For those without shelter, winter is typically the toughest season. This year, the same held true for those helping the homeless.
Scant funding and growing need pushed the largest homeless services provider in Chico to near bankruptcy. In Redding, meanwhile attempts to try an innovative approach fell flat. This, as poverty, desperation and antisocial behavior remain as visible as ever around the region.
In Chico, where demand for meals and overnight accommodations at the Torres Community Shelter is rising, a bureaucratic change in Sacramento turned trying times into a crisis.
Brad Montgomery is the shelter’s executive director.
“In a given month, we’ll have 60 new people come in, and that’s pretty standard,” he says.
Several years ago, about 80 people would typically line up for dinner. That number now regularly tops 120. Last year, donations slid. Then, the state agency administering federal homeless services grants overhauled its application process, and switched to a two-year cycle.
As a result, Torres will have to wait an extra year to receive federal funding, assuming their application succeeds. Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development Spokesman Ed Cabrera said Sacramento’s move created unauthorized delays, triggering a notice of violation. Though, he admitted, the bureaucratic scolding lacks real consequences.
Except to places like Torres. It depends in part on that federal help. In the interim, the local community has been filling the breach.
“The number of folks that are giving to us monthly has tripled in the last few weeks,” Montgomery said.
After warning in January that Torres could close, Montgomery is more optimistic. Earlier this month, Enloe Medical Center donated $20,000, just over 3 percent of Torres’ annual budget. New initiatives are also reducing dependence on federal grants.
Meanwhile, charting a new course in Redding hasn’t been easy. Concerns about costs, morality and limited resources have so-far stymied “housing first” — a paradigm turning homeless services upside down. Rather than requiring sobriety, employment and other commitments before housing, advocates say providing shelter first, without strings, enables the other goals to fall into place.
“Once they’re housed, they are more receptive and more able to be treated, so if you could imagine trying to get somebody to be clean and sober and then when they go home, they don’t have a home — they’re going back on the street,” Redding Councilwoman Kristen Schreder says.
After getting the long-term homeless indoors, counseling assists with employment, mental health services, alcoholism, or whatever led them to the street in the first place.
Boosters argue that housing first works, pointing to Denver, Boston and Utah for inspiration.
At a recent Redding council meeting, doubters balked at the $70,000 cost to house and support to just five people, especially when there’s 100 times as many without shelter in Shasta County according to a recent homeless census. A similar survey found over 1,100 in Butte County.
Schreder and other advocates say if all costs are included, housing first wouldn’t seem extravagant.
“When you leave someone on the street or let them, or they’re on the street and they get their medical care not through planned prevention, but they actually go through the emergency room, or stay in the hospital or they spend time in jail, there’s a larger cost for that,” Schreder says.
The cost comparison is actually favorable, she said.
“That costs more than providing the housing with the case management and the supportive services” she said.
While declining a housing first trial, the council approved an accounting study, to compile total costs. Schreder said those figures, expected in April, could prove eye-opening to opponents.
Naysayers have other concerns. Improving conditions will attract the homeless in greater numbers, they say. Promoters retort that hasn’t happened in Utah, where the model has met success statewide.
There’s a bit less pushback back in Chico where Stairways Programming, an entity employing housing first gets some resources.
The pleas to consider total cost were in some ways echoed by Mike Wiltermood, Enloe Medical Center’s CEO, in justifying is donation to Torres. There’s altruism, but also business to consider. When the vulnerable and penniless are exposed to the elements, they’re more likely wind up in an emergency room, getting care the hospital ends up eating.