The Creeps on the Street
Let's imagine for a moment that you are planning a community roundtable discussion about the problem of homelessness. The goal of the Roundtable is to reach out to the community and to start to bring people together to come up with solutions to the problem of homelessness. Who would you want to attend such a meeting? Service providers and others who've worked with the homeless? Check. Members of local government? Check. The people organizing efforts to help the homeless in their communities? Check. Homeless people?

Uh...oops?

Hmm OK. Well how about the agency that runs the men's and women's shelters in town and who has a major role in providing services to the homeless?

Oops again?

This is exactly what happened this past Saturday April 30 at the Second Community Roundtable Discussion on homelessness held at New Hope Elementary School. Kristin Lavergne, IFC's services director, was out of town, which is something that I can understand. She goes to a lot of meetings, she wasn't able to make one, its not that big a deal. But I was rather surprised to arrive at the meeting and see that no one from the IFC managed to make it. It is difficult for me to imagine a community discussion about homelessness without IFC at the table--or, come to think of it, without homeless people.

Of course, homeless people usually don't have cars and there's no busses running in Chapel Hill early on a Saturday morning. Come to think of it, there are no busses running to New Hope Elementary, period. Billie Guthrie, who works on the Community Initiative, went out of her way to specifically ask in all of the promotional releases for the Roundtable for anyone needing transportation assistance to contact her. That information was also included on the flier that was sent to IFC in the hopes that it would be posted on the bulletin boards at the shelters--the flier that seems to have disappeared into the black hole of the IFC bureaucracy. I'm not aware of any effort that IFC made to let people know about the Roundtable or to arrange transportation (they own a van) for those who might wish to attend. Somehow Ms. Guthrie's requests to IFC for those things got lost in the shuffle. But I suppose these things happen.

In spite of all of this, the Roundtable was a definite success. There was a lot of good discussion and people seemed to be willing to come together to address the issue of homelessness. I heard more than one person comment that they had been unaware of many of the facts about homelessness that were presented. Sadly, it will end up being a grossly underreported success, though, since the Chapel Hill Herald was the only media outlet represented. One would perhaps wonder, though, whether it wouldn't be simpler to just ask the homeless what would help them rather than the endless speculation as to what would help them. Of course, we couldn't ask them, because there were none there. I would be remiss if I neglected to thank the IFC for that state of affairs. I suppose the IFC had other priorities, although I'm unclear as to what exactly those are.

In spite of the Roundtable being a very productive success for the most part, we can probably do better. In any case, here are a few of the facts about the homeless that came up in the discussion:

• There are a lot of factors that have contributed to the explosion of the homeless problem beginning in the 1980s, among them deinstitutionalization of people from the criminal justice system or mental health centers in the 1960s combined with the later arrival of the affordable housing crisis, the drop in the buying power of low income workers, cuts in social programs, and so forth.
  
  
• 80% of the homeless are homeless for less than 1-2 months and then transition back into housing.
  
  
• 10% of the homeless are homeless for around 6 months. The remaining 10% are the chronically homeless who have been in their situation for over a year and who consume roughly 50% of the resources that exist to help the homeless.
  
  
• The strategy of Pathways to Housing in New York City and Washington DC is to move the most difficult people to serve directly into housing. And it turns out they're not spending much more to do that then we spend on the same tired old approaches that haven't been working for the past 20 years.
  
  
• There are over 600 homeless people in Asheville, NC on any given night; 19 of them have been arrested a total of over 800 times in a two year period, mostly for petty crimes associated with homelessness such as trespassing and loitering. This of course puts a huge burden on our police and courts.
  
  
• On any given night, there are at least 230 homeless people in Orange County, many of these members of families with children. Perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 of homeless people are veterans of the Armed Forces. This number also includes 59 families with a total of 38 children and at least 48 victims of domestic violence. There is no shelter for victims of domestic violence in Orange County and of course one wonders how many people stay in such situations because of having no alternatives to becoming homeless if they were to leave.
  
  
• None of these statistics count individuals and families who are perhaps a missed paycheck, a serious health problem, or some other emergency away from being homeless. These numbers also come from very strict definitions established by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on who counts as homeless. The numbers do NOT count those who are illegally doubled up with no lease, perhaps crashing on someone's floor or couch. The actual number of people who are homeless or severely at risk of becoming homeless is likely far higher than these statistics.

So what is to be done? Well the first thing to be done is to realize that homelessness is not going to be solved by one or two agencies and its not going to be solved overnight. We don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel because there are a lot of ideas scattered around out there and we probably know a lot of what we need to solve the homelessness problem already. But we do need for communities to take ownership of the homelessness issue and then come together and find solutions that will work rather than passing the buck to this or that agency. I believe that the problem CAN be solved if we'd simply make it a community and political priority to solve it. Aside from the moral considerations, the data shows pretty clearly that we'd also save a lot of money and resources by putting an end to homelessness in America.
-# posted by Michael McGee @ 4:46 PM