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Mark Zimmerman: Give Them a Home

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A nice follow up to Terri’s homeless census post is Mark Zimmerman’s My View column in the recent Chapel Hill News

How do you solve the homeless problem? Give them a home.

That almost sounds like a bad joke, doesn’t it? But it’s what the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness Steering Committee is about to propose in its Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness. The partnership includes 60 community leaders representing dozens of organizations working on a local plan in response to a federal homelessness initiative.

Included among the partnership’s recommendations is a plan to move chronically homeless from the streets into permanent housing accompanied by intensive services.

The program is a relatively new idea called Housing First. It’s a federal initiative based on the principle that some people — the chronically homeless — need the stability of a residence before they can overcome the issues that led to their homelessness. The traditional model has required people to become “housing ready” before getting their own place. Housing First turns that model on its head.

So who are these chronically homeless? They are a group born of a federal definition: individuals, homeless for at least a year, or consistently homeless over several years, with a disability (often substance abuse or mental illness). These are folks who haven’t just been hit with problems. They have become part of their problem.

The chronically homeless are a minority of the homeless population (39 were counted in Orange County last year). However, they are among the most visible. Current treatment and care programs haven’t proven very effective. This group uses a disproportionate share of services, draining limited resources. They are costly to our hospitals and are more likely to draw police attention. They are often the ones who invoke the unfortunate vituperation of some residents, businesses and visitors.

That “vituperation” has been commented on extensively over on this thread at OrangePolitics.

Mark continues:

Housing First will take a commitment from the community to succeed, especially since we don’t want to divert funds currently assisting the transitional and non-chronically homeless. Indeed, Housing First is just one of multiple strategies in the Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness to address the continuum of housing needs in our community.

I hope this proposal will engage our community in productive debate, for there is one point on which both advocates for and detractors of our homeless population agree: We should get these folks off the streets. Whatever else you may think about it, Housing First promises to accomplish that.

Checkout the whole column to see how Mark’s thinking change over the course of his investigations.

2 thoughts on “Mark Zimmerman: Give Them a Home”

  1. Will, Notice that Mark says there were 39 chronically homeless individuals identified during the January 2006 PIT count. This January there were 71. That’s a huge jump.

  2. Yes, we seem to be following national trends.

    I know the recent HUD study – which reported 754,000 homeless in ’07 – has its critics but, at least, it’s a start.

    One problem, as you noted elsewhere, is trying to find folks that usually make it their job to stay hidden. The other is the narrow definition of homelessness that HUD uses:

    HUD goes by the law, which requires a literal meaning of “homeless.” The technical definition is an individual who lacks primary nighttime residence, but Sullivan said a person living in “shelters, streets, or places they ought not to be” should also be considered homeless.

    So, folks that didn’t have a home but maybe were living “temporarily” with relatives or in a shelter the night of the HUD counts would not be included.

    Not surprisingly, the make up of our homeless populations doesn’t reflect the make up of our population:

    In an unprecedented new study, an estimated 754,000 people are homeless across the United States — and many of them are black, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

    “We find most of these homeless people are men and, disproportionately, a large amount are black,” Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for HUD, told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

    The new HUD study showed that 65 percent of homeless adults are male, and 45 percent of those sheltered homeless people are African-Americans. Today, a visual face on homelessness in America is this: A black man, around 40 years old, living in a large, urban city.

    A statistic that goes to Fred Black’s recent comments.

    The mentally ill, unfortunately, comprise a large segment:

    Schizophrenia, which tops the list of chronic conditions homeless people face, affects approximately 200,000 people, according to a 2003 study by the Department of Health and Human Services. In large metropolitan cities, these individuals are regarded as “part of the urban landscape”, not getting the proper care, the study said.

    Sunday, March 11, 2007, Danielle Kwateng, Howard University News Service

    Interesting that even where the numbers seemed to have stabilized and why:

    According to the one-day count, there were 20 fewer homeless people in 2007 than in 2005 — the first countywide count — about a 1 percent decrease. But that number does not include several transitional shelters, which have failed to return surveys, said Tamra Losinski, family self-sufficiency coordinator with the Housing Authority of Stanislaus County, which organized the count. The actual number could increase by “a couple hundred,” she said.

    The number of chronically homeless — those who’ve been homeless for more than a year or three times in four years — in shelters has dropped by 62percent. The number of unsheltered chronic homeless counted has yet to be calculated.

    With state legislation targeting those with chronic mental illness and habitual drug abuse, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the chronic homeless numbers are dropping, said Michelle Gonzalez, president of Stanislaus County Housing and Support Services Collaborative.

    “There’s a direct correlation betweenchronicsubstance abuse and mental illness with chronic homeless,” she said. “One of the areas that we have been focusing on is services for chronically homeless individuals. Clearly you can see that in the numbers.”

    Modesto, California’s Modesto Bee, Mar. 6th, 2007

    Providing permanent homes for the chronic homeless does seem to work in community’s focused on that goal. Take Quincy, Mass.

    Quincy officials announced last week that the area’s homeless assistance programs will receive nearly $1.9 million from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development — a 17 percent increase over last year. The money will help support programs that, officials say, have reduced homelessness in the city by a fifth over the last year.

    The money was awarded to the Quincy/Weymouth Continuum of Care, which serves both municipalities under Quincy’s Department of Planning and Community Development. It will fund nine projects, most of which coordinate permanent housing and support services for homeless families and individuals.

    By providing homeless people with permanent residences, pressure on the city’s emergency services and law enforcement is reduced, officials say, and the city saves money.

    This approach makes sense, said Philip Mangano, executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, at a press conference at Quincy City Hall Friday. “Quincy is a model for other cities of this size.”

    Father Bill’s Place in Quincy, an emergency shelter that serves the region south of Boston, has taken the lead in transitional housing for the homeless, according to Sean Glennon, a research assistant at the Department of Planning and Community Development.

    In 2005, Father Bill’s moved a dozen women into their own rooms at the Claremont House, the pilot effort of the “housing first” initiative. In the year before they moved in, the women had a total of 22 emergency room visits that equaled 44 days spent in the hospital. But after a year of living in the house, emergency room visits were cut in half, and days spent in the hospital were reduced to four.

    Glennon estimates that at $1,500 per day, $60,000 was saved.

    The average stay at Father Bill’s is two to three months, but there is a small percentage that have made it their home for as long as 10 years. John Yazwinski, executive director of Father Bill’s and chairman of the board for the Continuum of Care, said it is that group that needs to be addressed. “We need to really target the chronic homeless, who are the most expensive people to serve in our community,” he said.

    The basic cost of housing is about $2,000 less per year than caring for them at a shelter, and placing the long-term homeless in a supportive housing model would save between $7,000 and $10,000 per person, according to Yazwinski.

    “It’s not just the cost of the housing unit — it’s the savings of the soft costs of emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, police, corrections, and those things start adding up,” he said.

    Father Bill’s has already chosen the individuals and families that will benefit from the grants. Teresa’s Project will provide housing for 13 individuals for three years; the Empowerment Project will provide leasing for eight families; and six of the nine projects are through Shelter Plus Care, which is a tenant-based rental assistance program.

    The Homeless Management Information System, a data collection system to track the city’s homeless and forecast trends, will receive $75,000.

    The money is part of nearly $1.4 billion distributed nationwide by HUD. The grants — to more than 5,300 local homeless programs serving 150,000 people — were announced last week.

    Boston Globe, Mar. 1st, 2007

    I thought Mark’s comments about his journey – from a skeptical real-estate dude to convert – was notable.

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