New Housing Project Targets Senior Fire Survivors

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Many have been on housing waitlists for years, but a first-of-its-kind project now in development may help dozens of seniors displaced by Sonoma County’s fires finally find permanent housing.

Construction will begin soon on the Linda Tunis Senior Apartments, to be built at the former site of the Scottish Rite Temple along Highway 12 in Santa Rosa. The apartments will be filled by seniors who were impacted, or lost their homes due to federally declared disasters, such as the Tubbs fire.

The project is named after Linda Tunis, who was killed in 2017’s Tubbs Fire while living at the Journey’s End mobile home park. The 26 studio apartments are being built by PEP Housing, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing low income housing and services for seniors.

Project construction will begin when the final $3 million dollars in funding is raised, with a hoped-for completion date of the end of the year. Major funding for the $7 million project has included a one million dollar gift from Kaiser, as well as a quarter million dollars each from the St. Joseph Foundation, Finley Foundation and Bethlehem Foundation.

Pep Housing currently manages 672 senior housing units serving more than 700 seniors, almost all of them in Sonoma County.

Jessica Tunis, the daughter of the project’s namesake, is a property manager for Pep Housing. She told News of the North Bay that to have the project named for her mom, is a touching tribute to her mother’s memory.