City boosts effort to get homeless off the streets
New shelter to allow pets, couples; others get hotels
Baltimore is spending more than $350,000 to put some of the city's chronically homeless in hotels and serve others in a shelter where they can sleep as couples and bring their pets.
Another $200,000 will double — to 24 — the number of city outreach workers who look to build relationships with people sleeping on the streets and steer them toward housing and treatment services.
Jacquelyn Duval-Harvey, who heads the mayor's human services office, said the new approach is designed to help more of the city's roughly 3,000 homeless people — one of Baltimore's most visible problems — by removing barriers that keep them on the streets.
“This is not something that anyone has figured out the answer to. It's a struggle,” Duval-Harvey said. “We'll take whatever steps we can, small or large.”
Duval-Harvey said the city also will pay about $65 a night for homeless people to stay in hotels on an emergency basis. The idea is to place people sleeping in encampments in hotels while outreach workers seek more permanent accommodations.
The Board of Estimates voted 5-0 Wednesday to authorize the spending. The City Council must also approve it.
All told, the board agreed to spend more than $550,000 on the new initiatives and about $1.4 million to continue an assortment of current programs for the homeless, including extra shelter space during extreme weather.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who controls the city spending panel, said she wanted to make additional money available to address homelessness. The funding will come from money that CSX Transportation reimbursed the city after Baltimore paid to rebuild a collapsed railroad support wall in Charles Village.
“We have people who have yet to recover from the Great Recession,” the mayor said. “We have a homeless population that is persistently higher than anyone would like. I'm always looking to direct more resources to support people to get them into permanent housing.”
Most of the roughly $37 million the city spends on homeless services each year comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Baltimore has a 10-year plan intended to find housing for all of the city's homeless by 2018 using a variety of approaches. That includes 100 additional housing vouchers dedicated to the homeless in December, bringing the total number of vouchers to 850.
Kevin Lindamood, president of the nonprofit Health Care for the Homeless, said dealing with an intractable problem with limited money takes innovative solutions. Dedicating resources to pay for hotels and a new shelter open to a broader range of homeless people is “a good move,” he said.
“There is pressing unmet need,” Lindamood said. “When you get people into housing and off the streets, pretty amazing things happen.”
Not wanting to give up a pet is one of many reasons some people resist sleeping in traditional shelters, Lindamood said. He pointed to the experience of the late Nestor DeVenecia, a well-known homeless man who traveled everywhere with his dog, Oxter, who alerted DeVenecia when the man was about to have a seizure.
When the dog was lost in the summer of 2006, Mount Vernon businesses put up a reward to find the chow mix. Lindamood said the dog was never found, but the community helped DeVenecia get another dog.
Dotsie Mack, a longtime friend of DeVenecia's, said the new shelter is “awesome” and would have been a comfort to her friend, who would have felt safer with his companion.
“It's incredible,” Mack said. “Your pets, they're family. It's an unconditional love that they provide for you.”
Kim Trueheart, a community activist, helped come up with the concept for the shelter and petitioned the city for funding, but she is no longer involved. Trueheart said she is concerned about the way the program is run and whether it can provide the services homeless people need.
“What happens to the individuals when they have not successfully been connected to housing?” Trueheart said. “I don't know what the answer is to that. The question is, is the city willing to put up any more money to see this demonstration through?” Trueheart said she had raised her concerns with city officials.
New Vision House of Hope did not respond to a request for comment.
Duval-Harvey said the program got off to a bumpy start as New Vision became more familiar with the city's process for managing contracts, including reimbursements and purchase requirements. Duval-Harvey said the city has found “nothing inappropriate.”
The shelter opened Sept. 11. Wednesday's action by the Board of Estimates assigned a specific source of funding for the contract, which was awarded in October.
Duval-Harvey said if the pilot is deemed a success, the city and its community partners will try to find the resources to keep it running.
“Our goal is to bring in as many people off of the street — who are not going into any shelter at all — as we can,” she said. “Their life is at risk.”
The same philosophy is driving the spending on hotel stays.
“We were getting very concerned about the number of people in encampments,” she said.
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