{"id":50831,"date":"2022-07-28T11:43:29","date_gmt":"2022-07-28T18:43:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=50831"},"modified":"2022-07-28T11:43:29","modified_gmt":"2022-07-28T18:43:29","slug":"a-tale-of-three-cities-how-bakersfield-columbus-and-houston-tackled-homelessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=50831","title":{"rendered":"A Tale of Three Cities \u2013 How Bakersfield, Columbus and Houston Tackled Homelessness"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Jenny Manrique<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Leer en\u00a0espa\u00f1ol<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, around half a million individuals nationwide are currently experiencing homelessness. Yet three cities have been able to make dramatic gains in tackling the problem with important lessons for the rest of the country.<\/p>\n

Among these lessons: housing and homelessness are community issues requiring community solutions.<\/p>\n

In March, 2020 the city of Bakersfield, California achieved \u201cfunctional zero\u201d chronic homelessness, while Houston, Texas placed more than 25,000 people in permanent housing, resulting in a 64% decrease in homelessness. And in 2018, Columbus, Ohio had successfully housed 70% of its homeless population.<\/p>\n

During a\u00a0July 22nd Ethnic Media Services briefing<\/a>, front line workers in all three cities explained the strategies that led to their success.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe accomplished this because we changed our mindset and our beliefs,\u201d said Mary Scott, client services director at\u00a0Open Door Network<\/a>\u00a0in Bakersfield. \u201cWe now believe homelessness is not an individual issue. Homelessness is a community issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Mary Scott, client services director at Open Door Network in Bakersfield<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

With that new mindset, organizations, government agencies, landlords, and homeless residents were able to partner to create support services and permanent housing for the community, Scott explained.<\/p>\n

Work began with a comprehensive register of every person in the county experiencing homelessness, with names listed under the following categories: chronically homeless, veterans, youth, elderly, and families.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe with the different organizations and go one by one to each person, to find out what the service provider is providing, what their status is, and what are the barriers,\u201d Scott said.<\/p>\n

Housing vouchers, low-income units, landlords working with housing locators, and the \u2018Milestone project\u2019 \u2013 which is refurbishing motels and turning them into permanent housing units \u2013 are all part of the strategy.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of our continued challenges are the lack of affordable housing: we have a 2% vacancy rate, and we identified 1,603 unduplicated homeless individuals in our 2022 headcount,\u201d she continued. \u201cIt is also a struggle finding landlords and property owners who are willing to rent to our clients who have little to no income.\u201d<\/p>\n

Evictions are another challenge. In Columbus, Ohio, addressing the homeless crisis meant \u201cgetting ahead\u201d of eviction filings.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are bringing more landlords on board, not to sell them on the tenants themselves, but on the support services that we have in place to keep people housed,\u201d said Marcus J. Salter, housing stability specialist at the\u00a0Community Mediation Services of Central Ohio<\/a>.<\/p>\n

His agency is one of several that form the Homeless Prevention Network, a collaboration of housing providers and mental health agencies created after the pandemic to connect homeless residents to support services.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve heard landlords say, \u2018We had a tenant here, a situation happened, and we didn\u2019t know who to contact.\u2019 We can make those support services more accessible,\u201d said Salter.<\/p>\n

Currently, the Homeless Prevention Network is working to reduce demand at the city\u2019s five single adult centers and two family shelters, all of which are filled to capacity, by moving people into more permanent housing.<\/p>\n

According to Scott, the network \u201cdiverted 311 people away from entering shelters\u201d between January and March of this year, with a total of \u201c2,035 long-term homeless residents served by permanent supportive housing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Houston took a similar approach, moving 25,000 people from the streets and into permanent housing over the past decade. Back in 2012, the nation\u2019s fourth most populous city had the sixth largest homeless population in the country, with service providers operating in silos.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were not looking at our data to make sure that the decisions we were making were in line with what the community needed. And our recidivism was very high,\u201d said Ana Rausch, vice president of program operations at the\u00a0Houston Coalition for the Homeless<\/a>, an umbrella organization that brings together more than 100 nonprofits and local government agencies.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur partners and funders all came together to identify the common goals for the homeless response system.\u201d<\/p>\n

The results: since 2011, the city has seen a 63% decrease in overall homelessness, a 69% decrease in chronic homelessness, and an 82% decline in family homelessness. Veteran homelessness ended in 2015, and in the current year, of the 3,124 individuals experiencing homelessness, 1,622 are now residing in a shelter.<\/p>\n

And according to Rausch, 95% of individuals supported stay housed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe use the Housing First model: we take someone from the streets and we put them into a place and then once they feel safe, having a roof over their head and food in their belly, then they can begin to focus on the issues that might have led to them becoming homeless,\u201d she noted.<\/p>\n

Harris County, where Houston is located, also managed to decommission 57 homeless encampments, thanks in part to additional COVID resources from the federal government, with individuals being moved into permanent housing.<\/p>\n

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Matthew Lewis, director of communications at California Yimby<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cWe had a lot of market-rate units,\u201d said Rausch, \u201cbut it\u2019s gotten to the point where there\u2019s really not many vacancies left.\u201d<\/p>\n

California now holds the dubious distinction of having the nation\u2019s highest homeless population, tallied at an eye-popping 60,000 people.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd that\u2019s not because they\u2019re mentally ill, on drugs, or because they\u2019re criminals,\u201d said Matthew Lewis, director of communications at California Yimby, a statewide housing policy organization. \u201cIt\u2019s because they lost their homes.\u201d<\/p>\n

YIMBY is the acronym for Yes In My Backyard and refers to those who support greater housing developments in their own neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

Despite California\u2019s continued economic growth \u2013 if it were a nation, California would rank as the world\u2019s fifth largest economy \u2013 zoning law restrictions and a legacy of redlining, which prohibited minorities including Asians, Latinos and African Americans from purchasing homes in certain neighborhoods, are impeding the construction of affordable, multifamily housing.<\/p>\n

California Yimby works at the state level to try to reform the legislative framework around housing, which, according to Lewis, stands in the way of serious attempts to address the homeless challenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe legacy of segregation lives on in these neighborhoods and our cities have made it virtually impossible to add housing at all ends of the income spectrum,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to reverse those historic mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ByJenny Manrique July 27, 2022 EMS...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50832,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50831\/revisions\/50832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}