As Mayor Haslam mentions in the article, many chronically homeless people are mentally ill and became homeless after discharge from mental health facilities. These people don’t have family capable of meeting their needs, and they don’t have anywhere else to go, so they are effectively discharged into the streets.

Think about it this way. Those homeless folks you see, over and over, when you go downtown? A lot of them would have been institutionalized 30 or 40 years ago. They’re not institutionalized anymore. The State has been reducing its institutional capacity since the 1970s. Most of the severely mentally-ill live among us now. A lot of them live on the street.

It costs us a lot to support a chronically-homeless person. We spend an average of about $40,000 per year to do that, not including food and emergency shelter. Click here to learn more about estimated costs in Knoxville. When chronically homeless individuals gain access to permanent supportive housing, this cost declines dramatically. Click here to learn more about that. The cost discussion is about halfway down the page, but all of it’s worth reading.

There’s a shortage of affordable rental housing in Knoxville, and we need more of it to house chronically homeless people. “Affordable” means rental housing that costs up to 30% of the income of a renter who makes at or below 80% of the Area Median Income (AMI). For chronically homeless people, we need to be even more affordable than that: up to 30% of an income that is at or below 50% of AMI.

One thing we’ll be working very hard on over the next several years is building more affordable rental housing. That’s where permanent supportive housing happens. There is money available from outside the local community to build and operate affordable housing. It comes in the form of grants and loans from agencies like HUD, the FHLB, and THDA. The monies that come from those agencies originate with the Federal government.

Why do we need help from the state budget, then? Mostly we need it to help us provide supportive services.

Remember, chronically homeless people are disabled, by definition. Many of them are disabled specifically by mental illness and addiction. They will not succeed in housing by themselves. They need to maintain a strong relationship to a case manager who works to connect them with other appropriate supportive services.

That’s part of the reason Mayor Haslam is asking the State for help. We would like the State to invest along with us in delivering solid case management and other supportive services to people in Permanent Supportive Housing. The Mayor and his colleagues are asking the State to invest specifically in ending chronic homelessness in our local communities.

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.