Lakeside Shelter is Overflowing
The FAA and Department of Homeland Security closed Aviation High School as the Overflow Shelter for homeless men in Cleveland on February 1, 2008. With the snow and the cold this week, how have homeless people faired since this decision was implemented? 2100 Lakeside shelter is bursting at the seams, and on Thursday February 21, 2008, 25 guys waited throughout the night for a bed to open. The plan put in place by the City and County as we prepared for the closing of Aviation High Overflow Shelter did not work. The sooner that they admit that their plans failed, the sooner homeless men will be able to sleep peacefully in a bed. It is bad enough carrying all your stuff around, sleeping in a shelter, and being homeless without having to sit up all night waiting for a bed in the land of plenty in the richest country on the planet.
A little history is in order here. 2100 Lakeside legally houses 385 people a night. As we have learned "if you build it they will come." The shelter was full the day it opened, and every time they put more beds into the facility the population increased. In 2003, while the shelter was under the direction of the Salvation Army, there were some nights that 600 people showed up seeking a bed. St. Ignatius and some of the other shelters offered hallway space to accommodate the overflow on a temporary basis. In 2004, Aviation High School opened as the overflow site housing between 135-220 people per night. The Crawford Aviation Museum talked about buying the building in 2005, but it remained a shelter.
In late 2005, the City was contacted from the federal authorities began putting pressure on the City to close the shelter out of terrorism concerns. The shelter bordered Burke Lakefront Airport, and there was concern for the safety of the airport with 150 unscreened people sleeping a few yards from the airport grounds. The City resisted federal concerns, and pushed back a series of deadlines for relocation. Why would a terrorist become homeless and sneak onto Burke Lakefront to steal the WKYC helicopter or the KeyBank Learjet? The final deadline imposed by the Federal government was January 31, 2008. After that date the City could not use the abandoned high school. The City and County had over one year to put in place a replacement plan for Aviation.
The County Office of Homeless Services took the lead, and did a lot of innovative things to replace the overflow. They forced the rest of the men's shelters to take people into their programs first from the Lakeside Shelter. They opened a series of permanent supportive housing, and provided additional housing vouchers. They opened North Point Transitional shelter in an old motel, which can house 160 people. North Point is a great idea that we should be proud of in our community, but it is not overflow. We opened beds at Oriana House, and tried to quickly move people out of Lakeside. All worthwhile efforts, but they do not address the problem of overflow. As I have always said, "if you build it they will come." If you improve the system (North Point) more people who were living on the margins of homelessness will show up.
So, the day after Aviation closed on Saturday Feb. 2, despite 160 people having moved over to North Point, Lakeside shelter was overflowing. The staff at the shelter had asked the City for 100 beds of overflow. The County granted them 30 spaces at the Volunteers of America, and told them to deal with it. Luckily, the City Mission stepped in and offered an additional 30 spaces. Even with 60 overflow spaces the shelter has had 10 days of people waiting for a bed to open in the hallway and cafeteria. As stated above there were 85 people over the legal limit on Thursday. Sixty were provided a cot or mat at Volunteers of America and the City Mission, as the two overflow sites. Twenty five people had to wait for people to get up in the middle of the night to go to work in order to get a bed. The plan is not working. City and County officials should have listened to the professionals working at the shelter or even the Homeless Congress and have provided 100 overflow beds. A County Commissioner or the Mayor needs to step in here and open a warehouse that we can put 100 cots at night as the overflow. We have plenty of vacant buildings. Put them to use! Sunday night is going to be rough for homeless men in Cleveland seeking shelter.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.
Showing posts with label aviation high. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aviation high. Show all posts
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Aviation to Remain Open
Feds Give Overflow Permission to Stay Open Unit January
As you may know, the Federal Aviation Administration has informed the City of Cleveland that the overflow shelter currently at Aviation High School must close. The FAA claims that it is a safety concern to have 200 unknown people sleeping right next to Burke Lakefront Airport because of some bizarre homeland security rules. Even though the City and County have been aware of this deadline for over 20 months, they could not come up with an alternate site in all that time. The County spent about 8 months trying to free up space in the current system to avoid having to fund an overflow shelter at all. While this was a worthy effort, County officials should have looked for alternate locations at the same time.
North Point Inn motel was purchased in the summer 2007, but the 160 bed facility will not be ready by the Halloween 2007 deadline set by the FAA. The motel needs a sprinkler system before the Fire Marshall will allow the building to re-open as a shelter. The City begged for more time and the FAA has given the community until January 2008 to get North Point ready. It seems that the FAA feels that the terrorists hiding among the homeless population take the holidays off, and so the news choppers at Burke are safe for now. For that reason, they gave the shelter an extra three months to remain open. We will call that the holiday homeless security exception to the homeland security rules.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.
As you may know, the Federal Aviation Administration has informed the City of Cleveland that the overflow shelter currently at Aviation High School must close. The FAA claims that it is a safety concern to have 200 unknown people sleeping right next to Burke Lakefront Airport because of some bizarre homeland security rules. Even though the City and County have been aware of this deadline for over 20 months, they could not come up with an alternate site in all that time. The County spent about 8 months trying to free up space in the current system to avoid having to fund an overflow shelter at all. While this was a worthy effort, County officials should have looked for alternate locations at the same time.
North Point Inn motel was purchased in the summer 2007, but the 160 bed facility will not be ready by the Halloween 2007 deadline set by the FAA. The motel needs a sprinkler system before the Fire Marshall will allow the building to re-open as a shelter. The City begged for more time and the FAA has given the community until January 2008 to get North Point ready. It seems that the FAA feels that the terrorists hiding among the homeless population take the holidays off, and so the news choppers at Burke are safe for now. For that reason, they gave the shelter an extra three months to remain open. We will call that the holiday homeless security exception to the homeland security rules.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Congress Met Today
Homeless Meet with City/County Today
The Homeless Congress meeting today had a huge agenda, and was one of the best meetings we have ever had. Our good friend Cleveland Councilwoman Phyllis Cleveland attended to hear about the Shelter Standards. She pledged to bring the issue to the rest of Council. We agreed to give the social service providers a month and a half to get comments back to the Congress. Homeless people who attend the June 21 meeting will review the comments and suggest changes to the standards. Ruth Gillett and Rick Werner of Cuyahoga County both attended, and Natoya Walker of the City of Cleveland also joined the Congress. Gillett had not seen the Shelter Standards document, but did say there were already minimum standards for shelters. She suggested that if homeless people had problems they should file a grievance with the shelter.
This is not a NEOCH meeting, so it would have been appropriate to stand up and scream at Ruth that her suggestions just do not work in the real world in the same style many homeless people face at night when they question shelter staff. The problem is that a grievance always stays within the shelter, and there is no impartial look at the problem. It is like suggesting to those families facing foreclosure because of a predatory loan that they file a grievance with the mortgage company that issued the unethical terms for the loan and expect that they will reform themselves. We have laws in place to protect tenants, homeowners, nursing home residents, but homeless people have no law to turn to for protections against being thrown out into the snow in the middle of the night.
The most interesting part of the meeting was the discussions about Aviation High School and the North Point Motel. As we have discussed Aviation will close on Halloween, but the scariest part of this is the unworkable plan that the City and County have developed to replace Aviation. Tonight there are 550 people using either 2100 Lakeside shelter and Aviation High School, which operates as an overflow. The City and County are pushing the other shelters to take up the slack and move more people into housing/transitional housing and treatment. They want to reduce the number to 375 this summer so that there is no need for an overflow shelter. Then they want to open North Point as a permanent housing facility. Based on the questions, the Homeless Congress members were very skeptical of this plan. It was amazing to me that the only people in the room that could do basic math were the homeless people. This plan had post-war Iraq planning written all over it.
We have 15 years of proof that we are not going to open a facility like North Point with two people in a private room and expect fewer people to utilize the homeless system. It is like these government people do not understand poverty and they work in the poorest city in America. There are so many people waiting for housing (Over 50,000 according to most studies), but many choose not to use the shelters. Most in the community feel shelters are degrading, dirty, unsafe, or have one of a thousand other reasons, but if the City makes a shelter available that has a private room more people will show up for help not fewer.
City and County officials made a commitment to continue to allow anyone who shows up at the door to sleep inside a shelter, which is unique to Cleveland. No one explained how all these people would fit inside 2100 Lakeside or how many would sleep in the halls and cafeteria after the loss of the Aviation overflow site.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.
The Homeless Congress meeting today had a huge agenda, and was one of the best meetings we have ever had. Our good friend Cleveland Councilwoman Phyllis Cleveland attended to hear about the Shelter Standards. She pledged to bring the issue to the rest of Council. We agreed to give the social service providers a month and a half to get comments back to the Congress. Homeless people who attend the June 21 meeting will review the comments and suggest changes to the standards. Ruth Gillett and Rick Werner of Cuyahoga County both attended, and Natoya Walker of the City of Cleveland also joined the Congress. Gillett had not seen the Shelter Standards document, but did say there were already minimum standards for shelters. She suggested that if homeless people had problems they should file a grievance with the shelter.
This is not a NEOCH meeting, so it would have been appropriate to stand up and scream at Ruth that her suggestions just do not work in the real world in the same style many homeless people face at night when they question shelter staff. The problem is that a grievance always stays within the shelter, and there is no impartial look at the problem. It is like suggesting to those families facing foreclosure because of a predatory loan that they file a grievance with the mortgage company that issued the unethical terms for the loan and expect that they will reform themselves. We have laws in place to protect tenants, homeowners, nursing home residents, but homeless people have no law to turn to for protections against being thrown out into the snow in the middle of the night.
The most interesting part of the meeting was the discussions about Aviation High School and the North Point Motel. As we have discussed Aviation will close on Halloween, but the scariest part of this is the unworkable plan that the City and County have developed to replace Aviation. Tonight there are 550 people using either 2100 Lakeside shelter and Aviation High School, which operates as an overflow. The City and County are pushing the other shelters to take up the slack and move more people into housing/transitional housing and treatment. They want to reduce the number to 375 this summer so that there is no need for an overflow shelter. Then they want to open North Point as a permanent housing facility. Based on the questions, the Homeless Congress members were very skeptical of this plan. It was amazing to me that the only people in the room that could do basic math were the homeless people. This plan had post-war Iraq planning written all over it.
We have 15 years of proof that we are not going to open a facility like North Point with two people in a private room and expect fewer people to utilize the homeless system. It is like these government people do not understand poverty and they work in the poorest city in America. There are so many people waiting for housing (Over 50,000 according to most studies), but many choose not to use the shelters. Most in the community feel shelters are degrading, dirty, unsafe, or have one of a thousand other reasons, but if the City makes a shelter available that has a private room more people will show up for help not fewer.
City and County officials made a commitment to continue to allow anyone who shows up at the door to sleep inside a shelter, which is unique to Cleveland. No one explained how all these people would fit inside 2100 Lakeside or how many would sleep in the halls and cafeteria after the loss of the Aviation overflow site.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Updates from the Coalition
The Latest Dispatch from the Homeless Coalition
Annual Meeting of the Coalition
We normally have a stuffy formal annual meeting, but this year the Board of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless has decided the annual fundraiser from the Annual Meeting. So the 2006 Annual Meeting will be March 15, 2007 at Franklin Circle Church at 6 p.m. NEOCH will give out awards to the Advocate of the Year and Volunteer of the Year. We look at 2006 and ahead to 2007. Finally, NEOCH will elect a new board and present the 2006 Annual Report. We would love to have you join us for the Annual Meeting. It is free and we hope homeless people will be able to join the meeting. We are going to award a Roadblock of the Year to the person or organization that prevented the solving of homelessness in Northeast Ohio.
Media Wave Causes Stir
The Plain Dealer story two weeks ago with the headline about $22 million coming to Cleveland for homelessness always creates waves. It makes our meetings with homeless people difficult, because homeless people read the paper. They see a whole bunch of money coming to Cleveland and wonder why they eat pasta every night or why they cannot get housing. So, we get blamed for wasting funds or being incompetent for not solving homelessness with "all that money." We also get calls asking how they can set up a shelter so that they can get in on this federal gravy train. After I tried to convince the woman that called this week that this was not money for shelters and that public officials are not going to fund shelters anymore, she said, "I am not going to be deterred by anything you say, because God has told me to do this and I saw the article about the $22 million." There is no way to argue with God or money. Columbus only got $6 million, and they claim nearly the same number of homeless people, and so their providers are ticked off.
By dividing $22 million among the 20,000 people who are homeless every year, the funds only cover $1,100 per person who is homeless in Cleveland. 90% of the $22 million are just to keep the doors of the transitional shelters and the permanent housing programs open. Many of these funds are for very specific populations while the economically homeless have to find their own ways.
Aviation High School Has a Deadline
The main shelter in Cleveland, 2100 Lakeside, operates on the principle that anyone who comes to the door must be offered a bed. This has forced the shelter to operate an overflow facility at Aviation High School. This was a temporary solution that is now three years old. The federal government is not really happy with this solution with ex-cons, sexually based offenders, and an unknown group of people basically sleeping on the grounds of an airport. They have laid down the law--the overflow must close by November and there will be no further argument. This would seem to be plenty of time, but the County and City cannot agree and no one is talking to homeless people. This is going to go down to the wire, and the results are not going to be pretty.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.
Annual Meeting of the Coalition
We normally have a stuffy formal annual meeting, but this year the Board of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless has decided the annual fundraiser from the Annual Meeting. So the 2006 Annual Meeting will be March 15, 2007 at Franklin Circle Church at 6 p.m. NEOCH will give out awards to the Advocate of the Year and Volunteer of the Year. We look at 2006 and ahead to 2007. Finally, NEOCH will elect a new board and present the 2006 Annual Report. We would love to have you join us for the Annual Meeting. It is free and we hope homeless people will be able to join the meeting. We are going to award a Roadblock of the Year to the person or organization that prevented the solving of homelessness in Northeast Ohio.
Media Wave Causes Stir
The Plain Dealer story two weeks ago with the headline about $22 million coming to Cleveland for homelessness always creates waves. It makes our meetings with homeless people difficult, because homeless people read the paper. They see a whole bunch of money coming to Cleveland and wonder why they eat pasta every night or why they cannot get housing. So, we get blamed for wasting funds or being incompetent for not solving homelessness with "all that money." We also get calls asking how they can set up a shelter so that they can get in on this federal gravy train. After I tried to convince the woman that called this week that this was not money for shelters and that public officials are not going to fund shelters anymore, she said, "I am not going to be deterred by anything you say, because God has told me to do this and I saw the article about the $22 million." There is no way to argue with God or money. Columbus only got $6 million, and they claim nearly the same number of homeless people, and so their providers are ticked off.
By dividing $22 million among the 20,000 people who are homeless every year, the funds only cover $1,100 per person who is homeless in Cleveland. 90% of the $22 million are just to keep the doors of the transitional shelters and the permanent housing programs open. Many of these funds are for very specific populations while the economically homeless have to find their own ways.
Aviation High School Has a Deadline
The main shelter in Cleveland, 2100 Lakeside, operates on the principle that anyone who comes to the door must be offered a bed. This has forced the shelter to operate an overflow facility at Aviation High School. This was a temporary solution that is now three years old. The federal government is not really happy with this solution with ex-cons, sexually based offenders, and an unknown group of people basically sleeping on the grounds of an airport. They have laid down the law--the overflow must close by November and there will be no further argument. This would seem to be plenty of time, but the County and City cannot agree and no one is talking to homeless people. This is going to go down to the wire, and the results are not going to be pretty.
Brian
Posts by Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless staff and Board.
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