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US slashes funding for housing aid to homeless
YOUNGSTOWN
Three agencies that serve homeless people in the Mahoning Valley are scrambling to find alternative funding sources after collectively losing more than $550,000 in annual federal funding on short notice.
For transitional housing, funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development fell from $214,000 to zero at Beatitude House and from $291,480 to zero at Meridian Health Care.
At the Catholic Charities Regional Agency, annual HUD funding went from $52,000 a year to zero for a street outreach program to homeless people.
The cuts HUD announced in May represent more than one-fifth of the $2.5 million in annual HUD funding to Mahoning County agencies for all services to homeless people, said Larry Moliterno, chief executive officer at Meridian, a Youngstown-based agency that provides primary health care, addiction-recovery services and housing.
HUD is placing increasing emphasis on permanent housing, which is cheaper and more effective than transitional housing that offers a temporary residence with life-skills training and addiction treatment, said Brian Sullivan, a HUD spokesman.
Mental health and substance-abuse recovery services can be offered to people residing in permanent supportive housing, Sullivan said.
“Every community needs to have a full continuum of services for homeless,” including emergency shelter and transitional and permanent housing, Moliterno said.
“There are always going to be people along different parts of that pipeline,” he added. “If you just eliminate transitional housing, how do you go from emergency housing to permanent housing?”
Sister Janet Gardner, executive director of Beatitude House, whose transitional housing program is named House of Blessing, acknowledged that permanent housing is likely cheaper than transitional housing.
However, she said not everyone is prepared to obtain permanent housing.
“What we find is that the clientele we serve are coming with multiple obstacles to obtaining permanent housing,” such as arrest records, utility and rent debt and lack of job skills necessary to obtain employment to pay the rent, Gardner said.
“Many of the women come to us with zero income,” she added.
Meridian, Beatitude and Catholic Charities are exploring a variety of funding sources to help them compensate for the loss of HUD funding.
Meridian has been inquiring about alterative funding in discussions with officials of the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services and the Mahoning County Mental Health and Recovery Board, Moliterno said.
It is not yet clear whether the cut will force Meridian to reduce the number of transitional housing beds it provides, he added.
“We have a commitment to this population, and we’re going to do everything we can possibly do to maintain the number of beds,” Moliterno said. “There’s a need to increase the number of beds for this population.”
Meridian programs suffering from the HUD cut are the eight-bed Project Safe for homeless women and children, which operates at an undisclosed location; the 16-bed Passages program for homeless single men on Chalmers Avenue; and the 14-bed William Bodnar House for homeless veterans, which has seven beds each at locations on Chalmers Avenue and Glenwood Avenue.
The veterans’ program cut was retroactive to April; and the other program cuts will take effect in August, said Darla Gallagher, Meridian’s chief operating officer and vice chair of the Mahoning County Continuum of Care for Homelessness.
Meridian can use a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs grant to cover part, but not all, of the HUD cut to the agency’s transitional housing for veterans, she said.
The Continuum of Care, an umbrella group of agencies serving homeless people, is continuing to meet to discuss how to serve homeless people in the wake of the HUD cuts, Moliterno said.
“It hit us hard,” Gardner said of the HUD cut, which reduced by 23 percent the total funding for Beatitude’s House of Blessing, which has 12 units on Fifth Avenue in Youngstown and 13 units on Tod Avenue Northwest in Warren.
For Beatitude, the HUD cut is retroactive to Feb. 1 for Youngstown and May 1 for Warren, Gardner said.
The agency’s Youngstown and Warren transitional housing sites also get funds from the state, foundations and private donations.
“We were blessed to receive some United Way funding for the first time this year,” Gardner said of the $32,000 in United Way money for her Youngstown center, which will compensate in part for the HUD cut.
She said she also hopes to get United Way money for the Warren site, together with additional foundation grants.
Beatitude also is applying for federal Victims of Crime Act funding because 60 percent of the women it serves have suffered from domestic violence.
Beatitude’s transitional housing residents, primarily single women with children, live in fully furnished apartments.
They receive life-skills and money-management training and counseling for any mental health and substance- abuse issues.
About 60 percent of them have experienced multi-generational poverty, and 40 percent have a history of substance abuse, Gardner said.
Beatitude will be increasing its emphasis on permanent housing, which HUD is more likely to fund, but hopes to keep transitional housing at least through the summer of 2017, Gardner said.
Beatitude House has a permanent supportive housing program with 24 scattered units in Mahoning County, for which HUD funding is remaining intact, Gardner said.
A $52,000 a year HUD grant expiring July 1 provides about 80 percent of the funding for Catholic Charities’ local homeless outreach program, with the remainder coming from private donations, said Nancy Voitus, executive director of the Youngstown-based Catholic Charities Regional Agency.
Terry Vicars, that agency’s homeless outreach worker, visits and tries to assist homeless people living on streets, under bridges, in cars or in unstable housing.
Voitus said her agency will try to compensate for the HUD cut with city, county and state monies and with private donations.
“We provide that early outreach and case management to help people get channeled into housing,” she said.
“There are people that aren’t ready to go into permanent housing that need transitional housing or more services before they’re ready to be independent,” she said.
With the Obama administration having announced in 2010 its goal to end homelessness, HUD wants any homeless episodes to be “rare, brief and non-recurring,” Sullivan said.
The best way to achieve that is to focus on permanent housing, he said.
“We are moving as a nation toward providing real and lasting housing solutions, and we’re encouraging local communities to join this movement.”