$1 million gift to help house area’s chronically homeless
Donation from Chase will help fund project for 2,500 new units
Calvin Walter doesn’t want to spend another winter sleeping outside.
He makes his bed on a flattened cardboard box under a U.S. 59 overpass in Midtown; a bedsheet covers his small pile of belongings. Walter, who is about 50 and said he has an inherited blood disorder, wants a place to call home.
If all goes according to plan, he soon could, along with all other chronically homeless people in greater Houston.
Calling the goal a moral imperative with fiscal benefits, Mayor Sylvester Turner on Thursday announced a major boost for the regional campaign to open 2,500 new units of permanent supportive housing for the homeless: a $1 million check from J.P. Morgan Chase.
The mayor called on other businesses to follow the bank’s lead and plug an $8 million “gap” in funding.
“It’s not enough to fill potholes if we don’t take the opportunity to fill the potholes in people’s lives,” Turner said at a news conference announcing the donation to the Coalition for the Homeless.
Carolyn Watson, J.P. Morgan Chase’s vice president for corporate responsibility, praised the unified approach of the coalition, a consortium of 100 organizations and agencies in Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties.
“Houston is a model for the nation for bringing these entities together,” she said, before presenting the $1 million check.
To qualify as chronically homeless, someone must spend at least a year on the streets and suffer from a disabling condition — mental illness, physical disability, addiction or a combination of the three.
Sitting on an overturned grocery cart near a light-rail station just north of the Museum District, Walter said he gets biweekly blood transfusions at Houston Methodist and has spent time in jail.
Chronic homelessness is “very expensive for the taxpayer,” said Marc Eichenbaum, the mayor’s special assistant for homeless initiatives. “Between the ambulance costs and hospital costs and shelter
“It’s not enough to fill potholes if we don’t take the opportunity to fill the potholes in people’s lives.” Mayor Sylvester Turner
costs and police and cleaning up the streets, it uses an extraordinary amount of public resources.”
The chronically homeless number about 470 in the Houston area, according to the most recent count in January, down from nearly 2,000 five years earlier.
Turner said housing them permanently — even if they do not become self-sufficient — could save $28,000 per person by reducing consumption of public services.
In 2012, government agencies, nonprofits and private foundations united behind a plan called The Way Home. The goal was to effectively end homelessness by offering permanent supportive housing that includes medical and psychiatric treatment, job training and addiction counseling. The coalition saw a need for 2,500 new housing units; about a thousand already have opened and another thousand are in the development pipeline, Eichenbaum said.
Unlike past initiatives, the plan adopted the “Housing First” approach that does not require people to get a job or get sober before getting a place to live. It strikes some critics as unfair or enabling, but advocates say it is uniquely effective at ending homelessness.
“Housing First is the national standard with the data to prove it,” Eichenbaum said. After two years, 90 percent of chronically homeless Houstonians placed in permanent supportive housing remained stably housed. That beat even optimistic expectations.
“We’ve taken it to another level, in both the retention rate and the number of individuals being housed,” he said. From 2011 to 2016, he said, the annual count found a 76 percent drop in chronically homeless people, which may have been driven partly by the postrecession recovery.
Eichenbaum called J.P. Morgan Chase’s grant a “gamechanger” that could encourage more corporate giving.
“We know this is just the start,” he said. “Houston is on the cusp of becoming the first city in the nation to effectively end chronic homelessness. We know that the entire community — individual donors, philanthropic organizations and the private sector — will rally together to help their fellow Houstonians and make history.”