More than emergency shelter: Counties take different paths to address homelessness

County efforts to end homelessness go beyond just rapid re-housing and supportive housing

The quickest way to end homelessness is to provide housing.

It’s simple, but the economics are the hard part — the sum of funding, program support and available housing.

Rapid re-housing, now considered the model program by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, tries to limit the amount of time in temporary shelter and quickly get homeless families and individuals back into permanent, or at least long-term shelter.

Mercer County, N.J. was one of the 15 communities to receive a federal Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Grant to fund a rapid re-housing program in 2008.

The program is rooted in the ‘“housing first” philosophy, which hinges on taking care of immediate shelter needs and then addressing substance abuse and job stability later. Mercer County covers six months of rent and expenses for privately owned rental housing to give recipients a chance to build their savings and, with good execution, stay in that house.

“We don’t allow them to get an apartment they can’t sustainably afford,” said Marygrace Billek, director of human services for Mercer County. “And we open up resources like a food pantry so any income they have can go toward building savings.”

Mercer County’s earlier system moved families to transitional housing — with a heavy emphasis on social service delivery — from the shelter, almost like social promotion in schools. It was slow and expensive and not as efficient, as Billek found out. And now HUD doesn’t pay for transitional housing.

“We looked (in 2008) at what we were doing and realized we weren’t ending homelessness, we were managing it,” she said. “We had set up a process so that people would go from emergency shelter to transitional housing and sometimes to permanent housing. If you stuck with us long enough and did all of the right things, eventually, someday, you could be rewarded with housing.

“But homeless people didn’t need 18 months of classes on being a better parent; they needed a home.”

It’s a simple and direct approach for people who need a finish line, not red tape. Though some homeless people have been on the street for years, with mental and behavioral health or substance abuse disorders interfering with their chance for a sustainable lifestyle and requiring permanent supportive housing with heavy social service delivery, many are simply caught in the economic friction between wages and the cost of living.

“The level of poverty for families who are homeless isn’t very different from everyone else who lives in their neighborhood,” Billek said. “They’re on the margins and something happens, their car breaks down and they can’t get to work, they lose their job and their carefully balanced world falls apart. Get them in a safe place where they can get their bearings and they could be back on their feet.”

Reorganizing Mercer County’s system redirected all families through a standard screening and assessment process. Since 2012, Mercer County has not had a chronically homeless family, down from 130 in 2008.

The program has cut down on the length of time a family draws public assistance (an average of 189 days, down from the previous 339-day average), and increased monthly income in 50 percent of cases, compared to 14 percent previously. In the past seven years, only 6 percent of families have reported becoming homeless again, compared to an earlier 21 percent recidivism rate. All of that adds up to a nearly 50 percent cut in costs from the previous model.

Single homeless adults generally exhibit mental health or substance abuse disorders that require permanent supportive housing, but Billek said the county has a rapid re-housing model for single people, too.

“We focus on getting them back to work, but if they haven’t held a job in three years, they’re probably not getting one soon, so we shift our focus to getting them Social Security payments and then working on job training,” she said.

Regardless of the population, vigilance in program evaluation is necessary for success.

“Never take your eye off of the numbers,” Billek said. “If you don’t look at your data all the time and see the amount of time people spend in the shelter has gone from 47 days to 54 days, and you don’t ask ‘Why did that happen, what’s the problem?’ pretty soon the number will keep creeping up.”

In the rapid re-housing process, Mercer County provides expert consultation for lease negotiations.

“For a mother of three who gets in a house and then finds out she’s responsible for every utility and she has to clear the snow, that just makes it harder to keep her in a home,” Billek said. “We can be advocates for them, the social service environment is very confusing unless you have some help navigating it.”

 

A safety net before the safety net

Of course, keeping people from becoming homeless in the first place is another strategy. Hennepin County, Minn. is developing a “chatbot” legal advice smartphone app, which can give tenants a resource for their rights and options if they are facing eviction.

“We have a lot of households who use this tactic of stopping paying rent if the landlord isn’t fixing something,” said Mikkel Beckmen, director of the Hennepin County-Minneapolis Office to End Homelessness. “That may work in other cities and states but in Minneapolis, that will get you evicted.”

So educating tenants and trying to avoid eviction is all part of Hennepin County’s strategy of preventing homelessness in the first place. In some circumstances, that includes direct rental assistance to tenants.

“As much as you can keep people in housing, you should, because once you lose it, it becomes very hard to find a spot in a competitive housing market,” Beckmen said. “Families who have been in shelters are at the most risk of repeating, but studies have also shown that (government) rental assistance isn’t necessary for keeping all families in their homes. If we do offer direct rental assistance, to keep people from being evicted, we target families with less than $15,000 in annual income and who have had shelter experience previously.”

Beckmen’s department is also trying to reconcile the different timelines for emergency assistance services and housing court.

“Housing court is fast, it could take between three and 14 days for someone to be evicted, but it takes longer than that to even get emergency assistance started, leaving a vulnerable gap.”

Hennepin County is also working with cooperative landlords to provide direct counseling and a form of mediation to work out solutions to keep tenants from being evicted.

If all of that fails, Hennepin is one of a dwindling number of counties with a Right to Shelter policy for all families and single people with disabilities, the only in the upper Midwest.

A geographic challenge

Battling rural homelessness presents a number of challenges. Communities spread out over larger areas make it hard to position service providers. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimated that 7 percent of the homeless population lives in rural areas, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Many rural homeless stay with family or friends, which keeps them off of the official homeless counts and makes it hard to accurately track the size of the population.

That contributes to less funding for rural counties to fight homelessness.

“A lot of times, when it comes to funding, we end up not being eligible,” said Danielle Lurie, chairwoman of the Tuscarawas County, Ohio HOME (Housing Opportunity Monitoring Education) Network. “It’s tough.”

So she and her staff do what they can, as do other counties in the same situation, working from the margins to do what they can for people living on the margin to put people in homes. They have some vouchers, and some funding for rapid re-housing, but most efforts involve a lot of scraping to get by.

When an oil and gas boom in eastern Ohio brought out-of-town workers, affordable housing was in high demand and lower-income residents’ options narrowed further.

“We were able to get through to some local landlords who understood the purpose we served and were willing to stick with (the local renters),” Lurie said. “It wasn’t an issue that they wouldn’t get the money, Section 8 vouchers come guaranteed straight from the government, and quite frankly, in the long run it was more affordable for landlords because the oil and gas population was pretty rough on the properties. But we developed those relationships and made sure landlords knew the impact.”

Some counties have it worse than Tuscarawas, which still opens up its 91-bed shelter to neighboring Carroll County, which doesn’t have one of its own. Just over half of the United States’ 3,069 counties (1,536, to be exact) maintain homeless shelters with at least one bed. Like Tuscarawas County, they do tenant education, build that roster of cooperative landlords and hope for options a drop-in shelter some day.

“It’s a need, it continues to come up. It’s not something that’s particularly they welcomed by the community — nobody wants it in their back yard — but if managed properly, it could be a real asset,” Lurie said.

A place to live

The bridge between homelessness and security is the availability of safe affordable housing, which HUD defines as costing no more than 30 percent of an individual’s income.

It’s something Billek feels fortunate about in Mercer County.

“We’re not San Francisco, we have housing and we can put a person in a house and they’d have choice,” she said. “If they don’t want to be in Trenton, there’s housing in Princeton, or Hamilton or Hopewell.”

St. Clair County, Ill. has plenty of housing, following a population decline that started in the 1950s. But many of the houses are in poor condition, and Terry Beach, director of the county’s intergovernmental grants department, has overseen disbursement of grants worth up to $20,000 to rehabilitate low-moderate single-family homes, including emergency building code repairs.

In Butte County, Calif., a different plan to create safe housing is in the works. The county’s 10-year plan to end homelessness describes a designated campground for the homeless, with on-site amenities including showers, laundry facilities, mailboxes and a possible community building.

“For the chronically homeless, accustomed to an alternative lifestyle, a housing-first model can be threatening,” the plan says.

Just to the south, a Yuba County homeless shelter opened 20 8-foot-by-14-foot “tiny houses,” consisting of a room with two beds with no water or electricity, to provide some protection from the elements for the homeless for 30 days per person.

Whatever the resources they have available, counties are providing what is likely the last chance for many people in distress.

 “Most of the time, people have family or friends they can rely on for help, so the people we see showing up at a shelter tend to be the least connected with the shallowest personal support networks,” Beckmen said. “Homelessness looks similar across the country because it’s really about people with incredibly low incomes trying to compete for an ever-dwindling resource.”