Minvilla Manor will add 57 units of permanent supportive housing to our community’s affordable housing stock. This kind of housing is used to address the needs of a unique homeless subpopulation: people who are chronically homeless.
People who are chronically homeless
An estimated 7000 people in Knox County experience homelessness in a given year. The majority of those are not chronically homeless. Our community is probably home to somewhere between 700 and 800 people who are chronically homeless.
People who are chronically homeless don’t enter and exit homelessness: they stay homeless. According to HUD’s definition, a person who is chronically homeless is an unaccompanied disabled individual who has been homeless for over a year.
What’s the nature of their disability? The majority of them are mentally ill, substance-addicted, or both. These homeless people will never get themselves, by their own efforts, off the streets, into housing, employed, and living a life that includes being connected with the healthy community around them. They can’t. Their disabilities make that a virtual impossibility.
Most people who are chronically homeless are so because of a serious breakdown in the way we care for our neighbors who are mentally ill. We used to do that in state mental hospitals like Lakeshore. Through a process referred to as deinstitutionalization, those hospitals have diminished in size and the number of resident patients has been drastically decreased. Due to a complex set of circumstances, many of those people, who are severely mentally ill, now live among us. Some of them live in housing that is appropriate for them, but many have fallen through the cracks and are chronically homeless.
People who are chronically homeless cost our society a lot of money. Dr. Roger Nooe’s 2006 study found that we spend an average of $37,000 to care for the average chronically homeless person in Knox County. That does not include the cost of food and shelter services. People who are chronically homeless go to jail a lot, and they’re more expensive to maintain there than the average inmate. They ride ambulances a lot and they visit emergency rooms a lot. They also utilize services like detox and inpatient and outpatient psychiatric services. As a group, people who are chronically homeless are the heaviest consumers of these kinds of services than anyone else. All of these services are paid for by taxpayers.
Think about that for a moment. We already spend an average of somewhere around $37,000 per year in 2006 dollars to maintain a mentally ill person in a life on the streets. It costs us less to do much better.
Good neighbors
Some people are concerned that Minvilla’s residents will continue to hang around on the sidewalks on Broadway or wander around nearby neighborhoods. They worry that crime rates will rise as a result of these new neighbors moving into Minvilla Manor.
We believe these fears are unfounded. When chronically homeless people become residents of permanent supportive housing, their use of emergency services declines greatly. They are likely to become more circumspect about getting involved in crime because it would cause them to lose their housing. They don’t get arrested for public intoxication and other nuisance behavior nearly as frequently, and they don’t spend nearly as much time in jail. Why? Because they have a safe, secure place to call their own, because they don’t don’t have any reason to be out wandering the streets, and because they are working on their issues with their case manager.
Minvilla residents will hold leases and pay rent, like residents at any other apartment complex. Such people are not homeless by any definition, and they won’t act like they are. They will have as much reason as any other resident to want the best for their neighborhood. With their strong desire to change, with all of the help they will receive from their case managers, and with all of the other assets available to them to help them succeed, they should be good neighbors.
Homelessness is bigger than this.
Permanent supportive housing like Minvilla is the foundation of any movement to end chronic homelessness. An individual in permanent supportive housing is no longer homeless. He or she is a resident in an apartment complex, and is joined at the hip to a case manager who ensures that his client has access to the resources and services which will help the client stay housed.
But permanent supportive housing is just one (very significant!) part of our strategy for addressing the issue of chronic homelessness. We’ve also got to do some other things very differently than we do them now. The TYP is aware of these things and is working with service providers and other government agencies to address them.
Changing the culture
We do not do our community or homeless people any favors when we make homelessness an acceptable way of life here. While it is inevitable that some people will fall into homelessness, it is neither desirable nor necessary that they remain that way. We think that most people in our community are generous and compassionate, and want to help these people get back on their feet, back in housing, and back to being independent, contributing neighbors.
We also recognize that there are some people who simply will not accept responsibility for dealing with their homelessness problem even when it is in their power to do so. They’re not disabled by anything that is beyond their control. They just don’t want to be responsible. We think that we should find ways to help these folks move on down the road.
- Our community must find a way to get ALL homeless people in our community either on a path to housing or on their way out of town. We need to change our culture from one that reacts to homelessness to one that proactively ends it. We’ve started working in that direction via KARM’s new Crossroads Day Services.
- We’ve got to address the issue of the jail and hospitals discharging people directly to the street at all hours of the day and night.
- We should enforce our panhandling ordinance AND do a great job educating our neighbors about the negative effects of encouraging panhandling by giving money to practitioners of that ill discipline.
- We need to address the issue of folks obstructing sidewalks anywhere in town, not just in certain problem areas.
- It is extremely important that our emergency homeless services move towards being time-limited AND very proactively engaged in moving homeless people towards housing or towards getting themselves out of town.