Here’s an important update on this project, posted July 6, 2008.
Last night the TYP was the main event at a meeting in Vestal. Joe Hultquist, City Councilman for the First District, hosted the meeting, which was almost entirely concerned with the TYP’s proposed plan to renovate the old Flenniken School to make it available for permanent supportive housing for people who are chronically homeless. Jon Lawler, Director of the Ten-Year Plan, gave a presentation and then fielded questions.
Hayes Hickman covered the story in this morning’s News-Sentinel. Click here if you’d like to read it.
We distributed at that meeting a little Q & A sheet to give attendees a brief overview of our proposal to create Flenniken Housing. It’s posted below. It doesn’t cover every aspect of the project, but if you’re interested, it’s a good start. We’ll be posting more information here as the project moves along.
Knoxville’s Ten-Year Plan (TYP) seeks to stabilize people who are chronically homeless by placing them in permanent
supportive housing, and then helping them to reintegrate into society. This approach is proven to cut costs and to maximize benefit, both to the community and to homeless people. The following Q & A will help you gain a basic understanding of the TYP and how that relates to the old Flenniken Elementary School Building.
Q: What is chronic homelessness?
A: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines a chronically homeless individual as “an unaccompanied disabled individual who has been continuously homeless for over one year or who has had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years.” HUD estimates that 10-15% of homeless people in the USA are chronically homeless. That percentage might be higher in Knoxville.
Q: What is permanent supportive housing?
A: It’s nothing like a homeless shelter. All residents sign a lease, pay rent, and have an ongoing relationship with a case manager. The TYP commits us to permanently housing homeless people as rapidly as possible while providing those now-housed people with customized supportive social services to ensure that the greatest possible number of them stays successfully housed and moves towards independence.
Q: What will you do to the Flenniken School to renovate it?
A: Our plan is to acquire and renovate Flenniken into 48 efficiency apartments with abundant community space and some offices. Rehabilitation will be comprehensive and high-quality. From the outside, it will look essentially as the architects intended when they designed the building back in the early 20th century. Each apartment will be fully independent, with its own kitchen and bath and other amenities. All environmental concerns will be appropriately addressed by qualified contractors.
Q: How will Flenniken Housing be any different from a homeless shelter or a halfway house?
A: Most importantly, residents of Flenniken housing will no longer be homeless. They’ll be rent-paying members of the community. The proposed renovation at the Flenniken school will not create emergency or transitional housing. It is permanent housing (apartment living) that requires the resident to have a verifiable source of income, sign a lease and pay rent. In signing the lease the resident agrees to be a good neighbor. Failure to be a good neighbor will have consequences that can and sometimes will lead to eviction.
Q: What measures will you take to address the issue of safety? Will Flenniken residents be a danger to the community?
A: Safety and security are essential for everyone. Every resident agrees to be in a case management relationship to ensure and maintain a healthy environment conducive to change for the individual. Case management will maintain offices in the building during the day and evening hours. For the overnight hours, a case-manager aide will be present. Given that rent will be subsidized, and the commitment to a safe, secure environment, persons convicted of violent felonies and/or sexual offenses will not be considered for residency.
Q: Will Flenniken Housing residents be able to roam around at night?
A: Flenniken will not be a lock-down facility. Residents will be able to come and go from their apartments as they please. But they will be held accountable, to the point of eviction, for their actions. And consider this: when people have a place of their own, a place of safety and security, they are not likely to continue to act as though they are rootless.
Q: Why are you doing this in South Knoxville? Why not build this kind of housing in some other part of the city?
A: Our office is looking for appropriate property in every sector of Knoxville, and our plan is to spread permanent supportive housing throughout the community, rather than concentrating it in one or two spots. Right now, we are investigating three properties of interest east and west of downtown, and will continue to search out others.
Q: Why does the Ten-Year Plan focus on chronically homeless people? Why not work to end all homelessness?
A: Chronic homelessness is the starting point. Although the people in this category make up only a small proportion of the homeless people in the United States, they consume about 50% of all resources utilized by all homeless people. Chronic homelessness is the most destructive, devastating and injurious form of homelessness; it is very difficult for a person to overcome chronic homelessness without a supportive environment. Addressing chronic homelessness with the strategies of the TYP changes lives, and it maximizes all community resources dedicated to responding to such needs.
Q: What does our community spend each year to support a chronically homeless person?
A: Dr. Roger Nooe, Professor Emeritus in the University of Tennessee College of Social Work, and Knoxville’s leading expert on the study of homelessness, recently tracked 25 chronically homeless people over the course of approximately one year. Dr. Nooe’s study concluded that these 25 people, cycling repeatedly through jail, alcohol & drug treatment, and hospitals would incur costs of approximately $929,000. That’s an average of approximately $37,000 each.
Q: Why is permanent supportive housing particularly cost effective?
A: Permanent supportive housing reduces the amount of money a community spends to serve homeless people. Studies demonstrate that people in permanent supportive housing dramatically reduce their need for, and consumption of, psychiatric inpatient services, and other emergency services, such as emergency rooms, jails, and emergency shelters. In communities in which the model has been applied, the cost of permanent supportive housing is offset by savings in emergency services, jails, and law enforcement.
Q: What are the supportive services that chronically homeless people need?
A: Case managers are the point of connection between the client and all of the other services available to help keep him or her stabilized and housed: mental health services, primary medical care, drug and alcohol treatment programs, etc.
Q: What happens to a person who’s housed? Do they just hang around? Do they get jobs?
A: The TYP sees every person as a unique individual, and we want to do everything we can to help each of them to reach his or her fullest potential as a functioning member of our community. Once a formerly-homeless person is stabilized in permanent supportive housing, that person is in a much better position to work towards becoming a contributing member of the society in which we all take part. The TYP sees stabilization and reintegration as two sides of the same coin.
Q: So, housing is the stabilization side of the TYP. What about reintegration?
A: Reintegration happens in employment and healthy community. No person can reach his potential until he starts to be a productive member of society. The TYP calls for one homeless service provider agency to take the lead in preparing formerly-homeless people for employment. Some of them will have a great deal of employment potential and others, especially those with mental illness, will not. But wherever people fall on that continuum of potential, we want to help them be the very best they can be. We are also developing a special program for area faith-based organizations. The goal of this program is to help churches embrace people who were homeless and bring them into the community of faith to build healthy relationships with their neighbors.
If you have questions, we’d like to hear them, so please ask. Call Robert at 215-3071 if you prefer to talk to a live person.
7 Comments
Will drug adicts be housed in the facility?
Has anyone taken into consideration that tby supplying so many agencies and helping hands has made Knoxville a hub for the homeless?
People who are chronically homeless are, by HUD’s definition, disabled. In practice this almost always means they’re mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. That’s why permanent supportive housing is so effective in helping them to stabilize their lives to the point that they can become employed and can reintegrate with the community.
Knoxville has resources, so homeless people come here. Rural communities surrounding our community don’t have those same resources, so we see a good number of folks here who come from the surrounding counties. This same scenario plays out in Chattanooga, Nashville, Atlanta, Asheville, and just about any other city of our size located in the midst of areas that are less-developed.
If you talk to people in any city who work with people who are homeless, you’ll learn that it’s a common perception everywhere that “we’re taking care of everyone else’s homeless people.”
You should remember, though, that many people who experience homelessness are helped out of it by agencies like KARM and VMC and the Salvation Army. Those people come through the system, get help, get back into their own housing, and get back to their lives. If you became homeless due to a cascade of catastrophic events in your life, you’d want to know that help was available for you. We’d all want that. Do people come here and abuse this system? Of course. Do we have a perfect plan for weeding them out? No we don’t.
But some people who are chronically homeless are stuck in a cycle they can’t escape on their own. They cost us a lot of money: almost $40,000 per person per year. We know we can help them get out of homelessness with permanent supportive housing, help them get back to work an connected with people in our community, and do it for less than that $40,000 a year.
Doesn’t fix everything, I know, but it’s a very good place to start making a difference.
Will the caseworker offices be housed on site? Will it be DCS or a private care group? Who will manage the property? And what makes this different from Stonewall, Green Hills, Isabella Towers? Why not add case management to already exisiting housing? If a cascade of catastrophe has caused the homeless episode, as suggested, is there financial planning offered as well?
Good questions, SD. Let me answer them one-by-one.
“Will the caseworker offices be housed on site?”
Case managers will have offices onsite, and a case manager assistant will be on duty at night. There will be case management presence 24/7/365.
“Will it be DCS or a private care group?”
Case managers at Flenniken Housing will be employed by various agencies, and coordinated by Volunteer Ministry Center, the Ten-Year Plan’s designated agency for permanent housing.
“Who will manage the property?”
That is still to be determined. The owner will contract property management services to an organization with experience managing low-income housing.
“And what makes this different from Stonewall, Green Hills, Isabella Towers?”
There’s a huge difference, SD. Stonewall, Green Hills, and Isabella are low-income housing developments. They’re intended for anyone who needs affordable housing; anyone who qualifies for Section 8 rental assistance can live in those facilities. Flenniken will be permanent supportive housing. It’s a whole facility for people who are chronically homeless who have decided that they want to leave homelessness. They need affordable housing combined with the kind of support that will help them get out of a life of homelessness and stay housed, which is why every resident at Flenniken will have an ongoing relationship with a case manager.
“Why not add case management to already exisiting housing?”
Actually, we have, and will continue to. Agencies supporting the Ten-Year Plan (CAC, Helen Ross McNabb, and others) actively seek to find housing for chronically homeless people here, in those very places. That will continue to happen even as we develop more housing specifically for the chronically homeless.
“If a cascade of catastrophe has caused the homeless episode, as suggested, is there financial planning offered as well?”
That’s part of the plan.
By saying “by placing them in permanent
supportive housing” Do you really mean “forcing them into permanent
supportive housing”? Will they have a choice?
Entering permanent supportive housing is entirely voluntary, Jack. As is staying in permanent supportive housing. Nobody’s ever forced into it.
Qualifying for permanent supportive housing begins with a person who’s homeless deciding that he or she doesn’t want to be homeless anymore, and asking for help. That’s where the case manager relationship starts, and where the real work of re-housing begins. It’s always done with respect to the dignity of the person who’s seeking to change, which is one reason it’s so effective.
Good questions, and thanks for asking.