-foot drop-in center in the building’s west wing. The center has bike and storage lockers and pet kennels.
It features a quiet room where crisis managers can take someone who may be having a behavioral health crisis and can help deescalate the situation or where they can meet privately with victims of assault.
