Project Homeless Connect is based on an event first conducted in San Francisco and replicated in cities across the country.  In Knoxville, this event has not only provided an opportunity for our homeless neighbors to connect with help they need, but it has also provided an opportunity for agencies, ministries and individuals who work to help the homeless every day to connect with one another.  Especially at the first two annual events in Knoxville, there were many “ah-ha” moments, where one provider or ministry learned about another and figured out how they could coordinate not only at Project Connect, but also when they returned to everyday work back out in the community. 

The first Project Homeless Connect was held in Knoxville on December 8, 2005.  At the time, the Knoxville-Knox County Ten Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness had been written, but its implementation had not yet begun.  Because of that, Project Connect was also seen as an opportunity to introduce the Ten Year Plan to the community and to demonstrate that the time was right for us to coordinate and cooperate around ending chronic homelessness.  That first event brought together over 350 staff and volunteers, providing help to over 450 clients.  Services provided at the event included behavioral health, employment services, housing information, Social Security and Medicaid assistance, food stamps information, rehab services, veterans assistance information, clothing, food, transportation, immigration services, senior services, ID assistance, and haircuts.  The Attorney General and Public Defender’s offices worked with the local judiciary to hold court hearings at the event, and Remote Area Medical, with the support of the UT College of Nursing, provided medical, dental and vision services. Many individuals also consented to have their information included in the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a client database that allows service providers to share information and coordinate services for the homeless, and helps our community to gain a  better understanding of just who and how many are homeless in Knoxville. The event was a success, connecting many homeless individuals and families with needed services, and even a few directly with housing opportunities.  Perhaps even more importantly, the event proved that our community is willing and even eager to cooperate in unprecedented ways around this issue.

The second Project Homeless Connect was held exactly one year later, and gathered 460 professionals and volunteers together to help over 500 individuals who came through the doors.  By this time, implementation of the Ten Year Plan had begun, and Project Connect served as another opportunity to reaffirm a commitment to greater coordination around the goal of ending chronic homelessness.  Once again, Project Connect functioned as a focused model of all the services and ministries that work with the homeless, bringing together under one roof our continuum of homeless care that operates out in the community the other 364 days each year.  The event showed us how we work together, how our homeless neighbors interact with us, and even where some of these systems needed to improve, raising questions like, “How do we better coordinate case management and provide follow-up after each interaction with a homeless neighbor?”

The third Project Homeless Connect was held in December 2007.  This time, 419 professionals and volunteers came together and served almost 900 individuals who came through the doors seeking help.  By many measures, the event was again successful, but it also seemed clear that ‘the word was out,’ and that many who came to the event were not homeless, but came nonetheless, seeking access to medical services from Remote Area Medical, or legal services that were being offered by the local courts. 

We have learned a great deal from Project Homeless Connect.  In this third year of implementing the Ten Year Plan in Knoxville and Knox County, we are seeing that the kind of coordination and cooperation that began as a one-day concerted effort at Project Connect is now happening every day out in the community.  For instance, every other Tuesday, a group of individuals meets to coordinate efforts to identify, help and house the most vulnerable and challenging of the chronically homeless in our community.  This group includes homeless service agencies, ministries, mental health providers, hospitals, the police department and others. Through their consistent efforts over the past year, more than a dozen people who were previously falling through the cracks - some for years - have now been housed. 

Volunteer Ministry Center has shifted their entire focus to housing and providing case management for the chronically homeless.  The Salvation Army has begun a program to provide employment counseling, training and placement for those same individuals, coordinating directly with VMC. Also coordinating with Volunteer Ministry Center is the Compassion Coalition, which has begun an initiative that will recruit and train volunteer mentors from the faith community who will help formerly homeless individuals who are now housed as they seek to reintegrate into our community.   The Community Action Committee is now providing case management services for public housing residents who have been identified as high-risk for eviction. CAC’s services will help those people stay housed, preventing them from likely homelessness.

Through connections made at Project Connect, Remote Area Medical has been able to establish a greatly expanded weekend-long Knoxville ‘expedition’ in the Jacobs Building at Chilhowee Park.  This annual RAM event is held in January and provides medical, dental and vision services for many hundreds of uninsured people, including the homeless and working poor.  In addition, VMC is expanding their year-round volunteer medical and dental services in their new building this fall, and Cherokee Health is also about to expand medical and mental health services for the homeless.

Knox Area Rescue Ministries began on October 1 to provide a daytime “Welcome Center,” where the homeless can come in for shelter and immediately begin finding the right path off the streets and back into housing.  This Welcome Center is conceived and designed to be a single place where a homeless person can come in and connect not only with KARM’s services but also those of many other agencies and ministries in our community.  Those connections will be made not only by referral, but directly with people from those agencies and ministries who are located onsite at the Welcome Center.  The local courts are developing plans to provide specialized services and hearings for homeless individuals who are working with a case manager and for whom appropriate relief from the courts will remove critical barriers to housing, employment and community reintegration. 

As we look to December, 2008, it seems clear that as we continue to pursue the goals of the Ten Year Plan, we have learned a great deal about better coordination and more purposeful efforts to not just help the homeless but to help end homelessness.  Many of the things that we learned at the one-day Project Homeless Connect event are now being done out in our community year-round. 

Because so much of Project Homeless Connect is now being accomplished out in the community every day, there won’t be a one-day Project Connect event this December.  There is still much more to be done to end chronic homelessness and decrease short-term homelessness in Knoxville and Knox County, and we have learned from Project Connect that by coming together around the commitment to do that work not just for one day, but every day, we will be able to achieve just what we have set out to do.

As always, I want to thank everyone who made each Project Homeless Connect event happen.  I also want to thank everyone who works or volunteers year-round, making successes in ending chronic homelessness an every-day thing in Knoxville.

Mike Dunthorn

The Ten-Year Plan is beginning its third year in Knoxville and Knox County. Knoxville’s faith community has been serving people who are homeless for much longer than that. The Plan acknowledges their crucial role:

Faith-based agencies generate and utilize a wide range of volunteers who seek to help homeless persons find needed food, clothing, shelter, and hope for a better life. The ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness recognizes the importance of partnerships with faith-based organizations and the task force considers them to be one of the critical components in the plan to develop permanent solutions to homelessness.

Stabilization & Reintegration

The program that Mrs. Bocángel leads, Support Circles, is a key part of the Ten-Year Plan’s effort to help people get off the streets and reintegrated with healthy community.

A chronically homeless person’s first step out of a lifestyle of homelessness is stabilization in permanent supportive housing, the cornerstone of the Ten-Year Plan. But it’s not enough just to help people get off the streets and into a home.

Homeless people live in a separate culture that operates within and parallel to the one in which most of us live. That parallel culture is harmful in many ways. To help people who are leaving chronic homelessness avoid returning to the familiar culture of homelessness, we must help them achieve reintegration into our larger and healthier culture. That’s what Support Circles is all about.

“The idea is that before these folks got into housing their community was the streets,” said Mike Dunthorn, project manager for the Ten Year Plan, “and it’s important to connect them with the rest of us, so they aren’t tempted to go back to harmful influences when things get tough.”

Support Circles is a collaboration between the Ten-Year Plan and the Compassion Coalition. In her capacity as Faith-Based Mentoring Coordinator, Mrs. Bocángel will help develop a mentoring program for members of local faith communities to assist people who have been chronically homeless, to encourage them as they are placed into permanent housing, and to help achieve success in their new environments.

Her new job responsibilities will include recruiting teams from local faith communities, training those teams on the objectives and operations of the mentoring program, and coordinating with case managers to pair the mentor teams with people who are recently housed. Once mentoring teams are established, Mrs. Bocángel will follow up to assure that training and case coordination work as smoothly as possible, with the goals of maintaining residents in their new housing, and reintegrating them into the mainstream of the community to the greatest extent possible.

“I’m thrilled about this opportunity to be a part of something extraordinary,” she said. “It is by far the most challenging undertaking I’ve ever signed up for.”

Mrs. Bocángel has worked with the homeless here in Knoxville, as well as in an international context, since 2004. She is a trained Stephen’s Minister, and she operates with a personal philosophy of servant leadership. She is thrilled to have the opportunity to work in such a hands-on capacity to help meet the needs of the chronically homeless community here in Knoxville.

If you’d like more information about Support Circles, please contact Jessica Bocángel at the Compassion Coalition: (865) 251-1591 x8.

The answer is “Yes,” and here’s a good example.

Norfolk VA is a city not far from Knoxville. Like Knoxville, Norfolk has a Ten-Year Plan. It’s working.

According to a release from The National Alliance To End Homelessness, the city of Norfolk has experienced a record 69 percent drop in the number of homeless people living on the streets in the last two years. Norfolk is among an increasing number of cities across the nation making measurable progress in reducing homelessness.

Norfolk’s plan was implemented in 2005, a year before our own. Like Knoxville, Norfolk uses permanent supportive housing as a pillar of its plan, which also streamlines access to services and emphasizes prevention of homelessness.

The former Fifth Avenue Motel is probably Knoxville’s most notorious flophouse. Volunteer Ministry Center now owns that property, and is moving towards rehabilitating the historic structure into Minvilla Manor, an apartment building with 57 units of permanent supportive housing for people who are chronically homeless.

Minvilla Manor is not without controversy. It’s expensive, largely because it’s an historic renovation. It’s perceived by some to be an impending expansion of homeless services in an area already suffering from oversupply. Some fear that residents of Minvilla will be threatened by their surroundings. Others believe that they’ll wander the adjacent streets and neighborhoods.

Yesterday’s Rockford Register Star ran this piece about a project that has a lot in common with Minvilla.

Known for years as a flophouse swarming with drug dealers, addicts and prostitutes, the former Grand Hotel is but a memory to those who are there today.

The Grand, located at Broadway and Eighth in Rockford, is home to people who have struggled with homelessness.

Zion Development, a faith-based, nonprofit neighborhood development organization, bought the property in 1997 and opened it as permanent supportive housing in December 2001.

Zion’s website says that the Grand was “the most dangerous building in a nine county area.” Now in its seventh year of operation, it’s not the same place at all.

Boyd Glovier of the Take It Back neighborhood watch group said the Grand Apartments of today are “like night and day” compared with the old Grand Hotel, which was privately owned. “There was an awful lot of drug dealing and prostitution. It was like they weren’t even trying to hide it,” Glovier said. “That all stopped when Zion Development moved in. I don’t see the lowlifes hanging out like I used to. Now, you see people walking down the street. It’s not 100 percent, but we’re working on it.”

It seems that Zion Development has focused its security protocol more on keeping bad influences out than on policing the behavior of residents. “While the neighborhood outside the Grand offers a lot in terms of shopping, dining and social services — all within walking distance — it’s still a troubled area.”

About 10% of the Grand’s residents move out each year into an independent living situation. For others, the Grand is a good situation and they stay on. They all sign leases and pay rent, most of them using subsidies of one kind or another, or in combination.

It’s been a successful seven years for this permanent supportive housing project in Rockford, Illinois, a city roughly the same size as Knoxville. This is exactly the kind of story we believe we’ll be telling about Minvilla Manor eight years from now.

The national figures demonstrate that the number of homeless people experiencing chronic homelessness — our most vulnerable and disabled neighbors — dropped from nearly 176,000 in 2005 to fewer than 124,000 in 2007, a decrease of nearly 30 percent.

People who are chronically homeless are unaccompanied disabled individuals who have been continuously homeless for over one year or who have had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years. They make up perhaps 10-15% of the entire homeless population, yet they consume about half of all resources directed towards all people who struggle with homelessness.  (Our FAQ will help you learn much more.)

“Why have these numbers fallen?” Mangano asks. He locates the answer in a paradigm shift from managing homelessness to ending it.

Cost studies that have tabulated the expenses to keep someone in homelessness indicate that those costs are actually more expensive than providing the solution: housing with the needed support services.

In fact, studies done in many communities tell us that the costs range from $35,000 to $150,000 per year for each person. People experiencing chronic homelessness are “high fliers” in many community systems.

The cost of supportive housing in those communities ranges from $13,000 to $25,000 per year for each person. You don’t need to be Warren Buffett or a hedge-fund manager to figure out which is the better investment. Housing is the central antidote, both morally and economically.

It costs us approximately $40,000 per year to maintain a chronically homeless person on the street here. Most of that cost is related to law enforcement activities and other emergency services. All of them are expenses paid for by taxpayers.

As the Ten-Year Plan gains traction, and as our community changes its approach from paying to maintain street homelessness to investing to end it, we should see our community’s experience line up with what’s going on nationwide.

Ending homelessness is the right thing to do, economically and morally. It’s encouraging to see these numbers come down with regard to people who are chronically homeless.

““Probably about $400,000 a year is what we spend just on psychotropic drugs to treat the mentally ill. I’ll tell you, we are the largest mental health facility in East Tennessee,” says Jones.”

That quotation comes from a story (Sheriff: 1 in 5 Knox Co. inmates is mentally ill) published at WATE yesterday.

Sheriff Jones advocates an overhaul of the present system, one that includes permanent supportive housing, which is the cornerstone of the Ten-Year Plan. Our plan 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. This model is humane, it is tested and proven, and it is cost-effective. You can learn much more about it here.

Permanent supportive housing reduces the amount of money a community spends to serve homeless people. 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.

Permanent supportive housing is the right thing to do. As Sheriff Jones points out, people who are mentally ill need treatment, not incarceration. Some of the Knox County jail’s most frequent repeat inmates are chronically homeless people who are mentally ill, and jail’s not the best place for them to be. We’re glad to have such a strong advocate in Sheriff Jones.

The old 5th Avenue Motel on the corner of 5th & Broadway has been a rough spot for a long time. You can find all kinds of stuff about it in the press, online, and on the tips of the tongues of people who are interested in the renascence of the Broadway and 5th corridor.

A lot of that info is recent. Some of the most germane is below. This post is related to cost and purpose: what this project will cost, who’ll pay for it, and what it’ll do. If you’re interested, you may have more questions. If so, comments are welcome. So are phone calls. As long as they’re not in the middle of the night.

Cost: well below $200/sf.

There’s been a lot of speculation about the cost of this project. It’s definitely not cheap. Minvilla is an expensive project because it’s historic rehab. When early estimates hit the papers and the pixelverse, they were very low. The former developer made the best estimate that he could with the information he had at the time. We now have much better information (completed construction documents, for one thing) and a firm estimate. It is much higher than the preliminary one to which people indexed their expectations, but it is also realistic. Based on revised cost estimates and post-rehab square footage, the cost is well below $200 per square foot.

Where will the money come from?

Corporate investors will supply approximately 75% of this project’s funding. The investors who purchase the equity generated by historic tax credits and low-income housing tax credits, the bank issuing the mortgage, the Federal Home Loan Bank, all of those are ultimate sources of funding for this project and others like it. These investors see this project as a good investment in our community, and their dollars could come to Knoxville from anywhere.

Another 25% of the funding for Minvilla will be public funds set aside by the Federal Government for the purpose of making housing available to those who otherwise couldn’t afford it. Other dollars are set aside by the Feds to be disbursed by local entities like the City and County, both of which are committed to ending chronic homelessness.

Why not do this somewhere else? Aren’t developers interested in developing a market rate project at Minvilla?

Nobody involved with this project is seriously entertaining notions of developing some other permanent supportive housing project in lieu of Minvilla or of selling the property to a private developer. Any professional developer who considers purchasing this property is probably going to be aware that prior to its transfer to Volunteer Ministry Center, at least two different developers tried to make a go of something there and couldn’t make the numbers work. That was in a much stronger real estate market with much lower construction costs than today’s. If Minvilla were such an attractive property to developers, VMC would not own it right now.

Too, Minvilla has access to low-income housing equity to the tune of about $2 million. That’s around a third of this project’s financing. That money goes away if you do a market rate project there.

Expansion of what?

Minvilla does expand the footprint of VMC in 5^th & Broadway. That is a technical fact. But Minvilla’s not a business-as-usual expansion of homeless services in the mission district. And that is the truth.

Minvilla is permanent supportive housing, which is the proven, effective approach that we will use to end chronic homelessness in Knoxville. Minvilla’s not going to be a shelter or transitional housing or a feeding program or a street ministry or a sidewalk-strangling swarm of panhandlers. Instead, it’s going to be an apartment complex that will house rent-paying residents.

All of Minvilla’s residents will have some things in common: relationship with a case manager, some form of income, accountability, healthier relationships. The most significant of those things they’ll have in common? They won’t be homeless anymore. They’ll be like this guy.

Gary Waddell is the kind of resident who’ll be at Minvilla. He’s one reason that it’s fair and true to say that Minvilla does not represent an expansion of service to homeless people. Minvilla is about ending homelessness.

This project at Flenniken was to have been permanent supportive housing for people who are chronically homeless, one small part of addressing another part of a huge complex of issues.

Our focus is on one fraction of people who are homeless. The people that permanent supportive housing will help are people who have been homeless for a long time due to serious disabilities.

Disability does NOT mean they’re just bums, or that they just lack gumption or drive or people skills or that they’re simply lazy. These are people who struggle with various kinds of mental illness and substance abuse, much of the latter being due to their attempts to self-medicate for their mental illness.

These are also people who who have decided to leave homelessness. They need help. They know they need help. A lot of help.

And we should give it to them. Why?

Simple economics, for one thing. It costs less money to give them this help than it does to keep on doing what we’re doing now. It costs less to place these folks in a safe, secure, permanent environment and supply them with social services than it costs to leave them on the street where they’ll cycle through jail, rehab, the emergency room, and the streets on a perpetual, costly treadmill.

Those of you who are talking about your tax dollars being wasted are right. The way we do things right now is a waste of your tax dollars. You’re spending about $40,000 per year, right now, to keep a chronically homeless person on the street. Jail is no place to house people who are mentally ill, but that’s what it’s become, and you’re paying for it. Emergency rooms are no place to go for primary care at an average of around a thousand bucks a pop, but that’s where chronically homeless people go. You’re paying for that too. The list goes on, and it doesn’t do anything to end homelessness.

That’s the status quo: your tax dollars at work. Who wants to keep doing things that way?

Permanent supportive housing changes things for chronically homeless people. It ends their homelessness. It’s being done in other cities on a large scale, and it’s demonstrated by ample evidence to be cost effective. It also, not surprisingly at all, reduces the number of people you see hanging out in the streets in those cities.

Our office is not going to solve all the ills of the streets. We’re here to help this community tackle the issue of chronic homelessness, and that’s enough of a challenge all by itself. If we can meet it, we’ll end up saving public funds because chronically homeless people on the streets consume so many resources. We’ll make our city a better place to live. And we’ll give some of our most vulnerable neighbors their best opportunity to become healthy members of our community.

I said these things because, as you can see for yourself, some of the comments on this story got a little bit away from what we were actually trying to accomplish at Flenniken. I wanted to make at least an attempt to bring them back to the issue of what we’re actually trying to do: end chronic homelessness.

One commenter said

If they where from here, then we should help. Most are from other states (95%).

To which I replied

This statement is false.

Actually, when the last survey was completed in 2006, over half were Tennesseans. That’s been very consistent as long as this issue’s been studied here.

You’re repeating a little urban myth that’s common everywhere there are people who are homeless.

We hear this kind of assertion all the time. Even if it were true, it seems to me that it’d be irrelevant. To paraphrase a famous and obviously successful campaign meme of relatively recent vintage, “It’s about the economics, stupid.”

It doesn’t really matter where people who are chronically homeless come from. If they wash up on our shores, and start camping on our beach, they’re still going to cost us forty-thousand bucks per person per year to maintain them the way we do it now. Although maybe they should, the jail and the emergency rooms and the rehab programs and the ambulances don’t give us a discount just because people who are homeless in our community are born inside the boundaries of Knox County.

Anyway, we’ve got some thinking to do about how we’re thinking. I get the sense that many people are so frustrated with the issues of homelessness and panhandling and perceived increases in crime and violence and the obviously negative impact these things make on the livability of some parts of our community that they lump all of these problems together into a big emotional ember they carry around in their bellies. It feels like “a problem” when really it’s a whole system malfunction.

We can change the ways we think about this system. It’s not a problem to be solved by one agency or another. It’s a complex system that must be addressed in a different way, a much more holistic way, by our whole community–private citizens, faith-based organizations, service providers, law enforcement and other government types alike.

Southeastern has just learned that their 2008 initial application for 9% Low-Income Housing Tax Credits did not score high enough to secure a reservation of tax credits to turn the old Flenniken Elementary School into 48 units of permanent supportive housing for people who are chronically homeless.

These tax credits are awarded by the Tennessee Housing Development Agency for projects that increase the supply of affordable housing. Competition for them is fierce.

Disappointing? Yes. It delays our efforts to better address the needs of some of our most vulnerable neighbors. Defeating? No way. Chronic homelessness is a big problem. There’s still plenty of work to do.

Meanwhile, dragonboaters have raised $77,000 for KARM. You can read about that here.

Hmmm. Maybe the TYP needs its own fundraiser. Perhaps an MSA-wide scavenger hunt…