How has Chattanooga really dealt with our homeless veterans?
On paper, Chattanooga’s accomplishment solving veteran homelessness doesn’t seem very impressive. And yet, the city’s accomplishment is a first in Tennessee. It took two years of work.
In 2015, about 82 veterans slept under bridges and sought rest at the city’s emergency shelters, according to that year’s point in time count. The count is a nation-wide survey of homeless persons conducted in the dead of the January and mandated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Two years later in January 2017, the point in time count found 62 homeless veterans here. Thirty-one were living on the streets unsheltered. Twenty-three spent the night in emergency housing. That’s out of the 584 homeless people the count recorded in the Chattanooga area that night.
Truth of the matter, solving homelessness is devilishly hard. It can’t be solved by providing a few jobs. It’s not as simple as finding 82 shelters with a door, a roof and a place to lay a head back in 2015. Homelessness found more veterans in the meantime.
Explore any other societal ill, homelessness very likely lurks near the end, for the issue touches on mental health policy, the ability to get affordable housing, education, domestic violence and substance abuse. Even the economy, the ability to keep a job that brings in a good, steady income.
Lifting veterans from the streets
Ending Veteran homeless has been a major goal of federal agencies like the Veterans Administration, said Heather Hoffman, homeless program coordinator for the city.
When Mayor Andy Berke announced that Chattanooga was going to tackle veteran homelessness, the city hired Hoffman, who came from the Chattanooga Area Food Bank.
The deadline was tight. “You need to set a pretty tight deadline to get everyone scrambling and paying attention,” Hoffman said. And the goal was large. The city planned to house 184 veterans, to get ahead of the problem.
The case work for those veterans became intense and focused. For years, the city and the area nonprofits had used a software to track the aid they gave individuals, to ensure resources are used effectively. But as the city and aid organizations learned of homeless veterans, they created a list of their names.
Representatives of the organizations met weekly. First the group held meetings at the Chattanooga Regional Homeless Coalition. Later, the meetings moved to City Hall so that agencies like the VA could call into the meetings. Together, the groups focused on managing the by-name list, coordinating their care.
In the meetings, representatives of the organizations asked what, say, Joe Veteran needed to do to get housing. He didn’t have an identification card. Could they get that to him by next week? What about getting transportation for this other veteran so he could get his medicine?
They set goals to get to the next step in helping individual veterans, and the next. Case workers didn’t just call veterans, leaving messages asking them to check in. They canvassed the city, tracking veterans down—checking homeless camps, dropping by the community kitchen.
One of the greatest challenges was finding enough affordable housing, housing that cost about $450 to $550 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, Hoffman said. The city relies on local landlords to provide the housing, landlords who are willing to overlook less-than-perfect credit score, or a spotty criminal history, she said.
On February 3, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness sent Chattanooga a letter: “We are confident that the infrastructure and systems you have built will ensure that any Veteran experiencing homelessness in Chattanooga will get the support they need to quickly obtain a permanent home.”
“There was a lot of dancing,” Hoffman said, when the letter informing the city it had effectively ended veteran homelessness arrived. “We knew we were there. We knew that we had submitted a really solid report.”
In the end, it wasn’t a snapshot of the number of veterans without a home that showed progress, but that the city had a way to tackle the problem.
“There are still homeless veterans out there,” said Jens Christensen, executive director for Chattanooga Community Kitchen. “There will be more veterans that will become homeless, so the idea now is that we have a system in place that still requires work and will always require work, but a system to address veteran homelessness.”
The Next Problem
Now, some of the area’s leaders against homelessness want to attack chronic homelessness with the same vigor. Not only are people who have been homeless for more than a year more likely to die on the streets, they are the ones using the most resources, Christiansen said. Making an intense effort to help them will leave more resources across the whole city.
“If you believe that the poor will always be with us, then it’s okay to know that you’ll have some people become homeless over time,” Christiansen said. “But if we can help them quickly, we reduce their chances of returning to homelessness, we reduce the strain on the system, make a better, healthier place for the entire community.”
The Chattanooga Community Kitchen, situated in a long building along the tree-lined E. 11th Street, is one of the front lines in the fight against homelessness. The kitchen goes beyond offering a meal to the homeless, or people stuck in a decision between buying groceries or paying rent. It offers showers, internet access, phones and its doors are always open.
“The kitchen is where the person turns in terms of case management,” Christiansen said.
People often have an image of a homeless person, Christiansen said, that doesn’t conform to the facts. The picture in their minds is often of a panhandling, drug-addicted man. But many homeless are employed and many don’t have a drinking or drug problem, Christensen said. But the true causes are often outside the person’s control, such as domestic violence, unemployment or eviction.
As a result, there are many different strategies for managing homelessness. Chattanooga employs a housing-first philosophy—simply get the individual housed. Get them in a stable life where they can keep stable habits where they can get a job, develop income, have a base from which they can seek care, benefits, or work through an addiction.
This is a change, Christiansen said, from the philosophy years ago that only the people who have conquered drug habits—who have lived clean in streets littered with needles and empty bottles—are the ones deserving of aid.
A rising problem: Children and families
Meanwhile, the number of family homelessness and single younger women represent a rising number of Chattanooga-area homeless, Christiansen said.
The point in time counts don’t exactly describe all the people without a stable home, Galloway said. HUD uses one definition of homelessness: Is the person living on the streets, in an emergency shelter or in a transitional housing?
But it doesn’t take into account people are crashing on a friend’s couch in between apartments, or families who are bunking up 2-3 families per apartment. In those situations, housing is equally as tentative and it’s the way the Department of Education defines homelessness.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported in 2014 there were 1,700 such students in the district. “With homelessness, the children are picking up the bill,” Galloway said. Family Promise of Greater Chattanooga—an organization that works with 50 area congregations to provide food and shelter—recently received a call: A family was living in a Walmart parking lot. The kids did homework by streetlamp and used the bathroom in the superstore. Breakfast was whatever they could buy at a gas station convenience store.
Living when the next meal, the next bed is in question erodes the ability to focus well in school, attaining good grades. And when it comes to attaining higher education, well, forget about saving if you don’t even have enough to pay rent, Galloway said.
The result is that the ill effects of poverty are passed onto the next generation.
Homelessness, and the issues it brings, Galloway said, “really affects the core of someone...their spirit, the concept of who they are, the concept of what they are capable of. It interferes with their ability to dream.”
The need outstrips the resources
When it comes to fighting homelessness, collaboration is key among the levels of governments and Chattanooga’s nonprofits.
Many of the city’s aid organizations have memorandums of understanding with each other. “The money is not there. We have to work together,” Galloway said.
But it could get more difficult, because the 2018 federal budget proposes cutting the HUD budget by billions. It’s a move that leaves national and local players in the fight against homelessness wondering how big a war chest the issue will receive next year.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness said HUD’s proposed budget trims the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants program by $133 million. It’s a move the alliance said could leave 25,000 more Americans homeless in the coming fiscal year. HUD’s proposal also eliminates the Community Development Block Grant Program.
In its statement proposing the budget, the agency said the grant program, “is increasingly not well targeted to the poorest communities and has not demonstrated a measurable impact on communities.”
But Family Promise is using funds from the Community Development Block Grant to pay the salary of a case manager. “That’s the positions that know the community, know the population and know the resources in the community and have relationships and partnerships with these various referral agencies,” Galloway said. “They’re the ones that really move the families into permanent housing.”
Without the case managers working across the organizations, the city would not have been able to say it effectively ended veteran homelessness.