On the path to eliminating homelessness

Dan Rather doesn’t appear on TV much anymore, but something he said has stayed with me as my colleagues and I experience the ups and downs of trying to prevent homelessness. “If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey,” he observed, “most of us would never start out at all.” That may be true for some. But I’m lucky enough to have colleagues who would have embarked, and have stayed with it, regardless.

Last week, we took a huge step on that difficult journey. The federal government gave New Reach, my New Haven-based agency, $2.4 million — a gargantuan grant in the nonprofit world — to work with Yale New Haven Hospital on a model we hope will help women experiencing homelessness, mental illness and substance-use issues to stabilize in secure, affordable homes with the services they need to live independently. If we succeed, we will save invaluable hospital resources (some of these women visit the ER dozens of times a year, for which hospitals receive scant compensation). We also will save taxpayer funding for Medicaid and other services. And most important, we will save lives.

We have assembled a Dream Team of clinicians, social workers and therapists — and trained thoughtfully — to anticipate the “difficulties” we are sure to encounter and be flexible enough to make mid-course corrections. Over the next five years, we will be able to serve 130 women who, extremely vulnerable living on the streets, have been raped, abused and exploited. But we are confident that what we learn helping them will extend to thousands more women throughout Connecticut and across the nation. And the service and treatment model we shape will help the children those women have or will have, stabilizing their lives and keeping them housed, independent and successful, too.

Our goal is to closely evaluate our progress and be able to translate our findings to any community in the United States. Of course, if this were the only step in our journey to keep individuals and families housed, our job would be difficult enough. But New Reach, like many other providers across Connecticut and the nation, is taking many other steps.

We provide shelter — New Reach runs two shelters in New Haven — and supportive housing (affordable units with support services) in New Haven, Hamden and Bridgeport. We manage dozens of affordable units, run a Rapid Re-Housing program so that homeless episodes are temporary, have created a furniture co-op to help furnish homes, and run an eviction prevention program to keep households in their homes. Beyond that, we try to be innovative, working with developers to produce mixed-income housing and even developing housing ourselves.

Whatever doubts some may have, we march forward with a lean budget and cost controls that would make even the strictest corporate CFO smile. One example: we run a “diversion” program to ensure those seeking one of our very limited shelter beds have no other reasonable recourse. The two staffers who run it are compassionate and savvy; if a woman says she’s living in her car, they politely ask to see if her clothes and belongings are in it. If it’s empty, she may well have an alternative place to stay.

Working with our colleagues on the statewide Reaching Home Campaign, and with the new (and very highly regarded) Housing Commissioner Seila Mosquera-Bruno, we are confident that one day soon we will end homelessness in Connecticut. Lest some misunderstand, that won’t mean that no one will ever experience homelessness. It will mean we will have the affordable homes and other services to make that episode brief and nonrecurring. That will require more housing, more Rental Assistance Payment certificates and more resources for services.

Gov. Lamont has been compassionate and helpful, proposing many resources to fight homelessness in his General Fund budget. The debt diet in his capital spending proposal — excluding bond financing for housing creation — will be problematic if the Legislature doesn’t provide more construction subsidy. But that is just one of the barriers we continually confront on our journey. Those “difficulties” may cause us to pause and think hard about how to overcome, but they won’t deter us. I know I can speak for all of my colleagues when I say that, even if we’d known what challenges we’d face, we would have embarked anyway. Preventing and ending homelessness — and helping people live independent, fulfilling lives — is too important a quest to scare us away.

Rather may have been right about some people. But not us.