Reprinted by permission from The News of Orange
By CASEY FERRELL
Editor
Homelessness looks very different in Hillsborough and in the rural areas of the county. Unlike in Chapel Hill where the problem is self-evident, with people sleeping on benches and panhandling, the homeless folks in this end of the county walk among us mostly unnoticed.
“It’s a very different population here,” said Hillsborough Planning Director Margaret Hauth. “They’re harder to find, but they’re local families and we’re attached to them.”
Assistant County Manager Gwen Harvey said that the numbers “may be smaller or [the homeless] are less visible, but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.
“What we may not see may be equally problematic as what we do see.” At the town government level, not much is offered in terms of social services, including those that help the homeless. Historically, those services are provided at the county level in North Carolina, Hauth said.
Municipalities rarely foray into the fight against homelessness, and for the most part the town of Hillsborough is no different. It would be inaccurate, however, to say the town does nothing. In fact, the Town Board enthusiastically supports local non-profits like Orange Congregations in Mission (OCIM) and Neighbor House of Hillsborough, Inc., that provide services Hillsborough cannot.
The town of Hillsborough allocates some of its annual budget to non-profits and Hauth sees the spending as the town’s way of supporting a mechanism by which it can provide those services, at least indirectly. For example, the town implemented a water assistance program for those who were struggling to pay their bills. Not only did the town offer $5,000 seed money for the account, they also send out letters every quarter soliciting donations for the fund. OCIM then distributes the money based on referrals from the Department of Social Services.
But ultimately, the town’s annual financial contributions to area non-profits tend to make up only a fraction of their total operating costs. Consider that Hillsborough can allocate somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 of its annual budget to OCIM, which has an operating budget of $167,000.
SHELTERING THE HOMELESS
If the town is ever to have a homeless shelter, it will be because a non-profit group decides to launch one. “If Neighbor House and OCIM were to come together and give the Town Board a proposal saying this is where we can open our shelter, this is the property; we have this much money through donations and grants, and we need “X” amount of dollars from the town, the board would seriously consider it,” said Hauth.
A site in Fairview was proposed in November, 2004 by Neighbor House, a local non-profit. But resistance to the location made it clear that finding the right place for the shelter was paramount. No further proposals have been put forth. Hauth said she thinks that homelessness won’t be wiped out in Hillsborough until a shelter is available.
Harvey offers another perspective. "There would need to be evidence of an escalating need,” she said. “And I just don’t know if we’re at that particular stage.”
For the foreseeable future, it appears that the Hillsborough homeless will have to continue trying to get to shelters in Chapel Hill or Durham.
10-YEAR PLAN
The 10-year plan to end homelessness, a work in progress that could be approved by the end of the month, is steered by a committee made up of the who’s who of area politics, social services and businesses and includes commissioners, police chiefs and mayors.
Tara Fikes, the housing and community development coordinator for Orange County, is also on the steering committee and said the situations she sees most in her office are folks that are “doubled and tripled up,” she said. These are people that are living with friends and relatives. Many become homeless due to the fact that once that arrangement ends, they no longer have a place to go.
There are also a variety of substance abuse problems that directly and indirectly prevent people from getting housing.
“It creates all sorts of barriers to their access of housing,” she said.
Criminal backgrounds also cause problems, as do former evictions on credit files. “We see a whole myriad of problems,” she said.
Fikes said the county’s 10-year plan to end homelessness is currently gathering information on best practices used in other counties around the state and country. In fact, Durham and Wake counties have already begun implementing their versions of the 10- year plan.
“We’re targeting the chronically homeless but don’t want to exclude people that may be homeless for a variety of reasons,” Fikes said.
COUNTY SERVICES
The ways that homeless people are targeted for service is compartmentalized at the county government level. “The condition of homelessness has so many contributing factors,” Harvey said. “There’s social, mental and physical factors, as well as societal ones.
“Departments have certain tools to address certain factors. The Department of Social Services has Medicaid and food stamps to help with financial hardship, for instance.”
Harvey said that programs to directly or indirectly address homelessness exist in multiple departments including social services, health, housing and community development and OPC Mental Health. Even the Department on Aging can make an impact by intervening with elderly citizens who might be struggling to keep up with house payments.
“Intervention and prevention programs are better, overall I think, than ones that try to react to the condition of homelessness once it’s already occurred,” Harvey said.
She also said that budget cuts to social services at the state level have left counties in North Carolina struggling to offer the same services, underscoring the difficulty of delivering social services at the local level when such services are not well-funded at the state level.
“The state should be more responsible to the social safety net,” Harvey said.
No comments:
Post a Comment