Columbus Coalition Conference

Working Out of Homelessness

The Columbus Coalition for the Homeless is hosting a conference focusing on their effort to employ homeless people and start micro enterprise projects. The conference is Thursday January 20, 2011 in Columbus at the Broad Street Presbyterian Church. The keynote speaker is Dr. Fadhel Kaboub of Denison University who will discuss "the economy and the workforce picture today." There will be a panel discussion on the challenges facing homeless people in competing for jobs. There are workshops on how businesses can work with non-profit organizations to employ homeless people. There is a workshop on social enterprise projects and micro-finance projects. Also, some discussion on where there are funding opportunities for employing homeless people will take place.

The conference is only $50 and an additional $10 for Social Work CEUs. They have a workshop on street newspapers, training programs, the underground economy, urban farming, and faith based support for these projects. All the details are available on the Columbus Coalition website. The Columbus Coalition always does a good job, and we encourage you to attend. Plus it is right across from the statehouse, so you can stop in and lobby your state legislator while visiting the Capital City.

Brian
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New Homeless Czar for Federal Government

Ohioan Named Director of InterAgency Council on Homelessness

The office of InterAgency Council on Homelessness within the federal government has not produced much except some press releases and newsletters about how great the US government has done in solving homelessness. This in the face of ever increases in homelessness in the United States. The world's last superpower that can put a man on the moon, build a movable staircase and a way to turn the desert Southwest into a giant suburb with the invention of air conditioning but we cannot find housing for everyone living in America. Very few in the public have heard of this office, and any drive in the downtown of any city in America would lead to the conclusion that this office has failed miserably. It is supposed to get all the cabinet members together to work across bureaucracies to reduce homelessness. All the usual department heads are represented (HUD, HHS, VA, and Education), but also at the table is the head of social security, the department of labor, homeland security, transpiration, and energy. All these powerful people or their representatives at the table and all we have to show for it is a good newsletter?

Barbara Poppe from Columbus and the Community Shelter Board was just appointed Executive Director. I have a long relationship with Columbus as most of my family live in the capital city. I have known Barbara for years as the wife of the State Housing and Homeless director, Bill Faith, and as a competent leader of the Community Shelter Board. She kept down controversies in Columbus, and had an iron hand on the homeless social services that operate in Central Ohio. Poppe was the person politicians and the media turned to when they had problems with homeless people, and in exchange she controlled all the resources. She put in a plan to reduce homelessness among men, but never got around to address the issue of people with a sexually based offense who cannot find housing. She did a good job of putting Columbus on the map with regard to fighting to reduce homelessness, and she traveled the country teaching others. Poppe was the first in Ohio to recognize the need for supportive housing for long term single homeless people, and had to admit last year that family homelessness saw a steep rise in Columbus. Poppe had the confidence of the leadership of Columbus, but rarely interacted with people experiencing homelessness.

I have some experience with national homeless policies and with Ms. Poppe. I am in the perfect position to give Ms. Poppe some advice in her new role as the Director of the InterAgency Council on Homelessness. I met with her predecessor on four different occasions and walked out on two meetings with Mr. Mangano. I know what the spin that the Interagency Council has delivered over the last few years and the fact that there was just publicity coming out of the Interagency Council.

Dear Barb:
Congratulations on your appointment to the Interagency Council. We are honored that the administration recognized someone from Ohio as having made progress on homelessness. Since I have known you for years, I feel that I can pass along a few suggestions for your new job. Take them or leave them. As a 15 year observer on national policy I do have some expertise on the inter-workings of government. I met with Phil Mangano a number of times until I got tired of his same old song and dance routine. By 2006, we began arguing for a change in leadership at the IAC, and local activists pledged that they would protest any gathering that featured Mr. Mangano in Cleveland. Our objections were that he was not critical of all the cuts that hurt homeless people in housing subsidies and never said anything about the horrible federal response to Katrina. We felt that as the Homeless Czar he needed to raise concerns over federal policies that harmed those without housing.

My suggestions for the new office are:

1. Don't follow your predecessor's example. Don't fly around the country championing how great the federal government is doing when our problems are mounting in each of our communities. You do not have to the public relations arm of the administration.
   
2. We need you in DC pushing for change. We need help from the administration and the cabinet to make it easier for homeless people to find stability. We need each of these departments on the council to put forward objectives to reduce homelessness. An example is reducing the time it takes to approve disability assistance or increase enforcement of the exploitation of low income workers especially by temporary labor companies.
   
3. Please don't pit one population against another. Veterans vs. families or disabled vs. long term homeless or single adults vs. young people was the hallmark of the previous administration. It is going to take a much larger pie to solve these problems, and not just slicing the existing pie into smaller and smaller pieces for all these worthy sub-populations.
4. Please don't tell us to go use the mainstream programs. That is like telling us to go find the gold at the end of the rainbow. We all know that the mainstream programs (public housing, cash assistance, disability, etc.) are not accessible or have years long wait for help. It is an insult to keep bringing this up when there is nothing there, and we have all tried to find help with mainstream programs.
5. We need the other departments to start thinking of ways to serve homeless people. Why can't the Department of Health and Human Services take more of a role in solving homelessness? HUD is the leading funder of the shelters and services, but why can't some of the other departments help support the shelters? Why can't HHS set up a pool of funds to provide supportive services such as health care, voice mail, transportation, and mental health services at the shelters? Or why can't the Department of Labor provide employment training at the shelters?
6. We need real outcomes that lead to real reductions in homelessness. You did a very good job in Columbus requiring the shelters to prove their worth. We need something similar at the national level for all federal funding.
7. Don't forget about Civil Rights. Employment, housing, and health care are all important to ending homelessness, but civil rights issues are just as important. You never really addressed this in Columbus, but there were not huge threats in Columbus. In some cities this is the single biggest problem facing homeless people. If a person is regularly arrested because they cannot fit into the shelter, it will take them years to get off the streets. We all pay a huge bill for their incarceration, medical bills, and mental health services because we cannot help these troubled individuals off the streets. It is hypocritical for American cities to take money for shelters then turn around and make it illegal to be homeless or sleep outside or beg for money. This is an issue, Barb, that we need you to address.
8. We need you to ease the regulatory burden on the shelters and services. Please help us cut through the red tape in order to do good. Push for unified reporting forms for both public and private sector funding. We need you to help with oppressive regulatory guidelines and impossibles obstacles put in place to help people.
9. With the political will we can end homelessness. Not in five years or ten years or if something else happens, but we can end homelessness today if we wanted to. There is enough housing in this country. There are enough resources, but we are just not using those resources to put people into housing. We need you to convince Congress and the White House to fix health care, improve access to jobs and make housing a human right.
   

Brian Davis

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Hate Crime in Central Ohio

Young People Attack Homeless

In Reynoldsburg, Ohio just outside of Columbus, a group of young people attacked a man who was sleeping behind a hardware store. Robert Wirtz was known to the community as a quiet man who did not bother anyone, but lived outside. People in Central Ohio have raised money for Wirtz's medical care, and the Mayor of this suburban community has gotten involved. Eugene Clemons was attacked in Cleveland last April, and had to spend weeks in the hospital and in nursing care. The Veterans Administration eventually caught up with Clemons and were willing to offer housing to this former Marine. He is doing well in housing. Both individuals were attacked by young people.

This is a common occurrence, and the Columbus Dispatch has done a good job of looking at this issue. They interviewed Michael Stoops from the National Coalition for the Homeless and a lawyer from California who has done a great deal to address this problem. It only brings up that we need Rep. Foley's hate crimes bill to act as a deterrent to these kind of attacks in Ohio. If Maryland can pass a homeless hate crimes bill, why not Ohio? For those who do not believe that enhanced punishments do not work, look how attacks on minority and religious institutions have fallen over the last 40 years since hate crimes legislation swept across the United States.

The National Coalition for the Homeless hate crimes report will come out this summer. This is strategic in that many of the attacks happen during the summer when kids are out of school. They get bored and they find easy targets. These targets have become fixtures in our communities. Homeless people are hardly noticed in our cities anymore. Pedestrians walk over, ignore and turn their heads when confronted by a homeless guy or a panhandler. For the young person who has grown up ignoring homeless people their entire life, it is not much of a stretch from ignoring to vandalizing to violence. The problem is that homeless people are not mailboxes or washboard signs that can be tagged and beaten with baseball bats. Suspects are in custody in Columbus for this brutal attack. No one was ever arrested in the Cleveland attack on Mr. Clemons.

The above photo is by Larry Whitted from our 2007 Photography class.
Brian
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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.

Columbus Has a Great Plan

Columbus Mayor Appoints Cabinet Official to Work on Homelessness

Mayor Michael Coleman has appointed a cabinet level position to attempt to solve homelessness. This is a great idea, and we should think about this for Cleveland. The Mayor in Columbus at the urging of City Council appointed Erika Clark Jones to a cabinet level position to do advocacy and coordinate services.

"I consider this position to be a strong voice for the seemingly voiceless," she said. In addition to homelessness, the new office will focus on three main issues: the problems of the uninsured, affordable housing and work-force investment according to the Columbus Dispatch article.

As a former resident of Columbus, I hate to admit when Columbus does something better than Cleveland. In fact, we were told a few years ago that Columbus had solved homelessness, and HUD champions them as the center of progressive thinking on homelessness. No matter the propaganda and spin, this is a great idea.

We have had a joint City and County office for 15 years in Cleveland, but it has not done much. Yes, they bring in huge dollars for the County compared to the rest of the state, but bottom line is that homelessness is worse than it was 15 years ago. The City/County OHS does not do a very good job coordinating services, all of the services are still concentrated in the City of Cleveland, and no one coordinates lobbying activities. I am going to ask the Mayor of Cleveland to look to Columbus for a better way to address homelessness. Every urban community needs a cabinet level office to address homelessness, because it is most severe expression of every other problem in our society. Re-entry, illiteracy, housing, job re-training, entitlements, civil rights and the health care crisis are all serious problems for homeless people and are the cause of homelessness. The issues associated with homelessness cause prolonged stays in the shelters, are very expensive for the public, and cause instability in society. Tax payers are amazed that if they fall on hard times and cannot afford the rent or mortgage, they fall hard all the way to the shelters. They need a voice at the Mayor's cabinet to raise these issues, and restore the social safety net in our society.

In other Columbus Ohio news, the Columbus Coalition for the Homeless has hired full time staff and just published a street newspaper called Street Speech. While I am not a big fan of street newspapers that begin with the word Street (6 out of the 10 papers pictured on the front of the new paper are named "Street..."), but it is an impressive first issue. Street Speech is colorful, and has some interesting commentary inside. The paper has a review of the "Thrift Store," poetry, and a profile of the vendor of the month. Congratulations Columbus Coalition for a big step forward in providing a voice to homeless people.

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