More Questions Than Answers

Family Homelessness on the Rise in Cleveland

On Tuesday, the County and the Sisters of Charity Foundation hosted a half day conference on family homelessness. It raised more questions than it answered, and gave very little information about how bad families have it in Cleveland. We have a report on our website about Family Homelessness that gives a good overview of the problems faced by Mom, Dad and their kids. The best part of the day was the presentation by Marge Wherley of the Hennepin County Housing and Homeless Initiatives. She knew exactly how to solve this problem and the people in Minnesota had bucked the national trends to put in place a good program to end family homelessness. I sit on the National Coalition for the Homeless board with two representatives from Hennepin County Minnesota. I visited Minneapolis and can tell you that they know what is going on up there.

You may have heard the story on WCPN this week about these national experts coming in and talking about family homelessness. I was disappointed in the program, and seemed like a bunch of people who recently found religion about homelessness. Federal policies for the last eight years and pushed by some of these groups was to focus resources on long term homeless people has taken away funding for families. I mean the folks from Columbus do not even have a plan for ending homelessness among families, but they suddenly found this was a need when the State published a request for proposals to address the growing problem of families in the shelters. So, Columbus is studying the problem to see what will work right now. All four of the other biggest cities received this funding--Cleveland with its largest family homeless population in the state lost out. We were beat out by Fayette County Ohio.

The questions that came to mind for me include: No one talked about how to address women who have sizable income, but are caught up in a domestic violence break up and are out of their house and restricted from accessing their funds. How is that Columbus can serve families with their permanent supportive housing? HUD rules do not allow this, and Cleveland only serves those with a disability with their permanent supportive housing stock? Why do social service providers keep saying that if we can just get families to use "mainstream resources" we would significantly reduce homelessness? This is like saying if we could just get families to touch the horn of the mythical unicorn, we could eliminate hunger. We would love to have access to mainstream resources, but we do not have five years to wait for housing, disability or the other programs in our shredded safety net.

The most frustrating part of the day was how there have been so many programs in Cleveland that were similar to those mentioned in other communities that the county has let wither or die locally. The one program in Minnesota is similar to Bridging the Gap that the County could only find $40,000 a year to support. It could have done so much more if it was provided more funding. The County has never supported Homeless Legal Assistance program which helps 99% of the clients facing eviction in St. Paul. We could do the same thing with public money to prevent all evictions.

Mandel did a study on family homelessness, which was fine but only gave the dry numbers on the problems not the impact on our community. There were no stories about renters becoming homeless and having all their stuff locked up in legal limbo. Or the Mom and Dad who have to go to two separate shelters because there is no space for men at the women's shelters. We needed to see the face of family homelessness. Besides, the numbers that Mandel had to use were fatally flawed because they did not include the biggest shelters in the community. So, the numbers were released were a dramatic undercount in the real problem.

The national expert, Nan Roman, is a long time advocate to end homelessness with a well endowed agency and a powerfully connected board of trustees. Unfortunately, homelessness has increased in nearly every community in the United States during the last 20 years. While they were pushing the federal department that funds most of the homeless programs to focus on single adults who have been homeless for long periods of time, welfare was pulled out from people and family homelessness started increasing dramatically. Then the system collapsed in many cities with the foreclosure crisis. So, the National Alliance switched gears and started talking about the assault on the Section 8 program and the problems faced by families. It was interesting to see that St. Paul had rejected the National Alliance led focus on single adults 16 years ago and they are beginning to see the rewards. I asked if the National Alliance if they were supporting an expansion of the definition of homelessness to include those who are sleeping on sofas in overcrowded houses (which is the situation for most families), and Nan said "no" they were not. It is impossible for most HUD funded programs to provide help to families unless they give up the sofa and go to the shelters. Unfortunately, Cleveland has lost hundreds of shelter beds for families so that is not an option for many. We only have a limited pool of money in our community, and slicing off one-third of the pie to serve the long term single adults has had an impact on our families. Unless Congress substantially increases the pie we can't do both with serving families and serving single adults.

I like Nan a lot, but I hope that the next administration drops all this silly focus on one population. Every homeless person deserves and needs help no matter if they are a single adult or a family. We shall see if the county learns anything from this presentation and puts some value to prevention programs, legal assistance, voice mail, and on-going follow up services after the family is placed into housing.

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