Past time to address homeless issue
What a snapshot of reality Ron MacArthur’s article in the Dec. 10-13 Cape Gazette offers for Sussex County and the state of Delaware! Of $1.360 billion in federal funding that could be used to help the homeless denizens throughout Delaware, not even 3 percent ($56 million) has been used toward affordable housing! The executive director of Housing Alliance Delaware noted that the state and most jurisdictions had so far declined to make a public commitment of funding. Perhaps her comment should have been offered as a lead-in to the article and followed by multiple exclamation marks.
From my experience volunteering with a local homeless assistance group that finally capitulated as a result of the repeated local funding denials, refusals of already promised local funding, and behind-the-scenes, devastating gossip and innuendos orchestrated by Messrs Schwartzkopf and Lopez, leaders in the Lewes-Rehoboth Association of Churches, the local Community Resource Center and its favored Code Purple donor recipient, Love Inc., I think I have a reasonably accurate picture of the local scene.
First, I do not believe any local or state elected leader residing in the Cape area really wants facilities, including motel rooms, in the Rehoboth-Lewes area to be used for housing the homeless even in winter. Ostensibly, state officials arranged for the Troop 7 campus on Route 1 to become a homeless facility some two years ago. Even so, Love Inc., the recipient of this supposed largesse, was unable to open as a Code Purple shelter by the Dec. 1 expectation date this year. When it finally opened, it only offered sleeping space for 12 men each evening. Many motels in the area are no larger than the main building on this campus. Were they to limit occupancy to 12 individuals, does anyone really think they could continue to operate? Logical conclusion: Pay lip service to generosity then select an organization incapable of establishing a truly useful facility, or otherwise stymie its efforts to truly make use of the “gift.”
Next, try to force the charitable burden on local motels, but don’t offer the vouchers and financial or other assistance most homeless individuals and families need to be in occupancy. Those of us who travel with driver licenses, credit cards and the ability to pass general background checks probably do not even stop to consider that one does not just walk up to a motel, pay a fee and become an occupant. You and I may; we are blessed.
Currently, there are two sites in the area that are optimal for significantly reducing homelessness. The Troop 7 campus is one; the other is the Belltown site that A Sheltering Heart, an offshoot of Lighthouse for Broken Wings, is attempting to develop. Both have adequate land to allow decent housing experiments with tiny houses, container houses, apartment bachelor officer quarters housing that would allow several apartments with individual bathrooms to share a common living area, and goodness only knows, what other possibilities. Both sites also offer ideal access to public transportation, are convenient to schools and could be developed to offer on-site educational and counseling services. Importantly, too, they could be developed in such a way as to minimize the NIMBY complaints that will be inevitable virtually anywhere affordable housing in a complex is proposed.
If our leaders seriously wanted to establish affordable housing in the Cape Region, it could be done. Sites such as the two mentioned could be established via an expedited administrative process as locales that would permit alternative housing. Rather than wringing their hands and bemoaning the inability to change things then trying to shift the burden to the private sector while sitting on the funding to make it happen, local elected leaders could spearhead and support change. Tax codes could be amended to offer incentives to the many builders and small businesses that could make developing such campuses a reality. Vocational programs in state institutions could receive incentives to train the unemployed to become active stakeholders in the process. And importantly, nonprofits with demonstrated success in housing indigents despite opposition at every turn, such as A Sheltering Heart/Lighthouse for Broken Wings could take a lead in making the changes work. Certainly Toni Short, the dedicated CEO of Lighthouse, understands that the bureaucratic one-size-fits-all – send the men here, the women there, out place the children and treat all like cogs, not people – simply will not work for any kind of lasting change.
As the MacArthur article and the executive director of Housing Alliance Delaware have reported, the money is there. Local groups who distribute funds that are handed down have gone through some reforms over the past year. Meanwhile, elected officials sit back and withhold the money that has been earmarked to address housing. What a tragedy!
