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Novato Housing Coalition |
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There's No Place Like Home Should homeless focus be on temporary shelters or permanent housing? by Peter Seidman Two winters ago, temperatures plummeted in December. What was an uncomfortable inconvenience for many was life threatening for others. When two homeless people were admitted to Marin General Hospital showing signs of hypothermia, a hospital social worker alerted the community about a public-health crisis. At about the same time, the newly formed Marin Organizing Committee (MOC), a faith-based group associated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, had taken on the issue of homelessness and mounted a campaign to pressure the county to recognize the seriousness of the problem. That winter, the county worked to open the National Guard Armory across from the Civic Center as an emergency warming shelter during the coldest winter months. The emergency shelter was, in essence, a government mandate. In 1987, Congress passed the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act. It was aimed at helping the homeless by creating and aiding, among other programs, emergency shelters. George Deukmejian, governor at the time, called for the California National Guard to open its armories as temporary shelters during the winter to protect the health and safety of individuals who otherwise would be at risk. Marin's shelter remained open only through mid-February, leaving those who had found safe haven at the facility out in the cold for the remaining winter nights. A group of congregations recognized the crack in the support system and created a rotating emergency shelter program. The MOC met in August 2009 to keep the issue of affordable housing and housing for the homeless on the county's front burner. The county responded with a commitment to help fund a rotating shelter program in the winter of 2009/10. This year, efforts to continue programs for the homeless have met with mixed results. Aldersgate Church in Terra Linda withdrew its application in San Rafael for a use permit that would have allowed it to participate in the emergency shelter program. A vocal group of neighbors and some congregants said they were concerned the plan to offer homeless men safe shelter for a night would endanger their community. Ross residents raised similar concerns about a plan to offer shelter for men at St. John's Episcopal Church. The emergency shelter program offers a safe place to sleep for up to 35 men and 20 women at participating congregations. Men and women sleep at separate congregations. The nightly numbers are just a fraction of the county's homeless population. The congregations accept clients on a rotating basis. Some provide food and volunteer support. The homeless clients meet at the St. Vincent de Paul dining room in downtown San Rafael, where they take shuttle buses to the congregations providing services for that night. Shuttles return them to San Rafael the next morning. Before participating in the rotating shelter effort, clients must demonstrate that they're capable of modest behavior. Community members are on hand to oversee the nightly shelter program. Despite evidence that no incidents of consequence have occurred, some resident still remain wary. Advocates of the homeless say neighbors should be more comforted with an emergency shelter program that provides guidance and oversight than no shelter at all. The homeless still exist? shelter or no shelter. Not all neighborhoods are unwelcoming. The San Anselmo Town Council recently voiced support for an emergency shelter at First Presbyterian Church. Four San Rafael churches currently have use permits for emergency shelter duty for women. "We have about 15 congregations that will participate," says Christine Paquette, development director at St. Vincent de Paul Society of Marin, "but we are still working out details, so that number isn't official." Some of those 15 congregations will provide meals and volunteer services, she says, "It's definitely not 100 percent solid on each night being covered yet." The shelter program will begin the night of Dec. 1 and run through March 31. While the emergency shelter program undoubtedly provides respite, say many advocates, an over-emphasis on emergency shelters is the wrong road. Rather than warehousing the homeless, they say, society's efforts should focus on ending homelessness. A program that has gained increasing recognition is called Housing First. It's part of a range of approaches to homelessness that began after the numbers of homeless people in the United States began climbing in the 1980s. The first approach concentrated on temporary shelters. The next came with what's called continuum of care, in which a homeless person can enter a system of services through a shelter program with the aim of transferring to temporary housing program with support services. As a person stabilizes, transitional housing becomes possible, along with employment possibilities. Professionals can treat physical and mental issues. In a best-case scenario, the homeless person (or family) has moved through transition to permanent housing and placement in the community. The continuum of care model often requires a person to deal with mental health issues or addiction before qualifying for placement in housing programs. The problem, say advocates of homeless services, is that many homeless individuals never advance because they have difficulty meeting the admission requirement, which creates a permanent homeless population. That's where Housing First comes into the picture. As its name implies, Housing First is based on the premise that moving a homeless person into safe housing is the first step; without housing, nothing else is possible. The idea surfaced in the early 1990s, when the organization Pathways to Housing in New York City started a program based on the assumption that housing is a basic human right and should never be denied. Pathways developed a program to first provide housing for the most chronically homeless before addressing health and addiction issues. It is similar to supportive housing programs such as Shelter Plus Care, which provides housing, services and rental assistance for persons with disabilities. Shelter Plus Care operates in Marin, and many clients live and receive services throughout the county from the federally sponsored program. In Marin, Homeward Bound, the largest local provider of housing for the homeless, represents the continuum of care model. It operates the 40-bed Mill Street Center as well as the Family Emergency Center, which provides beds for 13 families at a Marin motel. And among its other programs, Homeward Bound also has the New Beginnings Center, an 80-bed shelter for single homeless adults. Homeward Bound operates two of the three hotels in San Rafael that provide space for the homeless, housing a total of 56 people, says Mary Kay Sweeney, executive director. "Those [types of continuum of care programs require you to comply with things like commitment to treatment, commitment to sobriety. Housing First doesn't have those conditions," says Lisa Sepahi, homeless analyst with the county. "It will get you into housing first, and if you're ready and willing to have people help with mental health problems or substance-abuse issues, then those services are there for you. If you don't want those, you don't have to have them." It seems counterintuitive, but it works. "If you look at the national programs that have been going, you find they are highly successful," says Sepahi. "The turnover rate is very low. When people become stably housed, their mental health and substance-abuse issues begin to diminish." The Housing First concept has crossed the political and ideological divide. It cannot be called simply a kneejerk liberal wasteful welfare program. In 1999, a predominantly Republican Congress required the Department of Housing and Urban Development to devote at least one third of funding for the homeless toward programs that moved the chronically homeless into permanent housing. Since then, cities across the country have participated. There's good reason for that. Cities and counties learned that Housing First, while requiring funding and support services for clients, costs about the same or actually saved money. As reported in a noted 2002 study co-authored by Dennis P. Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania, clients with chronic mental and addiction problems in Housing First units used services such as emergency rooms far less than the chronically homeless out on the streets or warehoused in emergency shelters. The program, however, is not without critics who say that Housing First rewards behavior that should be discouraged. But supporters point to the benefits of removing chronically addicted homeless from the streets and putting them in safe surroundings. They say it benefits the homeless and the community. "Housing is healthcare," says Sepahi. "Housing gives you your health, well-being and safety. If you can meet that need, there are many things that can come together in your life." Although the move toward Housing First-type programs rather than emergency shelters has gained momentum, advocates of homeless services say a need still exists for the short-term emergency-shelter model as long as a community isn't reliant on it as a primary solution. The effort to find a permanent facility for a warming shelter in Marin has faced major hurdles. It's hard to find a site that neighbors will accept and local planning agencies and city councils will approve. The MOC has worked to find a solution, but none has surfaced. Recognizing the difficulty of finding a permanent shelter site, Paquette says, "the Marin Organizing Committee has endorsed the county plan to look into funding Housing First." But she notes that an emergency shelter program can prove critical as part of a range of services. An emergency shelter, for instance, can act as a triage center. Not all homeless clients need a complicated set of services, she says. Sometimes, a bus ride or a plane trip home to family is a solution. St. Vincent de Paul facilitates that kind of intervention quite often, she says. In addition, visiting people in their homes before they become homeless is a critical part of St. Vincent's array of programs. A Homelessness Policy Steering Group has been meeting to chart a course for the county in its effort to provide services to the homeless. In addition to supporting another winter of an emergency shelter, the group also is considering how the county could fashion (and fund) a Housing First program here. The county has committed $400,000 to homeless programs, says Supervisor Susan Adams, "but the supervisors' position will likely be that we can't do it all. We can't build a temporary shelter and infuse money into Housing First and salvage the programs that the state and the feds are dismembering." The steering group will help guide expenditures by recommending funding priorities. "Housing First is gaining momentum," says Adams. Mary Kay Sweeney at Homeward Bound has no hesitance in endorsing Housing First, even though her current programs run on the continuum of care model. "If we had the houses to put people in and the service dollars, we would do it." And that points to a problem advocates of homeless services continually face: the lack of affordable housing. That's the biggest, the most impracticable obstacle, they say. "Housing First is really great," says Sweeney. "If we could divert some of the funding for the emergency end of the deal and throw it in to Housing First, that would be great. However, we don't have enough housing to do that yet. That's the issue we're facing, especially in this county."
Contact the writer at peter@pseidman.com. |
