Many homeless get housing, but others take their place
Despite the state’s success in moving homeless people out of hotels, where they have stayed since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and into permanent housing, the number of people sleeping outdoors has continued to increase, according to agencies devoted to assisting the homeless in Connecticut.
In New Haven, 271 people have been helped to get into apartments of their own, according to Dr. Mehul Dalal, the city’s community services administrator. There are similar success stories elsewhere: 167 housed in Fairfield County since June and 115 in Waterbury and Litchfield County, according to David Rich, executive director of Supportive Housing Works, which works to reduce homelessness in western Connecticut.
But the pandemic, which has increased unemployment and the need to close shelters, has forced more people outdoors.
“We have definitely been talking about the fact that there appears to be a number of folks who are newly unsheltered,” Dalal said last week.
Counting homeless people who have not sought help by calling 211 or an agency is difficult. “We are working on getting a more accurate handle on how many new individuals are on the streets,” Dalal said.
One way to measure the problem is the “By Name List” kept by the Connecticut Coordinated Access Networks, the regional bodies that assist local agencies in reducing homelessness. The number of people considered chronically homeless, meaning they were unsheltered for a year or for multiple episodes totaling a year, was 133 statewide as of Sept. 8, with 103 of them matched to housing. Fairfield County had matched all of its 24 chronically homeless, while Greater New Haven, stretching from Milford to Madison, had matched 22 of 37.
In addition, 1,432 homeless individuals were listed as not chronic, with 259 matched to housing: 23 of 388 in Fairfield County, and 65 of 221 in Greater New Haven.
In the Meriden, Middlesex, Wallingford CAN, 40 of 98 people, both chronic and non-chronic homeless, have been matched to housing. In the Northwest CAN, 26 of 123 have been.
Another way to estimate the number of still-unsheltered people is by the waiting list kept by agencies such as Columbus House in New Haven, which was 316 names long last week. However, according to Margaret Middleton, who began as the agency’s CEO June 8, “that doesn’t mean that there’s actually 316 people who would take a shelter bed tomorrow.” Some may have found housing elsewhere or are staying with friends.
“The number of requests for housing assistance is fairly similar to last year,” Middleton said. However, “the number of people who are actually keeping their appointments is dramatically up,” by as much as 35 percent, she said. That demonstrates how dire the situation has become for many.
“Connecticut was facing a housing crisis before the pandemic started,” she said. “I think that housing should be the first word on everybody’s mind when the legislature starts again.”
There are reasons for a sense of urgency: As shelters reopen, they will have fewer beds available, in order to keep clients safe from COVID. The overflow spaces in churches and gyms, which accept clients when the cold weather hits, won’t be available.
Also, New Haven is trying to track “how many people are at risk for eviction, and when the eviction moratorium ends, how many people that will put on the street,” Dalal said. The moratorium is scheduled to end Dec. 31.
“My gut is the numbers are probably going up,” Rich said. “Once the eviction moratorium is ended, the numbers are going to skyrocket.” That’s because renters won’t be able to make up the unpaid back rent. “They’re going to be stacking up three, four, five, six months. There’s no way they can dig out of the hole,” he said.
“We are putting together a homeless eviction-prevention program now so that we’re ready,” Rich said. “We’ve put together a war chest of about $5 million” to subsidize rents, providing security deposits and other short-term needs.
“The best recipe for success here, and the only one that really does work, is to buckle down and house people faster,” Rich said.
There are areas that have shown success in moving people into permanent housing, he said. Waterbury, where the number of tenants at the Marriott hotel has dropped from more than 60 to eight or 10, is “a huge success story,” Rich said. “Agencies in the area really worked very well together. It’s a model for the state and the nation.”
In lower Fairfield County, the Open Door Shelter, Family and Children’s Agency and the Mid Fairfield AIDS Project in Norwalk, along with Homes with Hope in Westport, have shown what can be done, “if every wealthy town was as supportive, not just [of] their homeless but the region’s homeless,” he said.
“Columbus House has done a phenomenal job,” Rich said, and on the eastern side of the state, the Homeless Hospitality Center in New London “has kicked it out of the park.”
The pandemic has made it difficult, with landlords not wanting to interview people in person, acting cautiously because of the eviction moratorium, along with the perennial problem of being unwilling to rent to someone who has had financial trouble. But, Rich said, “we’re here to support them.”
The reduced number of shelter beds makes it more urgent than ever to find people housing. “Our previous capacity prior to COVID was 82 in the main shelter. It’s going to be 41,” Middleton said. Columbus House’s overflow shelter, which had 75 beds, will have 30.
The main shelter reopened last week, with 14 individuals moved back from the hotels, she said.
The state Department of Housing in March began contracting with hotels to move homeless people from shelters, where sleeping together in large rooms ran the risk of spreading the coronavirus. That reduced shelter space by 60 percent, according to Steve DiLella, director of individual and family support services for the Housing Department.
The 1,000 Homes program, using an Emergency Solutions Grant from the federal CARE Act, was launched in June to move 1,800 people into apartments by the end of this month. A thousand were to come from hotels, in addition to 200 per month who were newly homeless. “It’s loosely tied to the number of hotel rooms that were set up at the beginning of the pandemic,” DiLella said. The goal was to “deconcentrate our shelter capacity to where individuals could stay safely in the shelters.”
The state received $20.8 million in its first-round CARE Act grant, with an additional $10.2 million divided among Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport and Waterbury. DiLella said the application for a second round of CARE Act housing money was submitted Friday.
The goal was 1,260 moves by the end of August, but only 808 were accomplished, according to the Coordinated Access Networks. An additional 93 people had been given permanent housing as of Friday.
The state is considering purchasing one or more hotels to use as additional shelter space, DiLella said. “We’ve certainly looked at a couple different options because we want to make sure there’s enough shelter space in the winter … enough beds in our shelters to be comparable to what we had last year.”
David Rich of Supportive Housing Works said the state and many regional and municipal support agencies have done well at moving people into housing since the pandemic began.
“A lot of folks have done a remarkable job. … The first couple weeks were pretty chaotic,” he said. Since then, “we got over a thousand of our homeless very quickly into these hotels from out in the street,” and the rate of positive tests for the coronavirus was just 1 percent or 2 percent.
Rich said the Federal Emergency Management Agency bore “a lion’s share of these costs” and he said he would “give credit where it’s due to the state” for using the money to put people into permanent homes. “No matter what happens, that’s the best route,” he said.
According to Richard Cho, CEO of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, there are 601 people still in the hotels, down from more than 1,000 in May. Meanwhile, the number of homeless people who have yet to be placed in a shelter or hotel “keeps increasing and increasing, but was rising even before COVID.”
Cho said the number of people in shelters dropped 63 percent between March and June and was 58 percent lower in July than a year earlier. But that is a mixture of good news — people housed in hotels or in permanent residences — and bad. “Because of COVID, the shelters have had to reduce their census and that means that people are being turned away,” he said.
Many of the uncounted homeless population may be in a “doubled or couch-surfing situation or they are sleeping outside. It’s a blind spot in our data system,” Cho said.
But with lower shelter capacity, “where we’re at now is not sustainable in turning people away,” he said. There are “232 percent more people who are added to the shelter waitlist compared to last year,” a status he called “kind of a purgatory.”
“We need to think about how to safely open shelters,” with partitions between beds and bathroom shifts, along with fewer numbers, Cho said. “Columbus House is the rock star of all rock stars in their ability to house people in the last few months.”
The idea of housing people in hotels didn’t sit well with one formerly homeless man, Clinton Staggers, who described himself as a “community activist outreach worker” as he sat on a bench on the New Haven Green. “I think they could have bought houses and buildings with that money,” he said.
Staggers also said case managers aren’t as easily found on the Green as they once were. “I’ve been out here since the COVID started,” he said. “They didn’t get nobody from the outside. … It’s not fair. The case manager used to go a little further than they’re doing. … There’s a lot of barriers that people face when they try to get housing.”
He said the large-scale landlords are not willing to house people with low incomes. “There’s a lot of people that make $780 a month but you’re telling them that’s not enough money to house you in my apartment,” he said. Mental health issues and people coming out of prison with no primary care doctor are all issues, he said.
“But it’s mainly about having a roof over your head,” he said. “I believe housing should be a human right. There’s too many buildings that’s vacant.”
A man waiting in line for the grab-and-go dinner at the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen on Temple Street said he sleeps behind the federal courthouse on Church Street. “I came out of jail at the wrong time. I came out after they already housed everybody,” he said. He was released June 26.
Paul Sutphin said he recently got an apartment but that he’s trying to find a new one because his roommates eat his food. He had been homeless since April. He said he has volunteered for nine years at the Church of St. Paul and St. James’ Loaves and Fishes food pantry. “I go down Friday and I load trucks, and Saturday I go and make bags there and we hand them out to the homeless.”
Steve Werlin, executive director of DESK, said while those who were staying in shelters were moved to hotels when COVID hit, “very few if any people who had been on the street at the start of the pandemic were moved into hotels despite our efforts.”
Werlin estimated that “at any given time there’s at least 100 people who are unsheltered on the street. … They are anecdotally known by the outreach and engagement team, an interagency group led by Connecticut Mental Health Center and including the Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center, Liberty Community Services and others.
“We have winter bearing down on us,” Werlin said. “All of this has worked because it’s been a mild season. If we have a winter like last winter, we might be OK, but we can’t guarantee that.”
Phil Costello, a nurse practitioner with the Hill Health Center, is known as Dr. Phil by his homeless patients, who were checking in with him at DESK. “There’s quite a bit of people that are homeless and have become homeless since COVID,” he said. “The virus itself has put a lot of people out of work. There’s the homeless that are living on the street and there’s the homeless who are staying on a friend’s couch. There’s a lot of people who are almost homeless, who are a week away from homeless.
“You get a lot of people out there that are surviving day to day and a lot of people out there who are struggling to live,” he said.