Neighbor House of Hillsborough
Cheryl Johnston, who is a writer for the Orange County bureau of the News and Observer has an article in today's Chapel Hill News regarding an upcoming public information meeting Monday night in Hillsborough. The purpose of the meeting will be to discuss the ongoing efforts of a group of volunteers to establish a homeless shelter in Hillsborough. The plan is for local churches to rotate providing temporary shelter to the homeless during the winter months and Ronnie Torrain, who leads the effort, has said his goal is for the program to be up and running by October of this year.

The bi-monthly meeting of the regional Community Initiative to End Homelessness (formerly the Orange County Continuum of Care) is also Monday afternoon in Hillsborough. The goal of the Community Initiative has been to rotate meeting sites to include people from all over Orange County. Its an admirable goal, but the problem is that it excludes anyone who might want to participate who doesn't have their own transportation. There's no public transit between Chapel Hill-Carrboro and Hillsborough, so by holding meetings in northern Orange County without addressing the transportation issue, it is excluding those in the southern part of the county who have no way to get there. The last two major events of the Community Initiative have been held in northern Orange at sites that are inaccessible by public transit: the recent Roundtable discussion at New Hope Elementary and now today's meeting in Hillsborough.

This brings to mind a conversation I had with a friend a couple of weeks ago regarding the wider issue of poorer people in our society being excluded from things due to transportation problems. For instance, programs at Chapel Hill High and East Chapel Hill High, such as AP classes and band often have meetings in the early morning before Chapel Hill Transit busses are running. Students whose parents cannot take them to school and who have to depend on the bus are thus out of luck. This naturally disproportionately affects students from poorer families. It is true that its great that a town the size of Chapel Hill has the kind of bus system that it does, but public transit in Orange County still has a lot of room for improvement.

For instance, during breaks at UNC, busses operate on a reduced schedule which means there's usually no busses running past 7:30 PM or so except for routes which are express only and run between downtown, UNC, and the various park and ride lots on the edge of town. This reduced schedule is in effect for several months during the summer; apparently Chapel Hill Transit does not plan for the fact that some people live here and that students are the only ones who use the busses. It makes things very difficult for anyone who, for instance, has to work second shift. It also caters to those who drive by running express routes to park and ride lots that don't stop anywhere else along their routes. The logic behind designing a bus system that at certain times only effectively serves those with cars escapes me.

Granted, this might seem like a little thing, but poorer people in America often have a constant series of such obstacles in their lives. And that is exactly the point. The poor and homeless often face day to day challenges that the average middle class American never has to even think about. And then we wonder why they find it so hard to climb out of homelessness or poverty and join the middle class. As John Edwards once stated in a recent talk at UNC Law School, its expensive to be poor and often very challenging as well. It is true that there are many stories of people rising above these kinds of challenges to find success in life. However, I do not see the logic of making it as hard as possible for people to get ahead in life. The promise of America should be to open the door to opportunity for as many people as possible. To do that, we might have to extend a helping hand to some of our poor neighbors, many of whom, if only given a chance, would be productive contributing citizens instead of placing strains on an inefficient social service system. Helping people to move up and become productive citizens and taxpayers would save us money in the long run.
-# posted by Michael McGee @ 11:50 AM 1 comments

 
Point In Time Committee Meeting
NOTE: This post has been reviewed by staff members of the Community Initiative to End Homelessness. Please click here for a detailed explanation of why this is done.

The Point in Time Committee of the Community Initiative to End Homelessness held a regular meeting the afternoon of May 11 at the Carrboro Police Department. The primary focus of this committee at this point is gathering data to get a better scope of the homeless problem. Federal guidelines from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) mandate some of this data and we're also discussing the best ways to collect additional data that would be useful locally. We now have someone with formal research experience working on the committee, so I'm excited about that because I believe that maintaining scientific discipline is of the utmost importance if our information is to mean anything. Someone with experience in this field is better able to keep us on track in that regard than I am. In the interests of full disclosure, I am a member of the Point in Time Committee.

Our main task at this point is developing a survey to find out what factors lead to homelessness, since there is really no such thing as a "typical" homeless person. In addition, we're also trying to determine the cost to the community to provide services and what other services might be needed to solve the problem. This should give us a better idea of how to use resources more efficiently.

The last point in time count of the homeless occurred in January 2005 and we're interested in doing a count and administering a survey during warm weather months in order to compare data. Our preference would be to do the study this year and I'm optimistic that we'll be able to do that. However, there is a lot involved in designing a study like this and its going to be necessary to work with other organizations (and that will require formal requests, reviews, and approval), so there's always a chance we'll have to wait until next year. The key is that we want to do the count in warm weather months to explore any seasonal differences in the numbers.

Its becoming quite clear that the definition HUD uses for homelessness (particularly what they call "chronic homelessness") does not capture the full scope of the homeless problem. The definition of "chronically homeless" used by HUD does not include families. HUD's figures also do not count people who are doubled up with no lease (sleeping on a friend's couch, for instance) who are at risk of becoming homeless. And naturally, HUD's numbers offer no real way to tell how many people are just one missed paycheck or severe health or financial crisis away from becoming homeless.

An important goal of the Community Initiative is trying to document the full extent of the problem and collect clear evidence of the gap between the actual problem and the way the federal government chooses to define the problem. We're getting a sense that HUD believes that the counts that are out there now are too high But in reality, according to most of the service providers and others who've worked with the homeless that I've spoken to, the counts are most likely too low, partly due to HUD's narrow definition of who is counted as homeless. This is going to require coming up with our own definition of homelessness that clearly shows why HUD's numbers don't capture the full scope of the problem. When we have to ask elected officials to pay attention to homeless and poverty issues, we're going to need the solid data to back up our case.
-# posted by Michael McGee @ 2:06 PM 0 comments

 
No place to go.
PBS Frontline will air the Documentary "The New Asylums" on Tuesday, May 10 at 9PM. This episode examines the issue of the mentally ill in prisons and jails, with the Ohio state prison system as its primary focus. Please refer to the Frontline Website for more information.

Source: Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness


According to Science Daily, a University of California-San Diego study has recently shown that there are more mentally ill people who are homeless than previously thought. And this is not surprising. The way deinstitutionalization has been handled most of the time is one of the major causes of the explosion of the homeless problem. In the meetings and discussions I've participated in regarding homelessness, deinstitutionalization is a theme that comes up a lot, in addition to the relative lack of health care options for the uninsured.

The fact is, social services agencies are in most cases poorly equipped to deal with the mentally ill. Cutting back on services to the mentally ill and forcing them to depend on general social service organizations which are not equipped to give them the help they need is neither logical nor humane. The fact that recent mental health reform efforts in North Carolina seem to be flawed is merely an invitation to worsening the problem of homelessness as agencies such as the IFC get swamped with clients they are not equipped to help.

Here's a personal testimony from one man who was once homeless and mentally ill in New York City. Words such as "deranged" and "psychos" are often used to depict these people, inflammatory language that could not be used against other groups in our society without political and legal repercussions.
-# posted by Michael McGee @ 3:19 PM 0 comments

 
Room for negotiation?
Sandra Shackelford, who has a Master's in Public Policy from Georgia Tech and has written for this blog before, has recently completed a conflict assessment paper on the difficulties between IFC and some of the neighborhoods of Chapel Hill over the possible relocation of the men's homeless shelter (currently on Rosemary Street downtown). This work was done with Professor Michael Elliot of Georia Tech, who does this kind of work for a living. The complete paper is available here and it does a good job of summing up the history and issues involved in the process of trying to relocate the shelter. The paper is also available in MS Word format.
-# posted by Michael McGee @ 2:21 PM 0 comments

 
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 0 comments

 
Just your friendly neighborhood sorority
On April 29, a warm Friday night, downtown Chapel Hill was crowded with UNC students celebrating the end of the academic year. Loud music could be heard from various fraternity houses and those old enough to drink (and let's face it, probably some who weren't) hit the bars on Franklin Street. And while all this was going on, after a dinner of barbecue served at the IFC's men's homeless shelter on Rosemary Street, many of the homeless walked the block over to University Baptist Church downtown for a movie night for the homeless sponsored by Phil Beta Chi, a Christian sorority at the University.

I sat down and talked with Allison Monroe, the Outreach Coordinator for the sorority. It turns out that, unlike a lot of organizations with formal public service requirements or the common perception among many people these days that "community service" is a form of punishment, Phi Beta Chi has no such formalities. They simply believe in helping others and live according to their values, because, as Ms. Monroe put it, "we're just a group of girls who love the Lord."

The list of the things these girls do is pretty impressive and a refreshing change from the me-centered attitude of a lot of people these days who merely pay lip service to giving back to the community because its considered politically correct. Its certainly a nice change from the "We don't want those worthless bums in our backyard" attitude of some local citizens I've dealt with in my work with IFC and the Community Initiative.

But you get the definite sense that the members of Phi Beta Chi don't care if people are impressed because that's not the point. So I'll show them the respect of not making too big of a deal of something that to them is merely a natural part of being a Christian and a member of the community. Some of the places they've visited have included senior centers, hospitals, and the Ronald McDonald house. They serve breakfast at the IFC shelter every other Friday. And sometimes they just hand out free blowpops and lemonade along with some kind words and wishes of good luck to UNC students around exam time.

The movie night was the idea of Katie Dawson, the former Outreach coordinator who kept the project alive even in spite of facing a lot of obstacles such as finding affordable space. Kudos to University Baptist for allowing Phi Beta Chi the use of their facilities for free. There was free popcorn, drinks, and lots of snacks (including homemade cookies) and a lot of fun and good conversation. I spent most of the evening chatting with Sarah from the sorority and an older guy also named Mike who lives at the shelter who was trying to recall the names of obscure actors from Dr. Who. I'm an avid sci-fi fan myself, but I personally preferred the Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits from the old shows.

I promised I wouldn't make a huge deal of it so I won't. I'll just simply say that it was a refreshing evening and I wish there were more people in the world like these girls. Of course, there are quite a few amazing people in the world; I've had the good fortune to meet many of them through my involvement in activism and in working with IFC and the Community Initiative. And then I've also met my fair share of those who see IFC's clients as worthless bums. But when you actually get to know these people, you realize that once you get beyond economic circumstance, are anything but "worthless bums". They are, in fact, not all that different from anyone else, except for having to face circumstances that most of us could not begin to imagine. I believe that once people start to realize that, ending homelessness in ten years won't be such an impossible goal after all--which is why I keep writing.

It doesn't take much to change the world--just a little human kindness and compassion and putting aside trivial differences to get in touch with our humanity. So thank you to Allison and Katie and Sarah and all the rest for a lovely evening and for being such an example for people to live by. Instead of yelling about how much of a Christian nation we are, perhaps we'd all be better off if we simply started acting like one. And instead of fighting over where to place the Ten Commandments, perhaps we should simply start following them. I truly believe that ending homelessness--along with a great many of the rest of the world's problems--really is that easy--and also, that difficult. Its pretty amazing to stop and think, for just a moment, about what kind of a different world we could have if everyone would come together to rebuild our communities, our country, and our planet.

Oh and the movie they showed? Spiderman II--actually a very good and entertaining film once you get past the wildly implausible physics.
-# posted by Michael McGee @ 3:35 PM 0 comments

 
If you build it, they will come?
The Mayor of Hillsborough seems to think there's no homeless in his town. Thankfully, the Chapel Hill News seems to know better and they've been following the efforts that are underway to get a shelter opened in the town. Incidentally, the IFC and its director, Chris Moran, have provided advice in getting a shelter up and running.

Of course the misconception is that there are no homeless people and a shelter will attract them. Actually, some of IFC's opponents seem to believe that the current IFC shelter in Chapel Hill attracts homeless from all over. I'm not going to try to debate that point, but I'm reminded of when I attended a Town Council meeting a couple months ago. Lynne Kane, who has consistently opposed IFC said that the shelter was attracting people who weren't even from Chapel Hill. Council member Sally Greene pointed out that a lot of people are not from here, but can afford to live here. And some people are just down on their luck; it doesn't make them less human because they cannot afford the sky-high rents in Chapel Hill.

And if we really want to get into a discussion about people who aren't from Chapel Hill, we might as well start at the top: the The Mayor is from Ohio.



-# posted by Michael McGee @ 12:27 AM 1 comments