Homelessness – Hank Kalet

Homelessness on the rise

We are hearing a lot about the impact that the recession is having and will have on middle-class homeowners and workers, but there is an entire class of people who we’re not hearing about — the homeless.

I mentioned them in a post the other day, focusing on some anecdotal evidence that we are seeing an increase in the number of people on the streets (which does not include a whole subset of people who may live on relatives’ couches or move from place to place to keep themselves sheltered).

Here is more evidence: A story from MSNBC on the closing of a Seattle homeless shelter run by CityTeam Ministries, based in San Jose, Calif., described the confluence of factors that is contributing to an awful trend.

The CityTeam closure is a piece in the expanding problem of homelessness across the nation: Shelters and related services for the homeless are facing funding shortfalls as the downturn takes its toll on state budgets and corporate donations. And while individual donors in many cases are keeping up gifts — or even digging a little deeper for charities that help with urgent needs like food and shelter — the service providers say they are faced with a rapidly growing demand from people losing jobs and homes in the economic crisis.

It makes serving a particularly vulnerable population difficult.

“A downturn in (overall) funding in this case is accompanied by a surge in demand, so a homeless shelter, food pantry, or job-training program is going to feel it first,” says Chuck Bean, executive director of Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington, in the District of Columbia. “Even if they have 100 percent of their budget compared to last year, they now see a 50 percent surge in demand. Then (they) get into the tough decisions: Do you thin the soup, or shorten the line?”

Consider the facts:

Shelters across the country report that more people are seeking emergency shelter and more are being turned away. In a report published in December, 330 school districts identified the same number or more homeless students in the first few months of the school year than they identified in the entire previous year. Meantime, demand is sharply up at soup kitchens, an indication of deepening hardship and potential homelessness.

“Everything we are seeing is indicating an increase,” says Laurel Weir,
policy director at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. “And
homelessness tends to lag the economy. So we’re probably seeing the tip of the
iceberg here.”

And it is likely to get worse, because the recession is tied to the collapse of the housing market and the foreclosure crisis.

In the foreclosure crisis, the people being displaced from homes won’t likely be on the street immediately, explains Michael Stoops, director of National Coalition for the Homeless.

“The people who have lost homes or tenants in homes that were foreclosed … have downsized, and if that doesn’t work they will move in with family and friends,” says Stoops. “After a while, they will move into their RV in a state campground. The next step is a car. And the worst nightmare for a working, middle-class person or even a wealthy person who has never experienced homelessness is knocking on a shelter door.”

That’s why the most important aspect of any stimulus is not tax cuts or even infrastructure work (as important as that is), but spending money on things like food stamps, unemployment benefits, health care and other elements of the social safety net. We need to keep people from drowning in the bad economy by tossing them life-preservers — and then we can get on with the difficult work of repairing the leaks.

Homelessness on the rise

New Jersey’s homeless population shrank between 2005 and 2007, but advocates for the poor say the faltering economy is reversing the trend.

Accoding to a survey done by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, there were 17,314 homeless persons in New Jersey in 2007, or about 20 for every 10,000 New Jerseyans. That was down about 11 percent over the two-year period. In addition, the state saw decreases in the all categories of homelessness during that time period.

The state, according to the survey, has fared better than the rest of the nation — which has 22 homeless persons per 10,000 people with a greater percentage (18 percent to 15 percent) considered chronically homeless and a dramatic 42 percent being unsheltered, compared with just 14 percent in New Jersey.

Part of the reason for this is New Jersey’s relative wealth — the per capita income in the state is higher than most other states and just 8 percent of New Jerseyans live below the poverty line, compared with 13 percent nationally. Of course, the cost of living here is higher, which distorts some of the economic numbers.

According to the survey, there was one category in which New Jersey outpaced the rest of the country — a troubling statistic that could help explain the anecdotal evidence being compiled by advocates for the homeless: A greater percentage of New Jerseyans face what is called a “severe housing cost burden — 19 percent — than the rest of the nation.

As the recession — what some are calling “The Great Recession” — deepens and more people face job loss, reduced hours (and wages) and increased costs for fuel, heat, food and other necessities, more and more people could find themselves facing homelessness.

Lisanne Finston, director at Elijah’s Promise in New Brunswick, told The Home News Tribune she is seeing evidence of this already. Surveys being collected to help prepared for the biennial point in time survey, she said, are showing “the number of people that we have counted are significantly higher than last year” and that, “Across the board, in each category, the numbers are up, we’re at least 10 percent higher and getting to 20 percent.”

“Anecdotally, we’re seeing people coming in who have suffered foreclosures and have exhausted all their resources,” Finston said. “Not only have the national trends reversed, but we are only at the beginning of how bad it’s going to get.”

Mercer County advocates, quoted in The Times of Trenton, are seeing the same trends. The county had experienced a 47 percent drop in the number of homeless people, according to the survey, but Mary Gay Abbott-Young, executive director of Rescue Mission of Trenton, told the paper that her “organization has been providing shelter for additional people for several months now.” She reported a 21 percent increase for the first two weeks of January, compared with the same time last year.

Abbott-Young said the economic crisis — a factor driving more people into shelters — has also resulted in a decrease in furniture and clothing donations, but the organization received monetary donations during the holidays last month.

“We’re going to have an increase in factors known to contribute to homelessness,” she said, “unemployment, increase in stress levels, mortgage foreclosures.”

We have entered a dark economic period, but we remain among the richest nations in history. Surely, we can do better than to have our people living in shelters or on the streets.

Dispatches: Helping New Jersey’s homeless

The snow has stopped falling outside my office window in Princeton, but its steadiness just a little while ago was a visual reminder of the elements faced by homeless New Jerseyans in winter. Read my column on the problem and do what you can to help.

A hand up and a hand out are needed

Though more and more people are struggling in this failing economy — the Crisis Ministry of Princeton and Trenton, for instance, reports that it served 1,400 families in October — there is a core group that had been struggling even when we were experiencing what Wall Street had been painting as good times.

Consider these figures from the Mercer Alliance to End Homelessness:

On any given day in Mercer County, over 1200 people experience homelessness. (Homeless Resource Advisory Council, HRAC, COC 2008

Homeless survey snapshots from February 2002 through August 2004 by HRAC show 3 relatively consistent numbers of sheltered homeless in Mercer County: See links to recent surveys. (2003 Survey) (2004 Survey)

Over the course of a year, more than 3,000 men, women, and children in Mercer County receive services in the homeless system. (Mercer County Homeless Resources Advisory Council (HRAC)

Approximately 20% of homeless children do not attend school regularly. (National Center on Family Homelessness)

Homeless children are 3 times more likely than other children to have emotional of behavioral problems. (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty)

Homeless children are twice as likely to experience hunger than non-homeless children. (National Center on Family Homelessness)

That’s why a concerted effort to battle homelessness is needed, including income supports and expanded support services, an aggressive effort to build more affordable housing and universal, single-payer healthcare that takes medical bills out of the equation as one of the leading causes of bankruptcy and homelessness.

In the short term, however, legislation that recently passed the state Assembly — A3101 — and awaits a Senate vote could help. The legislation, called the “County Homelessness Trust Fund Act,” would allow the state’s 21 counties to create to

impose a surcharge of $3 on each document recorded with a county, for deposit into a county homelessness trust fund, five per cent of which may be used annually for administrative costs related to the administration of the fund, and the remainder of the monies in the fund may be used solely for the operation of a homelessness housing grant program established in order to provide:

for the acquisition,construction, or rehabilitation of housing projects, or units within housing projects, that supply permanent affordable housing for homeless persons or families, including those at risk of homelessness;

rental assistance vouchers, including tenant and project based subsidies, for affordable housing projects or units within housing projects that provide permanent affordable housing for homeless persons or families, including those at risk of homelessness;

supportive services as may be required by homeless individuals or families in order to obtain or maintain, or both, permanent affordable housing;
and

prevention services for at risk homeless individuals or families so that they can obtain and maintain permanent affordable housing.

Grants awarded by the governing body of the county shall be used to support projects that:

measurably reduce homelessness;

demonstrate government cost savings over time;

employ evidence-based models;

can be replicated in other counties;

include an outcome measurement component;

are consistent with the local homelessness housing plan; or

fund the acquisition, construction, or rehabilitation of projects that will serve homeless individuals or families for a period of at least 30 years or equal to the longest term of affordability required by other funding sources.

The trust funds, according to the NJ Advocacy Network to End Homelessness, would “leverage … scarce funding” and “help thousands of families and individuals in New Jersey move into permanent housing.”

States across the country have helped localities dramatically reduce their homeless populations by enabling them to fund the implementation of local plans to end homelessness through local Trust Funds. In these states, this has resulted in a reduction of costs to the public sector and community. A recent example is the King County Homeless Housing and Services Fund, created when the Washington State
Legislature passed the Homeless Housing and Assistance Act of 2005 (ESSHB 2163) establishing an additional $10 document recording fee dedicated to funding homeless initiatives. This year this assisted more than 200 low-income, homeless individuals and their families will be able to move into stable housing where they can receive the supportive services they need to maintain that housing. The goal of the legislation in
Washington State was to reduce homelessness by 50% in ten years.

The same results can and will happen in New Jersey.

The Senate Community and Urban Affairs Committee endorsed the legislation by a 4-0 vote, with one abstention. It now awaits a vote of the full Senate, where it is likely to pass.

In the meantime, do what you can to help out groups like the Crisis Ministry, the Mercer Alliance, Coming Home in Middlesex County and all of the other groups working to aid those in the direst of need.

Pockets of need

This is a tough story. Not because it was difficult to report or write, but because it points out the flawed statistics we rely on to understand our economy.

Last week, the county conducted a homeless census designed to determine how homeless men, women and children there are in Middlesex County. The trouble is that the count is essentially voluntary, relying on the homeless to come forward and volunteer their status. While this catches many, it leaves those living in the shadows in the shadows while also purposely ignoring a whole category of transients who technically have roofs over their heads.

(A)ccording to Amanda Warga, who works for the Middlesex County homeless Help Line, people living in welfare motels do not count as homeless because they have shelter.

“Although they are homeless in regular language, they can get hotel placement for two months and not be considered homeless,” Ms. Warga said. “Sometimes the hotels are so far out that they can’t find work anywhere and they aren’t counted as homeless. They should be, but they’re not.”

I’d have to agree. Not counting them distorts the true picture of homelessness and what is sometimes called housing insecurity. They have shelter — but only for the moment and it is dependent on forces they cannot control. When the winds change, they often find themselves without shelter, perhaps under a bridge in New Brunswick or living in a tree house on Beekman Road.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick