Housing Cleveland update

The affordable housing website for Cuyahoga County, housingcleveland.org was funded by stimulus dollars for another three years. It is a real gem for the community, and we wish the state would invest funds to expand this site statewide. It is administered by Socialserve.com in North Carolina, and organized locally by 211/First Call for Help and NEOCH. To be honest, the current state of Ohio funded housing website is a huge waste of money. Taxpayers should be up in arms over the horrible waste of money. HousingCleveland is regularly updated (every three weeks) and has a bilingual call center. The Ohio funded housing site is a static website that is rarely updated, and has only a fraction number of units that we have on the Cuyahoga County site.

Here are some stats from the Housing Cleveland site from May 15, 2010:

• There are 1,360 available listings or 2,026 total units on the Housing Cleveland site with a total of 26,982 total units in the database.
• 54% of the units are within the City of Cleveland and the rest are spread throughout the county.
  
• There have been 2,281 units added to the site since January 2010. This is down from the 3,500 units added in the same period in 2009. We suspect that many people were marketing their houses as apartments because of the foreclosure crisis in 2008-9, but not doing that as much in 2010.
• There are 1,706 basic searches done everyday from 217 unique users.
  
• There were 693,000 searches done by 88,600 unique users done in the last year.

There is also an expanded site in Medina County (HousingMedina.org). They have 44 searches done every day, and 61 available listings or 166 available units. Housing Medina could benefit from some marketing help, but that is another story.

It is time to make Socialserve the sole provider in Ohio for a housing website. It is a wonderful non-profit that is surprisingly affordable.

Brian
Posts reflect the opinion of those who sign the entry.

Veterans Street Card Available

Photo by Cheryl Jones of the NEOCH Photo Project. Call NEOCH if you want a print.

Homeless Veterans Street Card Available on the NEOCH Website

We have updated the Street Card dedicated to the services for Veterans in Cleveland. This is an 8.5 inch by 11 inch double sided piece of paper with all the information that you might need if you became homeless in Cleveland. Please feel feel to print and distribute the Veterans Street Card as much as you want.

Speaking of the website...

1. The Homeless Legal Assistance Clinic has been updated.
2. We have added a section on the Movable Wall exhibit that is available to educate the public about homelessness.
3. We added the new regular Street Card to the site.
   
4. The About Us section has been updated for accuracy.
   
5. We added a report on the Voting activities from the 2008 election. We will blog about this in the future.
6. There is a better search function on the site.
   
7. Finally, we added our 2008 Annual Report and some of the items from the report to various sections of the site.
   

Tell us what you think, and what we should add. We have an intern this summer working on the site. Daniel from CSU has been great at improving the site. What do you think?

Brian
Posts reflect the opinion of those who sign the entry.

Quick Takes

A Few Random Thoughts

Rough times....imagine waking up in the morning and the guy in the tent next to yours is dead. Then you find out that the guy was waiting for sentencing for an insurance scam in Indiana. Could you stay in that area after finding a guy who died? We have noticed an increase in the number of people sleeping outside since September, but we did not know that there were people hiding out from the law in these camps. I hope that this does not paint the impression that homeless people are a bunch of people hiding out for the law.

Web Stats from 2008... The NEOCH website had 40,210 unique users in 2008. Our best month was Feb. 2008 with 4,700 unique users. The largest day of the week is Monday, and there are more people who visit in the beginning of the month. People visit 3.27 pages per visit, and this blog is the top website linking to the main NEOCH website. We are going to continue to add content and new stuff to the website, so keep checking back.

Shelter cuts...The three big shelters in Cleveland are facing a 5.5% cut in 2009, because of the County financial issues. This means that 2100 Lakeside shelter will have a harder time feeding everyone and staying open 24/7. The Community Women's Shelter will have to drop the cleaning and kitchen staff as well as cutting back on bus tickets in order to stay within their reduced budget. The Disabled Men's Shelter is going to have to close down for a one shift during the day weekdays in order to survive. It is expected that the new North Point Transitional shelter will face cuts in October 2009. The other shelters receive most of their money from the federal government. They will not face a cut in 2009, but they have not had a cost of living increase for 9 to 10 years. How they continue to make it on the same amount of money as they had in 2000 is amazing to me.

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

Another Attack on the Lowest Income

A Website Dedicated to Bad Tenants

There was a story this week on WEWS “newschannel5” about a national registry of bad tenants. An aside: why is Channel 5 called “news channel” when they don’t even have the most local news of the four local channels in Cleveland? Anyway, this was surprisingly a good local news story about this new front in the war between rich and poor, which will certainly keep people homeless for a longer period of time. This is a horrible trend, and I hope that activists sue the pants off the creators of this site in order to shut it down. In the alternative, there must be some industrious young tenants with some time to create a website of bad landlords.

It sounds like a good idea on its face--a place where landlords can prevent a “Pacific Heights” type tenant from reeking havoc around the community. Some tenants may even be thankful that this site may weed out a few bad neighbors. We understand landlords trying to protect themselves against financial ruin, but this is the wrong approach. There is no ability to appeal a listing on this website. There is no verification that the information is accurate. For landlords there are background checks that can be done that provide more objective information. There is a fee to view the list of bad tenants, but anyone can enter the name, social security or date of birth for bad tenants. Didn’t those credit score websites get in trouble for listing credit scores without having the ability for the owner of those scores to correct inaccurate data? Is it legal to have a person’s social security number listed and so readily available on a website? All it takes is a small fee, and you could have access to hundreds of social security numbers to select a new identity. These tenants never gave permission for the landlord to post their personal information on a public website. There must be some industrious young lawyers out there who would want to challenge the legality of this website or some lawmaker who wants to standup for the little guy.

What happened to forgiveness? How long do these stay up? Is it fair to list a problem tenant from 10 years ago? Since no one screens these can others list untrustworthy people? I mean if I were a landlord I would never rent to former Senator Phil Gramm or Vice President Cheney. I would never allow Tom Delay or former Ohio Attorney General Mark Dann to bring his partying lifestyle to my apartment building. There are many public officials who routinely lie, and may not be the most upstanding tenants. I can think of hundreds of people that I would be worried every month that they may not be good for the rent. Anybody got the social security number and date of birth for former HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson?

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

A Lack of Collaboration

Unhelpful Websites

I was doing some searching various websites to see if there are negative or positive stories about the Coalition, and I noticed a few strange things. By looking at the websites it is clear that there is very little collaboration among the homeless service providers. One rare exception was not even a homeless service provider at all. We do not always see eye to eye with Downtown Cleveland Alliance, but at least they have the courtesy to put a link to the NEOCH website on their website about homelessness.

On the opposite extreme, I checked many of the other homeless social service providers in the community and I could not find one that linked to NEOCH. The worst was the County Office of Homeless Services barely mentions NEOCH (1 time), and never provides a link to our website. site. OHS does not provide a link to the housing website or the United Way First Call for Help website. There is very little helpful information on any of the homeless social services websites especially anything that might be useful to homeless people.

The Downtown Alliance talks about the Grapevine and provides a link to NEOCH on their Homeless Education Page. The County Office of Homeless Services did a complete change of their website (no link--go find it yourself), and did not include one mention of the NEOCH website. This is strange since we coordinate the outreach for the community, we produce the Street Card--one page guide to homeless people on available services, and we have our most popular part of the website--the schedule of where lawyers are staffing clinics in the shelters. We are five of the top 10 search results for "cleveland homeless" on Google, and have 3,000 unique users a month to our website. NEOCH staff and board regularly complain and criticize the County for their slow response to the problems faced by homeless people, but why not provide a link so that homeless people can get off the streets?

I checked Hitchcock Center, Volunteers of America, Y-Haven, West Side Catholic, Salvation Army, and Mental Health Services websites. On all of those site there were only two mentions of the Coalition and no links. We all think that what we do is the most important thing in the community, but the Street Card lists every service available to homeless people and is updated every year. It seems that the providers would want to provide access to a one page guide to homelessness. Since the public libraries are busiest drop in centers for homeless people in our community, there are a great many web surfing homeless people. Most of the emergency shelters kick people out during the day and a large number of the 1,200 homeless people sleeping in the emergency shelters go to the air conditioned, comfortable libraries in our community.

Of course one of the best resources in the community is the 211/First Call for Help website. You can find every homeless service provider, and nearly every social service provider in the community on those sites. The 211 website combined with the Housing Cleveland website provide all the information that anyone might need to get off the streets. It is a shame that the County does not support these two valuable resources with all that they need, and they do not even provide a link from their Office of Homeless Services website.

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