When people are homeless, they are often under a roof – but it's never certain how long they can stay there. An assortment of places can be the temporary living space of a person experiencing homelessness, and in writing my story about the King County 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness, I thought it would be helpful to provide a definition of the places. For someone outside of the homelessness field, the names sound interchangeable – shelter, transitional housing, supportive housing, rapid re-housing – but they're quite different. I'm going to blog about these over the next couple of days.
When I was working at the Raphael House shelter in San Francisco, we had this huge plaque full of the names of donors to the house at the front desk. Its title was: "In support of the families who walked through these doors to a better life." When a charity is working right and gets someone out of homelessness, that short statement is a good description of what it is doing.
When it's not, it's a holding tank that maintains people in their homeless state. Over the last 40 years, great numbers of well-intended efforts to help the homeless have ended up turning into holding tanks.
First:
Doubled up/ in a hotel
When someone loses housing, usually their first step is to sleep on the floor of family members or friends, or to end up in a hotel. You can call it "couch surfing" or being "doubled up" or being on "skid row," but by government definition, this is considered being homeless if there's no permanent address that the person can get back to. When I was in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, there were large numbers of single-resident occupancy hotels around the shelter where I worked. These hotels provided tiny rooms with shared bathrooms and kitchen facilities, and many homeless people were living in them and paying rent. Many of the families we received had spent several months, or even years living in these "SROs" (single-room occupancy programs).
Bill Hobson, director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center, said that Seattle used to have a much larger number of "skid row" style bunking houses, but urban renewal efforts in the 1970s and 1980s removed them, which was one factor behind the increase in homelessness that began then. While these bunking houses were dreadful places to live, what was worse was that there was no replacement for them.
Shelters
Homeless shelters are run by a charities or government agencies and provide a temporary place to sleep, usually at no cost. Professor Dennis Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania said that today's homeless shelters are basically modeled after the 19th Century "poorhouse" and have not changed much since then. The idea behind a shelter is that having a roof over your head will stabilize you enough to get a new job and an apartment.
Shelters that someone can walk in to at a moment's notice are called "emergency shelters" because they exist to help when sudden homelessness occurs that people cannot plan for. They often have time limits of a few days or a few weeks.
Raphael House is a shelter, although it isn't so much of an "emergency" shelter because people had to get on a waiting list to get in. It typically took three to five months for a family to be able to move out. The reason for the long wait was that it took them that much time to save up for the security deposit and rent on an apartment. Father David Lowell, the executive director, explained that when he started there back in the mid-80s, families would stay for a couple of weeks – at that time, if you saved up two welfare payments, you could start paying rent on an apartment.
We tried as hard as we could to keep Raphael House from being a holding tank. We had a rigorous program of activities to keep family members engaged with each other in games and crafts in the evenings. We also banned television and radio from the house in an effort to get family members to be more functional with each other. (The TV ban was also a great way to scare away lazy people.) The people who participated in our programs benefited from them, but I wasn't sure that it was really necessary for their success.
We did serve great numbers of families with serious problems such as family dysfunction, domestic violence or recent release from jail, and I think they needed our supervision, but about half of the families we served would have functioned pretty well in their own apartment – if they had one. For them, I think, we were just providing a holding tank – a place to stay while they waited until they could save up for an apartment.
Another thing about Raphael House's shelter is that it wasn't very cheap – it cost $1 million a year to run the shelter, and it served between 115 and 150 people a year when I was there. We often wished we could close the shelter and serve families a different way. We also knew that funding for shelters was slowly drying up as charitable foundations were tiring of their reputation as holding tanks.
A recent study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development showed that running a shelter is a pretty costly way of serving the homeless – in three U.S. cities, the cost of providing emergency shelter for an individual ranged from $408 to $1,817 per month, while fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment ranged from $549 to $643. For families, the cost of emergency shelter for adults in four U.S. cities ranged from $1,391 to $3,698 per month, while fair market rent for a two bedroom unit ranged from $599 to $1,225 per month.
The short lesson of those numbers is that it can actually be cheaper to pay rent for people than to shelter them.
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Coming up in future blog posts: A look at transitional housing, supportive housing, rapid re-housing
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Reporter Eric Ruthford is digging to get answers to these questions regarding the 10-year plan to end homelessness in King County: Now that the time period is half-way through, what benefits are evident so far? Will the new way of addressing homelessness -- by providing permanent housing instead of overnight shelter -- actually end homelessness, as planned? Having written for the P-I and other newspapers plus worked as a homeless shelter financial director, he is uniquely suited. His work is underwritten by your donations via Spot.us. Above we've combined his two latest Spot.us blog items providing an update on his reporting research.
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FURTHER READING
Creaming -- a phenomenon making it harder to help those who need it most
Homeless shelters aren't cheap... and the alternative?
The human face of homelessness: too overdone?
