Belonging

VANCOUVER - You've probably heard the stories too. The ones about a handful of communities that have tried to solve their homeless "problem" by making it someone else's, sending their homeless someplace else, offering one-way bus or plane tickets to the homeless and encouraging them to get out of town. Nothing's really solved, just shipped elsewhere.

Virtually every city in America - big, small or somewhere in between - has a homeless problem. The vast majority don't try to off-load on others. They step-up and face the challenge head-on.

Like Vancouver, the fourth-largest city in Washington state, just across the Columbia River from Portland. On a cold night in January, 2015 volunteers fanned-out across the city and surrounding Clark County for the annual point-in-time count that is required of all Continuums of Care - like the Vancouver-Clark County Continuum - that receives HUD funding for the homeless. Admittedly, it's "an unscientific census," says The Columbian (www.columbian.com/news/2015/jun/03/clark-county-homeless-census-improves-slightly/), that helps local homeless providers and advocates gauge the size and scope of the homeless populations in their community.

The point-in-time "snapshot" reported some modestly good news - the total number of homeless individuals fell slightly from 695 in January, 2014 to 662 a year later. The number of homeless families also dropped. But there also was not-so-good news -chronically-homeless individuals in Vancouver and Clark County increased more than a third, from 60 to 81 individuals. More than half were unsheltered.

Cause for concern, said The Columbian. The chronically homeless are "the people who tend to have lots of barriers to housing" like " criminal records, past evictions and bad credit" and "also be the ones who suffer most acutely from problems that keep from making progress in life - like mental illness, drug addiction, developmental delays." In an area with a rental vacancy of just two percent, explains Andy Silver of the Council for the Homeless, "it is very difficult to find apartment owners and property management companies that will rent to this population, even if service providers are paying the rent and providing support."

So are the City of Vancouver and Clark County packing the homeless on busses and shipping them somewhere else? Nope. To the contrary, they're aggressively and collaboratively meeting the housing needs these chronically-homeless individuals have.

It's called Lincoln Place in downtown Vancouver. Built, in part, with HUD HOME Investment Partnership funds from the City and County, and opened by the Vancouver Housing Authority in early 2016, the $6 million Lincoln Place will provide 30 furnished, rent-subsidized studio apartments to "house and support the people in our community who have been homeless the longest and utilize the most resources" - Vancouver's chronically, "hardest to serve"-homeless.

It's Vancouver's first Housing First facility and driven by the belief that homelessness is "first and foremost a housing problem" and that "people who are homeless or on the verge of homelessness should be returned to or stabilized in permanent housing as quickly as possible" but also "connected to resources necessary to sustain that housing" - mental health, physical health, employment, education, benefit and financial management and, last but not least, substance abuse services

Housing First often sparks controversy, usually because residents need not be clean and sober. But wherever Housing First has been tried - Seattle, Anchorage and Fairbanks, for example - it's worked. Studies show, the Authority notes, "that for even those considered the hardest to serve over 80 percent were in housing a year after entry under the Housing First" approach. And, by the way, many are no longer substance abusers.

Housing First also benefits the larger community. The chronically-homeless "utilize 50 percent of the shelter system resources, utilize a higher percentage of hospital emergency services and require longer care, and have higher rates of incarceration and recidivism." When they enter Housing First, those numbers drop as do the considerable costs associated with them, costs that no longer have to be borne by taxpayers.

Lincoln Place reflects a community that's trying not to off-load, but to step-up and meet a challenge some of its citizens face. Their homeless aren't being shipped to another city, not even to another neighborhood. "The people who will be served by this project," the City (www.vhausa.com/media/docs/lincoln-place-faq.pdf) notes, "live in the downtown area and think of it as their neighborhood." It's likely they'd be "unwilling to move to an unfamiliar neighborhood" for services or for housing.

Though they are homeless, they view downtown Vancouver as the place they want to live, the place they call home, the place where they belong. We would not deny that to ourselves. So why would we deny it to the homeless?

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