Doesn't matter what city or town you call home, if you're earning close to minimum wage you're going to have one helluva time putting a roof over your head....
Task force: Affordable housing needed; Officials call it crucial to combating
homelessness
Brock Letchworth. Daily Reflector. Greenville, N.C.: Aug 12, 2008.
Task force officials developing a plan to end chronic homelessness say there are ample resources locally, but affordable housing is not one of them.
Churches, nonprofit organizations and government programs support the homeless in myriad ways. However, county studies show the homeless rate continues to rise and people are struggling to find shelter they can afford.
As Pitt County's Blue Ribbon Task Force completes a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, members say one of the solutions is more short-term and supportive permanent housing. Providing more housing is one of the plan's two primary goals, along with developing community-based services and support to prevent homelessness and diminish the risk of it.
"I think we have a lot of resources in the community, but by my estimation one of our shortages is housing," Greenville Community Shelter Executive Director Lynne James said. "That is a major gap. I don't think we have enough affordable housing here. Even though we have vacant apartments, a lot of those would not be considered affordable by the standards of the people we're working with. We need to be able to get people as quickly as possible into something they call home."
James said flooding in 1999 during Hurricane Floyd washed away a large portion of the community's public housing stock. The area hasn't recovered and there is now substantial need for more subsidized housing and housing stock targeted at the low-income population, she said.
Currently the shelter offers nearly 80 beds in addition to limited transitional housing space. Locations such as halfway houses also are limited in space and most are designated only for those with mental health conditions or problems with substance abuse. The waiting list for affordable housing keeps growing, James said.
Margaret Dixon, social work program manager at Pitt County Social Services, said her agency is mandated to meet the financial needs of those going through hard times, but it has no money or mandates to help people with housing.
"We don't have any say-so or connect with the housing stock in the community or affordable housing," Dixon said. "We service or provide assistance for people who have a low income or no income, but that doesn't create a housing situation for them. We need more affordable housing because the lack of that throws people into a situation of having to seek financial help that they may not normally need if they had a place that was affordable."
James said the Greenville Housing Authority is building housing units along B's Barbeque Road which are earmarked for the homeless, but the area will need more projects like that to make a dent in the problem.
If the task force's plan is accepted by county and city leaders during the next couple of months, members say it will take some time before the effects of it will be noticeable. Other communities that have employed the "housing first" strategy have experienced success, according to recent studies.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently reported the number of chronically homeless people living nationwide dropped by 30 percent between 2005 and 2007. Department officials credited the housing strategy proposed by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness in 2005 and that increasingly has been adopted across the country.
Local service providers expect demand for their services to keep rising until the task force's plan is approved and a similar strategy implemented.
Since Barbara Taft opened the Joy Soup Kitchen on Albemarle Avenue in 1994, she says her numbers have tripled to more than 170 people daily.
"I never thought I would see us serving as many people as we do now," said Taft, whose service relies on donations. "People continue to be very generous, but you wonder how long they can afford to be with the economy they way it is.
"If we didn't have this, some people may not be getting a decent meal during the day."
Organizations like the East Carolina Vocational Center and the Salvation Army also are seeing more of the homeless among their clientele.
The shelter uses ECVC to train individuals for employment and the Salvation Army provides vouchers for clothing.
"Those things are very helpful, but we have to increase the housing resources that are affordable," James said. "If we maximize the resources available housing-wise, I think we can significantly reduce the amount of time a person remains homeless."
