Photo by Susan Madden Lankford
Connecticut’s emergency shelters serve more than 14,000 men, women and children each year. Hundreds more go unsheltered, staying in cars, in tents in the woods or in abandoned buildings. Many citizens are committed to putting an end to that in 2014.
Lisa Tepper Bates, executive director, CT Coalition to End Homeless says:
Homelessness is a solvable problem, and a problem that we have to solve. Because it is wrong for the most powerful and prosperous nation in the history of the world to tolerate it, and because it is a wrong-headed and expensive public policy choice to do so.
A Pennsylvania study found that the cost of one child homeless costs the state $40,000 per year and Connecticut’s cost of living is about 20 percent higher than Pennsylvania’s. National studies prove that leaving single adults (often with mental illness or other disabilities) homeless on our streets is much more expensive–especially to our emergency services–than housing them with supports.
A few basic elements have to come together to end homelessness.
Crisis response: We need to coordinate our existing resources more effectively: bringing together separate providers of service to the homeless within one community, reducing duplication of effort and combining resources. That also means providers working together as a team to address the urgent housing crisis of every adult, every family with children and every homeless young person as quickly as possible.
Next step, housing: Our goal is to help each person who is homeless return to permanent housing. For some, this means the subsidy and support that they need to remain housed and stable, given the mental illness or other disabilities with which they live. For others, this means the helping hand they need simply to get back in the door of housing–assistance with a security deposit and first month’s rent. For all, it means offering help to connect them with the employment, health, education and similar resources that may benefit them.
The affordable housing gap: After we improve our ability to respond to the crisis, we need to end this problem permanently. The key element is more deeply affordable housing. Connecticut. needs to provide an additional 80,000 units of housing affordable for its poorest residents (those who earn less than 30% of the area’s median income). For 2012, to afford market-rate housing prices in Connecticut (where housing costs equal about 30% of income), household income had to be over $23/hour, but almost half the state’s occupations provide an average wage lower than the housing wage.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing (HPRP) Program allowed providers in Connecticut to greatly expand Rapid Re-housing services in 2010. In three years, 2010-2012, Connecticut providers re-housed 3,100 people in over 1,600 households.
Rapid Re-housing is short-term financial assistance and services such as case management, outreach, and housing search for individuals and families who are in emergency shelter or on the streets and need temporary assistance in order to obtain and retain housing. Rapid Re-housing does not meet the needs of every homeless person, but is an important option for many.
In the first three year since Connecticut clients received Rapid Re-housing services through HPRP, only a small number returned to shelter. These results are consistent with outcomes across the nation. Three years after receiving Rapid Re-housing, 96% of singles and 95% of families had not returned to shelters.
