Homeless Book Club Meets

How is Your Government Handling Homelessness: TALK!

The poorly named "advisory" board of the Office of Homeless Services met this last week. This group has all the right people at the table, but they advise no one. They talk a great deal about homelessness, but rarely act. It is a good chance to get together every other month and talk about homelessness similar to homeless book club. Can you believe that your government convenes a meeting only every 60 days to address homelessness? If it is any comfort to you they do meet for two hours every 60 days.

Again, nothing was decided, but we did get to hear a few updates. They are moving closer to having all the big shelters in the database so that those numbers will actually make sense. Right now the numbers are useless, but that does not stop the Federal government from publishing the results and using those numbers to tell us that they are "solving" homelessness. We heard a misguided presentation by the State Disability advocates and their "Home For Good" campaign to find service dollars for the permanent supportive housing programs. We have discussed how supportive housing is oversold and a Hummer of a program when the community needs many Ford Festivas instead. It took real courage for the group to accept the recommendation to renew the funding for all the existing programs currently funded by the federal government.

There was some discussion of working on a Central Intake point, but this is a concept we can expect to see in 2018 since the County is in charge. We heard about the plans around hospital discharge--no mention of the horrible Channel 3 story. The most interesting part of the meeting was the update on North Point Transitional Shelter. Remember this was the facility opened January 15, 2008 because Aviation was closing. The experiment is now five months old with only one month left for the 160 residents who opened the place. Here are the numbers:

The demographics of the North Point population:

• Only one-third of the men had one year of homelessness or more.
• 66% were addicted
• 55% had recent experience with the criminal justice system.
• 25% had un-addressed child support issues.
• Only 14% are veterans
  

Currently here are the statistics:

• 71% are now working.
• 14 are determined not to be able to work, and the shelter is looking to transfer them.
• 5 have moved into housing
• 16 were discharged mostly for violating rules.
• 19 left on their own.
• 15 have not been able to find a job.
• Average income at this time is $8.75 (below the housing wage and the living wage).
• They guess that 20-25 went back to Lakeside Shelter

What does this all mean? It is hard to find affordable housing even with a job. There are a number of people who were screened out of the program and they were kicked out or left on their own. This might have been because they had to select so many people in such a short period of time. The men are not finding jobs that will make it easy to find housing, and a lot of people will have to leave in June or ask for an extension. The one good piece of news is that the County agreed to give the men a year grace period in collecting child support payments while they get back on their feet.

The average number at Lakeside shelter was only 370 in April, down from 401 in March. The County hopes that a large number will be moving out of North Point in the next month so that there is no need for overflow at Lakeside. We shall see.

Brian
Update: East Side Catholic closed in December, and the Catholics turned off the heat, but not the water. So the pipes burst and the building is no longer usable. There are a few providers looking at filling the hole left by the East Side Catholic shelter serving 30 families, and now they will have to find a new building.

Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.