RETHINKING A PLAN FOR HOMELESS

What if everything a city was doing about homelessness was wrong and needed to be blown up?

That’s not exactly what Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke and the 8-month-old Chattanooga Interagency Council on Homelessness are suggesting, but it’s pretty close.

The key, as noted by the group in its recently released Chattanooga Community Action Plan, is housing.

“The only thing to end a person’s homelessness is to be in housing,” Berke told Times Free Press editors and reporters last week. The idea, he said, is to have a “system in place to get them from where they are into housing.”

Once homeless individuals are housed, he said, case managers and wraparound services help keep them there. If they are in a house, the chances are much greater they can get a job and become a productive member of society, much greater that they will remain healthy and much less that they will be involved in the likes of alcoholism and drug addiction.

It’s an idea that, as the seed of a plan, makes sense. If homeless individuals have permanent or semi-permanent housing, they’ve cleared one of the highest hurdles toward returning to a more normal life.

Creating such a system, though, will not be simple, cheap or accomplished quickly. On the contrary, it will be, according to Berke, a “tough, difficult, painful thing to do.”

The Chattanooga Community Action Plan, released Wednesday, covers four years and suggests four steps from homelessness to housing: identifying the people experiencing homelessness (including the chronically homeless and the episodically homeless), providing them emergency or temporary shelter, finding them permanent housing, and helping provide them housing stability and preventing future homelessness.

Tyler Yount, director of special projects for the mayor, suggested the “phased-in” 4- to 5-year plan could cost $10 million — the same amount Hamilton County recently announced would be spent on a needed new Humane Educational Society facility — but the costs are not fixed. Neither has it been determined from where each penny would come, though many current funding sources would be differently allocated.

The critical first step, Berke said, was a “plan to agree on what needs to happen. Then [we can] go back” for funding. Collaborators first should “build out the system we want,” he said, though it is inevitable there will be “bumps … along the way.”

The difficulty, we envision, is aligning the many loyal organizations, churches and nonprofits with the new housing-first goal. Many of them sought to tackle homelessness long before local governments ever got involved. And they did so by implementing the best practices of which they were aware at the time.

If the Chattanooga Community Action Plan is fully phased in, many of those longtime groups’ efforts would necessarily be altered. Some groups might not be needed. And while that — ending homelessness — surely would be a goal of any organization working with the group, it would be a sea change.

Many of those organizations, fortunately, Berke said, have been at the table as part of the Interagency Council on Homelessness and understand the need to “refocus everyone’s attention.”

Up to now, some organizations applied for federal funding, others offered temporary shelter and still others fed homeless individuals on a daily basis. The effect, it was said, was to make the homeless comfortable. Nevertheless, along the way, some homeless individuals did get housed — significantly, homeless veterans in the area.

But, said Betsy McCright, executive director of the Chattanooga Housing Authority, “the position to keep them housed is the piece missing.”

That’s why the city is immediately hiring housing navigators who can not only help coordinate getting individuals into homes but help keep them there. In order to cement its commitment going forward, the city also will put aspects of the plan into its 2019-2020 budget.

Envisioned down the road, among other things, are additional navigators, outreach workers and service coordinators; a mobile services van to provide services where the homeless are; and temporary shelters and a permanent 250-bed emergency shelter

The city, in time, would like to achieve the same type of success as did the state of Utah, which implemented a housing first model in 2005 and through 2015 had seen a 91 percent reduction in chronic homelessness. At that time, its chronic homeless population stood at 6 percent compared to 22 percent nationwide.

Berke believes a success rate of 85 percent is possible here. The implementation of such a plan would be by the Interagency Council and not the city, he stressed.

No one should be fooled that this is not a major undertaking, not a new way of doing things, not a plan that upsets the community apple cart.

“There is opposition to these kind of initiatives,” Berke acknowledged. “But there is a lot of dissatisfaction of where we are.”

It seems to us this is an opportunity to move from managing homelessness to helping end it. We look forward to hearing more about how longtime loyal providers will collaborate on the plan and how its implementation will be handled over time.