‘Housing first’ and helping the homeless
Initial findings on ‘housing first’ programs, such as Project 50 in Los Angeles, show that they may be a solution to chronic homelessness and possibly save taxpayer money.
In its recent series on a controversial program for the homeless, The Times described a project called Project 50 that seeks to put a roof over the heads of substance abusers without requiring them to undergo substance-abuse treatment, while still offering them as many services as they would use.
The new approach, known as “housing first,” has been heralded in communities across the nation as a promising solution to end homelessness and save taxpayer money. Skeptics have asserted that the program is both wasteful and immoral because it simply warehouses substance abusers, enabling them to continue their self-destructive lifestyles with the support of taxpayer dollars.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-morgenstern-homeless-20100815,0,6569787.story
To fight homelessness, turn Project 50 into Project 10,000
Many of you were present for Dr. Dennis Culhane’s presentation in Omaha last April. Here is his op-ed regarding the controversial LA Times series. – Erin Bock, Program Coordinator, MACCH (Metro Area Continuum of Care for the Homeless)
Jacqueline Novogratz on escaping poverty
Jacqueline Novogratz on escaping poverty
She does a great job talking about the importance of reminding us that poverty isn’t a category or a group of people.
http://tedxomaha.com/2010/08/12/jacqueline-novogratz-on-escaping-poverty/
Homes for the hardest of the hard-core homeless
L.A. County workers identify the 50 people likeliest to die on skid row’s streets and find them housing, with no requirement that they quit drugs, stop drinking or seek psychiatric help.
August 01, 2010|By Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times
The searchers carved skid row into quadrants and advanced in small groups, aiming flashlights into the cold.
They moved between nylon tents and cardboard lean-tos in the Toy District, where junkies had stripped the streetlights and left whole blocks in darkness. They roused the human bundles scattered around the tumbledown hotels and freshly painted lofts on Main Street, wasted faces blinking into their flashlights.
They looked in the eastern section called the Bottoms, around the big missions and flea traps, and around the neighborhood’s forbidding eastern edge, a zone of industrial warehouses and razor wire known as the Low Bottoms, where even now, hours before daylight, the crack trade was brisk.
The searchers, a couple dozen volunteers and Los Angeles County workers, had orders: Interview everyone living on these streets. Find out how long they’ve been homeless. Ask about their addictions, their mental and physical health.
Carrie Bach, a 54-year-old nurse with the Public Health Department, was leading one of the teams, a scarf around her neck and a walkie-talkie in her mittens. As her department’s homelessness coordinator, she knew skid row better than most. But she felt nervous and a little naive. She had never glimpsed the Boschian tableau that materialized after the warehouses bolted their doors, after the corrugated-metal gates rolled down over the church fronts, cheap-toy outlets and fake-flower shops.
She hadn’t seen the pavement scattered with bodies, the spectral shapes swaying against the cinder-block walls, the mounds of garbage screeching with rats. For some searchers, it was too much. They handed back their clipboards and went home.
For more of the story: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/01/local/la-me-0801-homeless-20100801
‘Housing first,’ help that lasts
Deborah’s Place celebrates 25 years of helping single women find and keep a secure place to live
By Pat Dunnigan, Special to the Tribune
July 30, 2010
For Jacqueline Parker, the road to homelessness was dazzling and well-lit. The 63-year-old Mississippi native had an apartment and a job when she began accompanying a friend to a Chicago-area casino to play the slot machines.
Soon, she said, she was gambling with her rent money and digging herself into a deep financial hole. “It just went to my head,” she said in a soft drawl. “One thing led to another.”
LaShon Gant, 39, made her way along a darker route, from a cocaine and heroin addiction to a prison cell. She had been drug free for a decade but a criminal record and two low-paying part-time jobs left her with no margin for error when her living arrangements fell apart. “I was living with a guy, and things didn’t work out,” she said.
Both women cycled through a patchwork of temporary accommodations — exhausting the hospitality of friends and family, dropping in and out of homeless shelters and, in Gant’s case, spending 18 months living out of a car. Then they found Deborah’s Place, a provider of housing and support for single, homeless women celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
Today each lives in her own studio apartment on Chicago’s West Side, supported by an array of health and social services that will remain available as long as they need them.
And that, says Deborah’s Place Executive Director Audrey Thomas, is the end of that road.
“Our goal is when a woman walks through our doors it is her last experience with homelessness,” said Thomas, who began as a volunteer 25 years ago and has been the organization’s executive director for six years.
From its beginning as an overnight shelter in a church gymnasium in 1985, the program has grown into a range of services and housing on the city’s West and North sides that includes crisis intervention, counseling, health care assistance, job training, education, daytime learning centers, transitional housing and 129 supported living apartments. The housing available includes 90 rental studio apartments, where women pay 30 percent of their income in rent and can stay as long as they want. Last year 487 women used at least one of the program’s services.
Deborah’s Place grew out of the efforts of a Catholic peace and justice organization and a group of Chicago-area women determined to provide safe shelter for the homeless woman they saw walking the streets by day and sleeping on sidewalks at night.
In addition to their decision to focus on single women, the organization stood out for its willingness to accommodate women’s individual needs and for policies that did away with many of the rules imposed by other shelters in favor of the philosophy that a safe place to stay was a basic right.
That priority soon led the founders to broaden the program from just providing overnight shelter to offering support services designed to break the cycle of homelessness. Those services include computer training, help with job placement, health screening, life skills training and even art therapy. But first and foremost, said Thomas, is a safe place to live.
Deborah’s Place did not invent the “housing first” model, but was one of the earliest programs in Chicago to adopt it, said Nancy Radner, CEO of the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness, the umbrella organization for the city’s 84 homeless service programs.
In particular, Radner said, Deborah’s Place has been a model for other programs in its eviction prevention policies. While other programs make compliance with treatment programs and other rules a condition of housing, at Deborah’s Place, “they will go to great lengths not to evict someone,” Radner said.
That is critical in serving a population in which as many as half also suffer from other problems including mental illness, physical disabilities and addictions, she said.
Thomas agrees. “When people hit our doors, the journey that got them there is really messy and complicated,” she said. “I just think Deborah’s Place is unique in our tolerance for where women are individually. You break a rule and it does not mean you get kicked out.”
It’s a philosophy that does create “intrinsic tensions,” Thomas said. In 2003, during the process of aligning the program with the city’s 10-year Plan to End Homelessness, such tensions led some staff members to leave, she said. “There was resistance,” Thomas said. “We did have people who left the organization because it just didn’t resonate with them.”
And from neighborhood battles over plans to develop new sites to philosophical disagreements over growth and direction, the organization’s leadership has always had more than the problems of the homeless to confront.
But 25 years later, it is its consistent adherence to the philosophy of its founders that is cited as the secret of the organization’s longevity and success.
Jean Durkin is the coordinator of the organization’s learning center in Old Town, where homeless women drop in to receive mail, make phone calls, have coffee and a snack, take a class or use the art studio. Durkin has been providing art therapy to Deborah’s Place clients since 1987. She believes the organization’s focus on individual needs is the key to everything that works.
“Deborah’s Place programs work because our vision at the very start was so clear,” Durkin said. The services, she said, are designed to help women find “their own way out of homelessness.”
Margaret Herring is one of 17 women known as the organization’s “founding mothers” who first met back in 1984 to try to address the problems of the women they encountered on Chicago’s streets.
She says the organization succeeded because of a “shared vision” and an “established culture” that drew as much from the women it served as from the women serving them.
“It was very important to us that the women be respected as individuals,” Herring said.
That, said Thomas, keeps the focus pretty simple, no matter how complicated the problems.
“A lot of what we do is just old-fashioned Jane Addams social work,” she said, citing the pioneering 19th century social services advocate.
“You meet people where they are, ask them what they need and you try to get them access to it. Recovery,” she said, “looks different for every person.”
Five myths about America’s homeless
Thanks Tara L. Muir for sharing this great article about people that are homeless. So many people think the answer is ‘just get a job’ or ‘stop being lazy’ but rarely is that the situation.
The face of America’s homeless youth
Denver, Colorado (CNN) — When the sun dips below the Rocky Mountains and the streets of Denver go dark, Lokki, his girlfriend Magic and their friend Tripp head home.
They climb in between the rafters of a highway overpass, crouching as they sit under the concrete structure that rumbles with every car that crosses overhead.
It is where they will sleep tonight. It is where they say they can live safely after escaping from abusive homes.
“It’s pretty hard,” says Magic, 18, when asked about living on the streets. “But most of the time it’s just life, you know. Life’s not going to be easy.”
She refuses to talk about what caused her to leave home.
Her boyfriend Lokki has a different outlook: He says he enjoys the fun and freedom of life on the streets.
“I don’t really have to worry about anything,” says Lokki, 20. “I get some food and kick back with the homies.”
Out of the three friends, Tripp seems to be the most concerned about the future. He says he began living on the streets two years ago, after escaping a violent relationship with his stepfather.
“If I defended myself against him, I always got looked at badly,” he said. “So when I turned 18, I left.”
He stops talking as he watches a homeless man walk by.
“I’d hate to think that’s the way I’m going,” says Tripp. “That I’m going to end up being 40 years old and on the streets.”
Getting off the streets is a daunting challenge for these young adults and others like them, who have no address, no job, very little education, and many times drug addictions and mental health issues.
Foster kid: ‘I’m just really scared’
“We see a lot of kids really since age of 7 or 8 [who] haven’t had any real roots to call their own,” according to Tom Manning, spokesman for Covenant House, which helps those who are young and homeless. “Those are the 18-year-olds who [have] very limited education and really need to start from square one.”
Manning, who has worked with homeless youths for 20 years, said a key goal is reaching these young adults before they “disappear into the streets.”
“It sounds like a movie, but it’s true: Pimps and traffickers, they spot these kids and go after them,” Manning said. “If we don’t get to them, many will end up on drugs or in prison.”
The youths can be helped, he said, if they can learn to establish healthy relationships with others.
“It’s a trust issue: Most of these kids have been abused and taken advantage of by every adult they’ve met,” Manning said.
Trust is at the heart of the family that Lokki has created for a small group of his friends living on the streets of Denver.
They call themselves “Juggalos” — the name for fans of the rap group Insane Clown Posse. But now, the name has a more important meaning.
“Juggalos started as a family for people who feel like they don’t have family,” Lokki explained. “Other people see it as a gang, but we just look out for each other any way we can.”
They mostly hang out, swimming in the Platte River or — if they manage to panhandle a few dollars — buying beer or marijuana.
Most days, they eat lunch at Sox Place, which was set up in 2002 by Doyle “Sox” Robinson. He got his street name after spending a year handing out clean socks to street kids.
Every day, about 100 young people come by to eat lunch, use the computers, watch movies and also pick up a fresh pair of socks.
“They are just like any other kids out there, they have the same struggles, the same issues,” Doyle said. “They still want love, they want acceptance, they want protections, they want rules, they want to be held accountable.”
Robinson said his goal is simply to provide a stable place where they can be loved for who they are.
“I don’t try to change them,” he said. “If they want to change, we’re here for them. If they don’t want to change, we’re still going to love them.”
Robinson, 55, says his Christian faith motivates him to help these kids, although he doesn’t try to push religion on anyone at Sox Place. He says he lies awake at night after hearing their stories of abuse and neglect.
“It shakes my faith in people,” he said. “How can we allow this to happen in our own country?”
The Obama administration recently unveiled a plan to end homelessness in the United States over the next decade. The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness will “harness public and private resources to build on the innovations that have been demonstrated at the local level nationwide,” according to council chairman Shaun Donavan.
Robinson is skeptical about whether the government can adequately address the root causes of homelessness.
“We need less government and more grass roots,” he said. “We need taxes not to go to renovating parks, but renovating lives.”
All the government can really do is put a roof over someone’s head, he said. And that doesn’t necessarily constitute a “home.”
“They don’t have a home, the sense of family,” Robinson said. “All we’re doing is pushing them to the sides, we’re not dealing with the real issues.”
Belle wandered into Sox Place one afternoon in June, a pretty young woman with an air of confidence that contrasts with the cuts across her cheek and the brace on her knee, injuries she said were inflicted by her pimp.
“People think it’s a choice to be on the streets, but it’s never a choice,” said Belle, 18.
She said she has been sexually abused since she was 6 years old and was in and out of foster care until recently.
Now, she is living in a camp with other homeless kids, hiding from her pimp.
“Yeah, it’s not a house, but a house isn’t everything,” she said. “Family. Love. Friends. This is my family. All I ever wanted was a family.”
She wants to go to college to study psychology and help other street kids, but she knows the odds are against her.
“I don’t have the building blocks to get up in life, to be able to do what I need to do, because I never learned it,” she said. “I have to learn that on my own.”
The odds were against Liz Martinez, who left home at age 12 and eventually became a member of the Juggalos.
“Most of these kids have been abused and been taken advantage of by every adult they’ve met.” –Tom Manning, advocate for homeless teens
“They were better than my own biological family,” said Martinez, who is now 21. “They didn’t put their hands on me, they fed me, they kept me safe, they cared about how I felt.”
After nearly a decade on the streets, she has just gotten her first apartment with her boyfriend and is looking forward to a more stable future for her 5-month-old daughter.
“I have almost $1,000 saved up from selling plasma and doing day labor, and hopefully in the next month and a half to three months, I’ll have my GED,” she said.
Martinez has drawn strength from living on the streets, and she thinks others can do the same:
“If you can survive off of living on the street and sleeping on cold concrete or behind a Dumpster when it’s snowing, you know you have the strength to do just about anything.”
Study of Fort Worth’s homeless plan shows ‘dramatic progress’
An article in Fort Worth’s Star-Telegram on how a community’s city, county, faith and service sectors came together to make a difference in people experiencing extreme crisis and no where left to turn.
Study of Fort Worth’s homeless plan shows ‘dramatic progress’
Posted Monday, Jun. 21, 2010
By ALEX BRANCH
abranch@star-telegram.com
Fort Worth’s homeless plan has made “dramatic progress” in getting people off the streets but may have to depend more on private funding to remain effective, according to an independent evaluation of the program’s first year.
Three hundred twenty-two homeless people have been housed through the plan, Directions Home, since April 2009, with many clients participating in counseling and substance abuse treatment, the University of Texas at Arlington School of Social Work found.
By the end of the first year, nearly 9 of 10 people who got permanent supportive housing vouchers had maintained their housing, one step toward self-sufficiency. New programs, including more case managers and job specialists, should help continue that progress.
However, with the city facing a projected $77 million budget shortfall, the evaluators acknowledged that the plan’s $2.9 million annual city funding is at risk and suggested that success may depend on finding alternate sources for money.
“The year-end result has been a strong shift to move people out of homelessness, increase their self-sufficiency and begin offering the tools needed to prevent re-occurrence,” the evaluation says. “The integrity of the plan appears contingent on identifying additional sources of funding in case municipal funds are reduced.”
Otis Thornton, the city’s homeless coordinator, said that the city has made no decisions about funding but that in light of the budget situation, “it’s hard to envision not experiencing any cuts.”
The plan, approved in 2008, is designed to eliminate chronic homelessness in 10 years by providing homeless people with help finding stable housing and support services so they can become more independent.
Thornton said the evaluation shows that the homeless plan is succeeding. “We are achieving what we set out to do,” he said. “We are helping people with long-term histories of homelessness escape the streets and emergency shelters, achieve housing, keep their housing and improve their lives.”
‘We can help people’
Of the 322 homeless people who got housing, 181 received city-funded vouchers, which was short of the plan’s goal of 200 during the first year. The remaining 141 were housed through emergency and day shelter programs that received money from Directions Home to hire caseworkers. That’s the figure that Thornton said impressed him.
“It shows that with a modest amount of assistance, we can help people get back into housing,” he said. “We’re very proud of our partner agencies and all that they are doing.”
The evaluation also said there was a 43 percent increase in their ability to be self-sufficient, based on various criteria, and a 22 percent increase in overall income after nine months among tenants in permanent supportive housing. It noted, though, that in most cases clients still did not earn a livable income.
A community court program for the homeless helped 202 people complete probation and community service as well as dismiss 1,665 citations. Outstanding warrants are often barriers to the homeless getting jobs or housing.
The evaluation included areas for improvement. Programs tend to boost clients’ self-sufficiency immediately upon their entry into housing because basic needs like shelter, food and safety are being met. But larger barriers like employment, income, mental health issues and substance abuse are overcome less dramatically.
Evaluators also said philosophies differed distinctly among service providers and recommended identifying best practices and applying them uniformly to ensure that all clients are served well.
‘Big step backward’
Some proponents of the plan say cutting funding would undermine the progress.
The Rev. Brooks Harrington, who was chairman of the Mayor’s Advisory Commission on Homelessness when the plan was formed, said that he understands that the city faces hard choices but that to shift funding responsibility for the homeless effort back to private sources would be a “big step backward.” Before the city passed the plan, private sources funded the vast majority of homeless services, he said.
“City and county government only recently stepped up to the plate and took responsibility that it should have taken a long time ago,” Harrington said. “The programs are doing so much good that I would hate to see the city lay off that responsibility after only two years.”
Last year, city leaders proposed cutting $1 million from the homeless plan but reconsidered after the plan’s supporters urged against it. The UTA evaluators noted the faith community’s “tremendous response” to the proposed cuts.
ALEX BRANCH, 817-390-7689
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United Way brings business tactics to homeless problem
Great article found in the Coloradoan…
LOVELAND – Ending homelessness is more than a moral issue, it’s crucial for
the economic health of a community.
That was the message delivered Thursday by keynote speaker Denver Mayor
John Hickenlooper during the 2010 United Way of Larimer County State of the
Community luncheon at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Loveland.
Before Denver started its Road Home program to end homelessness in 10
years, the city had more than 12,000 people who were homeless. A variety of
agencies worked to address the problem and were spending about $70 million
a year to fight the problem.
“But we weren’t addressing the issue of homelessness,” Hickenlooper said.
“We were just finding bigger Band-Aids to cover the problem.”
To tackle the problem, Hickenlooper and others decided to bring a business
perspective to a social issue.
To that end, Denver has gotten its professional sports teams, downtown
restaurants and hotels, and other businesses involved. Then the
organization decided to get the metro area’s 1,100 congregations involved.
So far, 275 congregations are providing mentors to help the homeless and
have been able to help 1,500 people, mostly single mothers with children,
move into their own homes. Ninety percent of the families that have been
placed in homes have remained in them after a year, Hickenlooper said.
“It’s a huge success that didn’t require a government bureaucracy,” he
said.
Five years into the program, Denver has cut homelessness in the city by 60
percent and has reduced panhandling in downtown Denver by 90 percent,
Hickenlooper.
The past two years have been a challenge as the economy has faltered, but
that makes it the perfect time for this kind of effort, he said.
“There’s no more important time to deal with homelessness than in a
recession like this.”
Bryce Hach, director of Homeward 2020, a 10-year plan to end homelessness
in Fort Collins that will kick off soon, told the 650 people at Thursday’s
luncheon that it’s important for the Fort Collins area to address
homelessness before it becomes a crisis.
“You can ignore homelessness, but you can’t avoid it,” Hach said.
Housing instability comes at a tremendous cost to the community in terms of
providing emergency medical care and space at the jail.
“We can no longer incur the costs to manage this issue,” Hach said. “We
need to move people from being tax users to taxpayers.”
Gordan Thibedeau, United Way of Larimer County executive director, said
Hickenlooper was chosen as the keynote speaker for the annual luncheon
several months before he decided to run as the Democratic candidate for
Colorado governor.
The United Way decided to have Hickenlooper speak despite his candidacy
because he’d be able to make the business case for ending homelessness.
“Homelessness is an issue that affects all of us,” Thibedeau said. “He’s
able to speak authoritatively about the issue.”
The luncheon is a nonpolitical, nonpartisan event.
