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Helpers reach out to homeless
Second of three-part series
YOUNGSTOWN
Social service and health care personnel are visiting homeless people living in tents under Mahoning River bridges in downtown Youngstown, but they can’t force them to accept help, an official of the Mahoning County Mental Health and Recovery Board says.
What to do about the riverfront encampment also is presenting a public policy challenge for city hall.
“Our preference would be, if somebody had a mental health issue, that they would allow us to help steer them toward more-permanent community tenure, but we cannot force somebody to go where we want them to go,” said Toni Notaro, the board’s compliance and evaluation director.
“It’s a personal choice. All the agencies are there for those individuals to get services from,” said Susan Skrzynski Krawchyk, director of the Mahoning County Veterans Service Commission.
“They choose to remain under the bridge. Either they don’t want to follow the rules of the shelter or they’ve been evicted from those shelters because of drug or alcohol use,” she added.
As far as the commission knows, three to five veterans live in the riverfront homeless encampment, Krawchyk said. A total of about 20 homeless veterans are known to live in Mahoning County, she added.
She said the commission is trying to link homeless veterans with agencies that can help them.
“If they wish services, they are available to anybody,” said William Carbonell, the mental health and recovery board’s director of clinical programs and evaluations.
seeking housing
One of the homeless occupants of a riverfront tent, who said he is now seeking indoor housing, is Arthur Walters, 55, a lifelong Youngstown resident who attended The Rayen School.
“I only made it to the 11th grade,” he said.
The former factory worker said he has been homeless for about three years and supports himself with odd jobs and $733 a month in Supplemental Security Income – a Social Security program for aged, blind and disabled people.
Walters said his employment history includes work at a pillow factory and at a supplier for Delphi, both in Youngstown. The Delphi supplier closed several years ago, he said.
He said he became homeless after his mother died and after he was incarcerated and his son was taken away from him by the county Children Services Board.
“Everything from there went downhill,” he said. “I lost everything.”
“With the good help of Terry Vicars, I’m on my way now to see if I can find an apartment or something before the snow hits the ground,” Walters said.
Vicars is a Catholic Charities case manager who has been working with homeless people in Youngstown for the past 10 years.
Walters said he has been living outdoors and not in a homeless shelter because he is uncomfortable with crowded living arrangements.
“I’m going to try to live and be happy and try to get my son back,” Walters said.
“I’d like to get a job. They’re few and far between here in Youngstown,” he added.
Walters’ Youngstown Municipal Court record consists of two minor offenses: a 2001 case in which he was convicted of reckless operation of a vehicle and not having a valid driver’s license and a 2003 case in which he was convicted of theft.
In 2008, Judge James C. Evans of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court sentenced him to a year in prison with credit for the 250 days he’d already been jailed after he pleaded guilty to possession of a dangerous ordnance, a fifth-degree felony.
“That part of my life is over,” Walters said of his brushes with the law.
ENCAMPMENT ENVIRONMENT
Vicars visits the riverfront encampment, which is located along an active single-track railroad line, every two or three weeks, and he knows many of its occupants by name and tent location.
“Anybody home? It’s Terry from Catholic Charities,” he shouts in front of zipped-up tents as he tries to get the attention of their homeless occupants.
Litter, including empty beer cans, has accumulated around some of the tent clusters.
Some of the clusters feature wooden picnic tables, together with chairs surrounding empty wooden cable spools that serve as makeshift tables. There are a few bicycles.
Vicars said the encampment now has 14 occupants – 11 men and three women.
Seven or eight people occupied the encampment most of last winter, Vicars said.
The group peaked this past summer at 16 to 18 people, he said.
Among the hazards faced by those camped along the river are fires from heat sources they use to stay warm and river flooding, he observed.
Underemployment, unemployment, mental illness and alcohol and drug abuse are major causes of homelessness, Vicars said.
“If we had [more] people working full-time jobs with a living wage, homelessness would be way down,” he observed.
“We’ve worked with college professors and former college professors and former business owners” who’ve become homeless, for reasons such as job loss, divorce and heath impairments, he said.
His goal for unsheltered homeless people is “to get them into housing as quickly as we can,” he said.
POLICE CHIEF’S VIEW
“My question is: Are we enabling those folks to stay there and avoid getting the help or assistance that they really need?” city Police Chief Robin Lees asked. Lees asked whether people who provide supplies to the outdoor homeless are “enabling that community to grow down there and not get the proper help that they need.”
“We are not about to uproot those folks down there, as long as they are not a problem in other ways,” Lees said.
He said, however, that police encourage social service agencies “to go down and try to provide some kind of assistance or help or direction to get them into a proper shelter and to get health care as well as mental health care where it’s available.”
“Some of these folks have worn out their welcome at the Rescue Mission, so they really don’t have anywhere else to go,” Lees observed.
Some aren’t welcome at the mission because they’re noncompliant with mission rules, including the ban on intoxication there, or because they don’t get along with other shelter residents, he explained.
Because it cannot endanger its occupants, which include children, as well as adult men and women, the mission cannot accommodate people who are under the influence of alcohol or drugs; and since it’s “communal living,” mission occupants need to be civil to one another, said Jim Echement, mission executive director. Weapons and open flames are banned at the mission, he added.
“It’s not like we can go up and expand the number of [shelter] beds or change anything. We have to rely on the social services as the other resources available to address those issues,” Lees said of the police perspective.
MAYOR’S PERSPECTIVE
The tent city by the Mahoning River “is not something that I am supportive of at all,” Mayor John A. McNally said.
“We need to be figuring out ways to get them out of that environment, as opposed to just bringing them supplies” such as tents and sleeping bags, he said. If the effort is limited to delivering camping supplies, “we are enabling that type of behavior [living outdoors],” he said.
Individuals and church groups who deliver supplies to the riverfront outdoor homeless people “have very big hearts,” Vicars said.
“I’m very careful about the assistance I provide down here. My main job is to try to help people who are homeless get into housing,” Vicars said.
Some occupants of the growing tent city may have “substance-abuse issues in addition to probably mental health issues,” McNally said.
“If you don’t want to be treated for either your mental health challenges or your substance abuse issues, throwing you into a treatment center or into a place that’s not equipped to deal with your needs is not going to be helpful to anybody,” the mayor said.
“I’m prepared to work with the social service agencies to get as much bed space as we can in places like the Rescue. ... Putting homeless [people] in the jail is not a solution,” he added.
The sheriff’s office and the county jail it operates “have enough problems without becoming an emergency shelter,” the mayor said.
“They’re there by choice. They’ve worn out their welcome at the centers,” Mahoning County Sheriff Jerry Greene said of riverfront encampment occupants. “You can’t get somebody in treatment that doesn’t want to be helped.”
“We will offer up the services we can provide, but we are not going to force people to do things that they don’t want to do, and I can’t force a group like the Rescue Mission to take in folks that they’re not prepared to deal with,” the mayor said.
“You run into an issue there of the individual rights. If somebody wants to go out there and freeze to death, and that’s their own free will and they’ve got a clear mind to do it and they’re mentally competent, that’s one issue,” said Judge Robert Milich of Youngstown Municipal Court.
“If you get somebody [who has] mental health issues, alcohol or drug abuse, I think you have more of a responsibility,” he said.
MENTAL HEALTH OUTREACH
Mental health and recovery program outreach workers visit the homeless encampment, said Duane Piccirilli, mental health and recovery board executive director.
“We have an outreach program that the board funds through a state grant that has people going under the bridge and along the railroad tracks and trying to engage these people,” he said.
“The first thing might be just, ‘Let’s go to the clinic [VA or St. Elizabeth Family Center]. Let’s go to the [St. Vincent DePaul] soup kitchen’” for lunch, he observed. The outreach workers’ strategy is: “Engage them; develop a relationship; and the ultimate goal is housing,” he explained.
“Once you get somebody in housing, the mission is to keep them in housing,” Carbonell said.
Catholic Charities uses the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development definition of homelessness, which includes people living in places not meant for human habitation, such as the riverfront encampment, abandoned houses and cars, as well as occupants of emergency shelters, such as the Rescue Mission.
Not included in that definition are people “doubled up” in housing with friends or relatives, but not occupying stable housing, observed Nancy Voitus, executive director of the Catholic Charities Regional Agency.
EMERGENCY SHELTER SHORTAGE
Mahoning County has a shortage of emergency homeless shelter beds, Piccirilli said, adding that the Rescue Mission was near capacity at the end of October, while the weather was still warm.
The 169-bed Rescue Mission is Mahoning County’s only general-purpose adult emergency shelter, with a nightly average occupancy of 131 in recent weeks, Echement noted.
“Approximately half of those 169 beds are upper bunks,” which aren’t accessible to people who are aren’t physically able to climb into them, he noted.
Almost a quarter of the mission’s occupants are physically, mentally or developmentally disabled, he said.
The shortage of state psychiatric hospital beds is a major contributor to mission occupancy, he said.
“They put the people out, and where do they go? After they burn through all of their safety nets, friends and families, they end up at the shelter, or in jail, or dead,” he explained.
“During the cold weather months, we try to accommodate extra and overflow, who may come in because of the weather,” he said. The mission is making provisions not to “leave anyone outside who asks to come in,” who abides by the mission rules, he added.
“We’ll use mats and sleeping bags for emergency” mission occupancy, he said.
The mission has raised $5 million toward building a new $9.5 million shelter with about 169 beds, capable of emergency expansion to more than 200 beds, on the 17.5-acre former South Side Park site, he said.
The faith-based mission does not accept any public funding and depends on contributions from individuals, churches and foundations.