The San Angelo City Council heard the Rock Rose Community Campus plan to provide housing and resources to homeless and struggling members in the community.
Leaders in San Angelo are working in partnership with the Concho Valley Community Action Agency, among other local community organizations, on a new project designed to provide housing and wraparound services for homeless and low-income residents.
The centerpiece of the effort is a multi-purpose campus that will offer services ranging from emergency shelter and permanent supportive housing to food distribution and healthcare access.
The initiative comes after years of planning and is now gaining momentum through collaboration between city officials and nonprofit leaders.
In an earlier interview with the Concho Observer, Mike Burnett, executive director of CVCAA and chair of the Concho Valley Homeless Planning Coalition talked about how the concept came together.
“As a coalition, we had a small group working for the past 4 or 5 years on a long-term solution to safely house their homeless invidious, and homeless neighbors, and provide services to them, that help them transition out of homelessness,” Burnett said.
“We have been pressing the city starting around late 2021, early 2022, we really started engaging the city leadership on helping find a solution and working together on it.”
The idea accelerated in early 2024 with the formation of a city-led homeless task force, which worked in partnership with CVCAA to develop a plan for a centralized services campus.
The City of San Angelo is providing the land for the project, a nearly 12-acre property located near the city center.
Burnett described the layout of the planned campus in three key sections.
“The front one-third chunk of it is the service center for CVCAA, and in-partner agencies, to provide those services,” Burnett said. “The middle chunk is a non-congregate shelter, plus permanent supportive housing, and then the back chunk is some affordable housing for the region.
“That’s kinda it in a nutshell.”
According to Burnett, the property secured for the campus is close to 12 acres, nearly double what the organization initially sought. The site’s proximity to downtown San Angelo will make it easier for individuals to access services from the more than 30 partner agencies involved in the project.
“We looked at a number of different properties and then this one property came into conversation and that’s where we ended up placing the campus,” Burnett said. “We were initially looking for 5 to 6 acres, and this one is close to 12 acres, so that is when it really became, ‘Oh, okay, now that we have a property this size secured, what else can we do?’”
Among the services planned are mental and physical healthcare, substance use treatment, utility assistance, and housing stabilization programs. Agencies will have access to shared office space in the service center on an as-needed basis.
“Instead of bouncing around town for services when they will not be aligned, all the services needed in one place—that’s game changing,” Burnett said. “And the size of this campus is allowing us to do that.”
A monthly event called Homeless Navigation Day, run by CVCAA, is helping to inform the campus model. The event offers one-day access to case management and services from nearly 20 local organizations. Burnett said it has become a successful, proven approach.
“We see on average between 150–170 individuals a day,” Burnett said. “About 30 percent of them are housed but they’re on the edge of homelessness and they need a lot of the same services. In 2024, we saw over 546 unduplicated attendees at navigation day last year. We gave out 4,450 direct services to those attendees over 12 months.”
In January, attendance at Navigation Day peaked at 195 individuals. Burnett said the model is effective because clients are not simply handed brochures — they are connected directly to services on-site. “It’s all these services in one place and we’re seeing a lot of positive outcomes from this and that’s the model that we’ll be replicating daily on the campus,” he said.
San Angelo’s estimated homeless population on any given night is believed to be more than 300 individuals, though the official Point-In-Time survey reported 173 earlier this year.
“However, the data on the PIT count is what we have to use from Housing and Urban Development, but for the estimates across the county, you can multiply that by 2 or 3 and that’s really a more accurate number,” Burnett said.
CVCAA has also conducted a community needs assessment to better understand what homeless and low-income residents in the region need most. “Affordable housing is number one, affordable medical is number two, number five was that the region lacked efficient emergency shelter for the homeless,” Burnett said.
Burnett said the city-collaborative project is modeled on similar successful campuses in Austin and other parts of the country. “We’ve done studies, we’ve learned from experts, and this model for a campus is being replicated across the country. Almost every state has one.”
In addition to housing and direct services, the campus will include a warehouse to support emergency needs, supply homeless and low-income residents with goods, and serve as a hub for food distribution.
“It really is a holistic look at what the needs are of our low income and homeless neighbors and then creating a game plan,” Burnett said. “That housing needs to come first.”
The site, located where West 14th Street crosses the railroad tracks near the intersection with West 11th Street, had been a heavily encumbered parcel containing a large two-story house, which City of San Angelo crews worked to clear earlier in the year. The house was subsequently demolished, and the parcel now stands cleared and ready for something new.
The Council approved the plan.
1 Comment
So exciting to see this plan. I’ve seen a news show about the one in Austin that is so successful. The manager said its success depended on one word – ACCOUNTABILITY. Let’s remember that.