Gov. candidate Lamont looks at homeless needs

NEW HAVEN—Ned Lamont, the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor, visited the Columbus House homeless shelter Tuesday to hear about the experiences and needs of people living or working there.

He heard from people living in the shelter who were unable to work because of disabilities, people separated from their families and some who couldn’t find a job because they are older adults.

As of January, 529 people were experiencing homelessness in New Haven, 97 of them children, according to the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness. Overall, the number of homeless is down 3 percent from last year, but those who are unsheltered has increased 118 percent.

“Supporting organizations like this is the future of the state,” Lamont said, and it will be a mix of public and private help. “If Washington is cutting back, the need is not cutting back, so we’re going to work to cover the shortfall.”

Columbus House provides shelter and has a team of managers who reach out to the homeless community to get them into a shelter and connect them with services.

“The real goal is to get people housed, to get people off the streets and some people just aren’t ready for it,” Columbus House CEO Alison Cunningham said. “You can’t force people into services.” She said there are several reasons a person wouldn’t choose a shelter, including discomfort with the structure of the shelter, or mental health disorders triggered by the shelter environment .

Above all, poverty puts people into homelessness, she said. Approximately 50 percent of people at Columbus House get out rather quickly because they have resources and support, but others don’t, which makes it hard to find work or get on entitlement.

“Poverty is the number one issue,” she said. The shelter serves 80 people, with 50 beds for men and 30 for women, which the shelter could use more of, Cunningham said.

The number of chronically homeless people has risen after consistent declines since 2014, according to CCEH, with the number of chronically homeless veterans up again also after a dramatic drop that year. The population overall is aging and the city is seeing an increase in people between the ages of 40 and 55.

“If Washington is cutting back, the need is not cutting back, so we’re going to work to cover the shortfall.”

— Ned Lamont

A challenge in getting people housed is if the person is used to being housed with groups, they are lost when they go to live on their own, Cunningham said. Lamont asked what issue Cunningham would bring to the Capitol regarding homelessness solutions; and she said it’s the lack of affordable housing.

“We’ve got to address the affordable housing issue,” she said. “We’ve made tremendous progress but we’re not done. I’ve got a shelter full of people and in the winter I’ll have two shelters full of people.” Housing, especially in New Haven, is just not affordable for many people, she said, which means not paying more than 30 percent of income toward living expenses. More over, the affordable housing wait list is years long.

“There’s a real need for affordable housing but there’s also a real need for jobs, for entry-level jobs,” she said “We need to figure out how to break the cycle and people need to go back to work . ... Entitlements and subsidies coming from the federal government, I don’t have great faith that they’ll continue, so we really need to think about how we’re going to break that poverty cycle to get people back to work.”

Lamont said now is a good time to put people in entry-level jobs because there’s a “desperate need” for them to be filled, but the state needs to figure out a way to get people trained for such positions.

“This doesn’t happen all the time, but right now there’s that opportunity,” he said, adding the state needs to do a better job focusing on job training for adults the way it does for teens and college students. “There are folks right there at 62 years of age who still have a lot to give, who want to work and there’s a lot for them to do, maybe in nonprofits, maybe service sector, but we nee to find a pipeline for them, too.”

Columbus House has 170 employees and a $12 million budget, which comes from state funding, federal funding and money raised through the private sector.

“We have to turn more and more to that to fill the gap that government funding doesn’t provide, especially with the cuts we had recently,” Cunningham said. “It’s becoming more and more difficult.”