Elected officials from Wilmington and New Hanover County met yesterday [Thursday] to discuss homelessness in the Cape Fear Region and how to improve it.
At an initial joint meeting earlier this year, public officials sent city and county staff on a mission to develop a strategic plan with the input of homeless individuals, the council of governments, and service providers.
After 27 interviews with homeless individuals and many meetings with other stakeholders, staff decided on a few key priorities.
- Increasing the community’s day shelter space to provide respite for unsheltered homeless;
- Improving coordination among providers through the regional Continuum of Care or CoC;
- Increasing the number of permanent supportive housing units in the community.
The lowest hanging fruit seems to be increasing the capacity of the CoC: that organization has just a handful of staff members, and adding capacity will help them coordinate across numerous organizations.
Wilmington Housing and Neighborhood Director Rachel Schuler said supporting the CoC can help agencies avoid duplicating efforts. “Making sure that when someone is in need, they're not calling three different agencies, there's one centralized entry point of where they can get connected to those services.”
The CoC already has a system in place for that, called Coordinated Entry (CE). Almost every homeless services provider in the tri-county area participates in CE, but adding staff to the CoC would make it easier to bring in more organizations.
Schuler says there are other major opportunities to help the most visible, unsheltered homeless get off the streets.
“Ensuring unsheltered individuals can access their basic needs through increased comprehensive day services, as we mentioned, a place to shower, a place to rest, really, that respite is going to be so important,” she explained.
Additionally, low-barrier overnight shelter is an important opportunity for growth – particularly shelters with wraparound mental health services, or which permit pets or couples to stay together.
County Chief Strategy officer Jennifer Rigby also said the county is in discussions with Trillium on a possible mental health day shelter model – but didn’t have the financials available during the meeting.
Instead, staff said they needed to know if they were “on the right track” and should move forward with the strategies they laid out.
City and county officials largely voiced support for the strategic plan and asked that staff come back with the costs and concrete steps for helping the CoC in the next 90 days.
Members debate best path forward
Still, there was some pushback, particularly from Commissioner Dane Scalise.
“We are here, all of us meeting, talking about spending more money. And to my mind, the end goal needs to be clearly defined,” he said. “It is going to, in my estimation, be one of two things, either we are going to improve the situation, we're going to reduce the incidence of homelessness in our community, or we are just going to get better at handling homeless services, which may mean expanding the reach of our homeless services. And I would argue that the public probably would prefer the first rather than the latter.”
He also asked whether the problem is “unsolvable,” to which Rigby responded: “I think there are opportunities to improve this issue for sure, and those are what we have identified here in terms of solving forever. I'm not sure that that is a possibility, but I think there are definite opportunities to improve the situation, and definite opportunities for collaboration amongst our providers to better serve individuals and get them whole and well, to go on and lead productive lives.”
Scalise then brought up a fairly common myth about the unhoused: that providing more services for the homeless will cause homeless individuals from all over the country to flock to the Wilmington area.
“There's no nice way to put this: we're going to be so great at doing homeless services in New Hanover County, this is where the large number of homeless people that are across the United States – and it's a larger issue that New Hanover County can fix – are going to say this is where we need to be, and that is only going to contribute further to the strain on our services,” he said.
City Councilmember Salette Andrews responded with local data from the CoC. “The vast, vast majority of people their prior address was within our service area. You know how difficult it is to move as a person with resources, imagine how difficult it is to move as a person who doesn't have any resources. So what we're finding is that very few people who are unhoused are moving from other places into our service area.”
Read More: "Try to stay positive." The lives of our homeless neighbors in Wilmington
Councilmember Clifford Barnett asked a different question: “If you could pick two programs that would really help us, what would stand out?” Schuler suggested comprehensive day shelters, particularly based on a model in Greensboro, and Rigby emphasized support for the CoC.
Councilmember Charlie Rivenbark seemed particularly keen on moving quickly on the CoC, and on holding firm with creating shelter space within the community. “If we do create some of these day shelters, it's going to take some political will on behalf of the county commission and the city council to do it and weather the storm that will surely come our way. Because, as people on council know, we have tried a number of locations in town that we thought made sense, and you’d have thought we were putting in a nuclear waste dump.”
Rivenbark spoke passionately about the need to help the homeless – he said he’d never seen people on the street as a child, but now it’s commonplace. “I keep saying this, but we got to do something drastic. We've got to throw money at it. Some problems, you just have to throw money at it. And until you get it right, it's going to be expensive, but we have to do it.”
Commissioner Jonathan Barfield agreed. “When it comes to updating the land use regulations, NIMBYism happens at every level,” he said. He added that homelessness can happen to anybody. “No matter where you live and what your pedigree is, what your education is, people find themselves in those situations and don't know what to do.”
The issue of permanent supportive housing was a bit more controversial than the other points – it is an expensive venture. Though there are 77 new units being developed by Good Shepherd Center in the coming years, providers estimate there will still be a need for 25 to 75 more units beyond that.
Councilmember Luke Waddell suggested that it shouldn't be a New Hanover county problem, so much as a regional problem. “I would probably not advocate that we build it all in the smallest county in the state with some of the highest land prices per acre in the state,” he said. “I think a regional issue should have a regional approach. I mean, our neighboring counties have property with many orders of magnitude less expensive than what we have here.”
He voiced a strong preference for mental health services through a day shelter. And public officials overall seemed more interested in those less expensive, less permanent solutions.
Staff said they would take the full discussion under advisement and come back with a menu of options to invest in, along with potential costs.