This week’s edition of MetroPulse contains an excellent interview with Mayor Bill Haslam.
The Mayor mentions Knoxville & Knox County’s Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness in a couple of places in the interview, and we think that’s fantastic. Without strong support from its executive, no city’s Ten-Year Plan will be successful.
Obviously, our Ten-Year Plan has excellent executive support. You can click here to see for yourself. It’s a great read.
What’s the cost of homelessness?
The Mayor mentions the Ten-Year Plan as a “big priority,” saying “It’s a big issue for us in terms of what we want to do as a city that’s compassionate and also in terms of the fact that the negative impacts do hit some of our near-to-downtown neighborhoods and for some of our businesses that’s costly right now.”
He also points out that the cost of managing chronic homelessness, which is pretty much what we have done up ’til now, runs between $30-40,000 per year, per chronically homeless person. He’s right. That is what we spend right now. Homelessness is not cost-free.
We’ll add that our Ten-Year Plan aims to end chronic homelessness, not simply continue to manage it and make it more tolerable. Ten-Year Plans in other cities have stabilized homeless people in permanent housing with customized supportive services at or below the same $30-40,000 annual per-person cost.
It takes a community to end homelessness.
Mayor Haslam also mentions a very special group of people. “We have a group now that spans the spectrum of those who deal with the homeless issue. Everybody from Volunteer Ministry Center to Knoxville Area Rescue Mission to Salvation Army to Helen Ross McNabb to the KPD, and they meet weekly and they literally go through on an individual basis what people’s problems are.”
This group is competent, compassionate, and persistent. As you can see, they represent many different kinds of agencies coming together cooperatively to tackle the same issue.
The group’s interactions focus on a list of about thirty of some of the most challenging folks in town. Most of them are chronically homeless. Many are mentally ill and/or serious substance abusers. In fact, if you’ve spent much time downtown, you’ve probably seen some of the people on this list. They’re quite visible. Theirs are the kinds of faces that pop into your head when you hear the word “homeless.”
The group keeps them in focus even after they are appropriately housed. Because of their issues, and because affordable rental housing is in short supply, housing them is not easy. Even so, seven have been housed.
Thanks!
Thanks, Mayor Haslam, for your involvement and your support, and for making it a priority of your administration to end chronic homelessness.
2 Comments
I just cant seem to grasp that it would take 10 years to fix this problem. Can you imagine being hungry and on the street, for whatever reason, and told “well wait ten years” I believe I read that there are 1900 homeless a month in 2004, so probably 2000 now, the program is to end chronic homelessness, which states above is ten percent of the homeless, so thats 200 people. Please, dont get me wrong I commend Mayor Haslam for addressing the problem, I am just trying to understand what the barriers are. I am sure there are things that must be done that I have no knowledge of, but through dialouge maybe citizens can figure it out.
I do wonder, if so many of them are mentally ill, why arent they receiving Social Security benefits? That would then give them medicaid, which can pay for mental health services and medications. I think alot of people could be helped by receiving medication, then be stabilized enough, to attempt some type of training.
Also, the medicad would cover drug treatment and hospitalization, if they are dually diagnosed.
I think this is a nice, simple web site for people to come up with ideas,it’s just a little hidden . Maybe you could make it more visible.
Just My Thoughts,
The Advocate06~
Thanks for your comments, The, and for the opportunity to clarify a few things. I’ll try to do that in a simple list.
First, I want to mention your numbers. As you might imagine, it’s very hard to know exactly how many homeless people we have living in Knoxville at any given time. It’s in the nature of things that it’s difficult to count people who don’t have a permanent address. Our estimates for 2004 were about 1900 per month. At the time these estimates were made, projections would have put the total number of people experiencing homelessness during the year at somewhere around 8000 to 9000. That’s pretty imprecise, but it gives you a number of around 800 chronically homeless in Knoxville. That’s an estimate, and it’s four times the 200 you projected from the monthly homeless estimates. So 800 is what we’re assuming. In fact , one of the goals of the Ten-Year Plan is to get 800 chronically-homeless people housed in ten years. You can read more about this starting on page 2 of the Ten-Year Plan.
Also, we’re about a year-and-a-half into the Ten-Year Plan.
1. We don’t tell people who are cold and hungry, “Sorry, but you’ll just have to wait ten years.” That’s not how it works. The ten years is the scope of a plan that seeks to bring a lot of change to a big system. In the meantime, people are being housed. Close to 80 people were put into permanent housing in 2007 by Volunteer Ministry Center alone. Others have been housed by Knox Area Rescue Ministries, the Salvation Army, by KCDC, and by other agencies. We want to see that happen for more people. Why doesn’t it now?
2. Two big reasons: Not enough available low-income rental housing and not enough funds to pay for the necessary supportive services.
* Housing: It will take time to build or rehab low-income housing. Development doesn’t happen fast, as much as we might wish that it did. Who pays for it? Well, as you probably know, HUD pays for most of it. Most homeless people qualify for subsidies that will pay to keep them in a home. But they’ve got to have places to live, and those places have to be located and developed. That’s a major challenge.
* Supportive Services: As you pointed out, most chronically-homeless people are mentally ill, addicted to drugs, or both. That’s why we believe that for them to succeed in housing, they’ll need to be in an ongoing relationship with a case manager. In most instances, case managers are social workers. They will need to be paid, and right now, there’s no funding source to pay for delivery of those services. HUD will use federal dollars to house people, but right now there’s no state or federal agency that funds service delivery to the necessary degree. That’s a challenge we’ll need to meet locally, whether through private funding sources or government sources, or some combination of those.
3. Benefits: You’re right. A lot of the people we’re talking about DO receive various kinds of disability benefits. They are used to pay for necessities in addition to those related to mental health care, but those benefits don’t usually go very far. Mental health services are available, but getting access to them is not super-simple for someone who is mentally ill. Think about it. If you’re extremely mentally ill, schizophrenic, say, how does it help you to have insurance that you really don’t even remember is there, that you don’t even know how to think about? If your mind is disconnected from reality, how are you supposed to navigate our mental healthcare system? How do you manage to keep yourself on your medication? For a lot of folks, it just doesn’t happen. That’s why the case manager relationship is so important. It’s that relationship that is the key to keeping people housed, and moving them towards reintegration in the community.
I hope this is helpful. Thanks for visiting the site, and for your comments and questions. Don’t hesitate to make more and ask more.
Robert