HOMELESSNESS SOLUTIONS DEPEND ON COOPERATION
We’ve heard the comments and we’ve read the op-eds. When will City Hall fix Chattanooga’s homelessness problem?
What many people fail to appreciate is that in many instances it takes only an unexpected illness that leads to large medical expenses, an unusually high electric bill in the cold season, or a sudden job loss that could spiral an individual or family into homelessness. These individuals often realize that they do not have safety nets in place at the moment that they need them.
In his recent State of the City address, Mayor Andy Berke said growth doesn’t affect all populations equally. The new Chattanooga Interagency Council on Homelessness is coming together at exactly the right time to focus on solutions before our community finds itself in the same situation as cities such as Seattle and Austin with regard to homelessness and housing crises. As Chattanooga continues to prosper, we face some serious questions: Who are we building Chattanooga for, and how can we plan for the city we will be 10 years from now?
Solving homelessness is not impossible. We know, because we’ve already done it for our homeless veteran population. In February 2017, Chattanooga joined over 60 communities who have ended veteran homelessness. The “end” to homelessness does not mean homelessness no longer exists, but rather that each community has the housing and system capacity to meet the housing needs of an individual or family who enters into homelessness to ensure their homelessness is brief.
One clear lesson must be learned from this work — a collective community effort will be required to fully address homelessness. This is a shared community responsibility. Neither the city of Chattanooga nor Hamilton County government nor any single nonprofit agency can do it alone, especially as support from state and federal governments continues to wither.
Simply put, the way to solve homelessness is to help people find a place to call home, assess issues that might lead them to become homeless in the future, and provide the supportive services they need to improve their lives once they are housed.
If the pathway to housing and other assistance is not clear, however, people will become lost. Assisting a family to move from a homeless situation into sustainable permanent housing is many times more challenging than it appears.
Over the next year, the Interagency Council will work to build a plan to tackle those challenges piece by piece, educate the public on the issues surrounding homelessness, bring together public and private resources to fund what it takes to reduce homelessness, and find innovative ways that will lead to viable, sustainable solutions.
As our council meets for the first time this week we need you to join us. We encourage you to contribute your thoughts about how to meaningfully address the plight of homelessness. We all know someone who’s living paycheck to paycheck or we’ve been there ourselves.
After our meeting, we’ll share our minutes and our future plans at our website connect.chattanooga.gov/cich. Please sign up to get involved and share your thoughts with us.
Chattanooga is thriving. We need to ensure it will thrive for all. We look forward to working with many of you in the community and hope you’ll join us in this fight against homelessness.
Betsy McCright and Donna Maddox are co-chairmen of the Chattanooga Interagency Council on Homelessness.