23
Dec
2002
On Friday, December 20, agencies in Iowa that deal with the issue of affordable housing got word of a potentially devastating development: An application for federal funding covering the entire state except Des Moines somehow didn't arrive intact in Washington, D.C., and as a result the state could lose $4.4 million in housing funds.
"I can't believe this," Kate Ridge, executive director of John Lewis Coffee Shop, said on Monday. She said the loss could result in hundreds of people out on the street within a few weeks, and thousands over the course of the next year. Her agency, which provides services ranging from homeless shelters to transitional housing to low-income housing, might be forced to cut 12 of its 28 social workers.
Three grants in the Iowa Quad Cities are in jeopardy, including two renewals totaling $670,000 and one new three-year grant for $1.1 million. John Lewis Coffee Shop was the lead applicant for the grants, with nine local agencies participating in the programs.
The two existing programs provide transitional housing for youth, and social-service and housing support for homeless families and individuals. Their current federal funding expires in April 2003.
The state's application, which was submitted by the Iowa Department of Economic Development, was weighed at the post office at 5 pounds, 13 ounces but arrived in Washington as only 11 pages. "It was some kind of error somewhere," Ridge said.
The state, social-service agencies, and Iowa's congressional delegation will surely be urging the federal government to reverse the funding decision - "Our plan is to continue to work with our elected officials," Ridge said - but the situation illustrates just how fragile the social safety net can be. One bureaucratic error can potentially result in hundreds or thousands of people going homeless statewide.
And that's not the only bad news. A number of rental properties in the Quad Cities that cater to low-income people are threatened, and that could mean the elimination of as many as 200 affordable-housing units. In November, for example, Davenport city inspectors found 275 fire-code violations in the Schricker Apartments, home to 50 low-income families on Fourth Street.
Yet while these developments paint a bleak picture, there are also positive things happening. John Lewis Coffee Shop plans in April to open a new $1.3 million emergency shelter at 1016 West Fifth Street in Davenport that will provide beds for 78 homeless people. And around the Quad Cities are projects that could alleviate the problems of homelessness and one of its main causes - a lack of safe, sanitary, affordable housing - by building or rehabilitating housing for low-income people.
Portrait of Homelessness
Like any urban area, the Quad Cities have a distressing number of people without any permanent place to live. They might live in homeless shelters, on the streets, or move around from friend to friend or family member to family member. A February 1999 count found 590 homeless people in the Quad Cities. A February 2002 tally found 692.
"Those are the people we can find and count," said Janine Johnson, director of supportive services for John Lewis Coffee Shop.
Five shelters in the Quad Cities currently provide shelter and services to the homeless: the Salvation Army Shelter for Families in Davenport, Family Resources Domestic Violence Shelter in Davenport, Christian Family Care Domestic Violence Shelter in Rock Island, Christian Family Care Rock Island Rescue Mission for Men, and John Lewis Coffee Shop's Miriam House in Davenport (which serves mostly homeless men).
Twelve years ago, Ridge said, eight agencies provided services for the homeless, with little coordination. These days, the organizations are reaping the benefits of collaboration. "We have great partnerships within the service providers," she said. Joint grant applications have resulted in $4 million in federal funds, and the result is that while there are a lot of chronic homeless people in the Quad Cities, they're receiving services. "You don't see a lot of homeless people on the street in the Quad Cities," Ridge said.
You can find them in shelters and at social-service agencies, though. "The majority of people who are homeless in the Quad Cities are women and children," Ridge said. Other factors that often lead to homelessness, she added, are mental illness, addiction, domestic violence, and the costs of child care, transportation, and health insurance. Those are all problems local social-service agencies address with the now-threatened $450,000 in HUD Permanent Supportive Housing Program funds.
The Salvation Army's shelter at 301 West Sixth Street in Davenport has room for 56 people - 14 families and six single women. Christine Butterfield, director of social services for the Salvation Army, estimates that the shelter will have served 710 different people by the end of the year.
Yet she also notes the shelter turns people away because it doesn't have enough room. "We're usually at capacity," Butterfield said. By the end of the year, the Salvation Army will have denied 435 requests for shelter. (The same person might call several times a day, and each call is considered a request.)
People staying at the shelter meet with a caseworker weekly to develop and discuss follow-through on a plan to get the client back into housing. Clients are typically required to look for a job or go to work, and save money. The center operates on a "four strike" rule; if a client fails to follow through with an action plan for four weeks, that person is forced to leave.
Butterfield said between 40 and 50 percent of Salvation Army shelter clients stay a week and leave voluntarily. The remainder stay less than three months.
"Too often they leave too quickly and go to a place that's cost-prohibitive, and they can't afford it, and they're back here quickly," Butterfield said.
Most of the shelter's clients, she said, are single women who live with men in uncommitted relationships. When the man leaves or kicks out the woman, she can't afford housing. "They have nothing ... and they have to start over," she said.
John Lewis Coffee Shop's Miriam House, similarly, requires the people it serves to develop and follow-through with a plan of action. People are allowed to stay at the shelter for 30 days, and if they're making progress toward their goals, they can stay another 30, said Jim Naguina, outreach coordinator for John Lewis Coffee Shop. The goal, he said, is to "keep them urgent about what their challenges are." Miriam House has 21 mats for people to sleep on, but it's not uncommon for the shelter to have 40 to 50 men sleeping there. "Nobody gets turned away," Naguina said. "We'll find a space."
The goal is to work the people in the shelter into permanent housing. After staying at the shelter, they might move to transitional housing, where they pay $2 a day for a bed and share a room with other people.
Transitional-housing programs take referrals from shelters, but also from drug- and alcohol-rehabilitation, mental-health, and corrections facilities, said Mary VoPava, service coordinator with John Lewis Coffee Shop. People participating in transitional-housing programs can stay in them as long as two years, but they must work with a coordinator on goals such as employment and saving money. "There's more accountability," VoPava said.
A key component of transitional housing, and homeless services in general, is ensuring people are getting the help they need. VoPava estimated that 80 percent of people in transitional programs have some form of drug or alcohol addiction, and most women have experienced domestic abuse. Support services "give them more of a firm footing in dealing with their issues in healthy ways," VoPava said.
Ken Johnson said he has been homeless by choice since 1995. He was stranded in Davenport in August 2001 and is now in the John Lewis Coffee Shop transitional-housing program. He started working at Goodwill in October 2001, and "I worked myself into a full-time position in August.
"I'm back in the system now," he said. "My goal is my own place."
Still, there's a high recidivism rate among the homeless. Naguina guessed that perhaps 30 percent of homeless people get back on their feet and stay there - people who "get out and stay gone."
"The bottom line is, you're not going to tell people how to live," Butterfield said.
Strides in Affordable Housing
Any discussion about homelessness in the Quad Cities must eventually become a discussion about affordable housing. The stereotype of the homeless is people with mental illness, but the reality is that (according to the 1999 homeless count) 68 percent of Quad Cities homeless are employed in some capacity. They're earning money, but not enough to afford housing.
That's not surprising. A person working full-time at the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour can afford monthly rent of $268, based on the long-standing federal standard that a family should spend no more than 30 percent of its income on housing. Fair-market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Quad Cities is $414 a month, while fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $512, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, using 2000 census figures.
And people on disability can't afford much in the way of housing, either. A single person on SSI can afford a housing cost of only $164 a month, based on the same federal guideline. "I got evicted in my room last April," said Ron Schoen, who is in John Lewis Coffee Shop's transitional-housing program and receives an SSI disability check of $545 each month. "I spent all summer by the river." Schoen has been on disability since 1992, and he's been off-and-on homeless since then, once spending a whole year on the street.
According to a needs assessment presented in 1999 by the Quad Cities Housing Cluster, 23 percent of households in Scott County earn less than 50 percent of the area's median income. Yet only 7 percent of housing in Scott County is assessed at a value that would be affordable to households at 50 percent or less of the median income. The Area Median Income in this area was $36,160 in the 1990 census, meaning that a household making 50 percent of that could afford monthly rent of $452. (According to the 2000 census, the current Area Median Income is $53,600. A household making 50 percent of that could afford rent of $670 a month.)
One can also see the need for more affordable housing in the federal Section 8 voucher program, in which the federal government offsets a portion of rental costs for low-income people. Currently in the Quad Cities, there's a four-year waiting list to get a Section 8 voucher, and that doesn't even account for the challenge of finding a landlord who accepts Section-8 recipients.
Collaboration has been important in making strides in the affordable-housing realm. When the State of Iowa encouraged local organizations to band together to apply for funds under the Local Housing Assistance Program (LHAP) about five years ago, the Quad Cities Housing Cluster came together. It and the related organization Scott County Housing Council spearhead local affordable-housing initiatives and have to-date gotten more than $2 million in funding, according to Rick Schloemer, the housing council's resource director.
That money has been used to create 330 units of new and rehabilitated affordable housing, Schloemer said. All of those units are affordable to households within 120 percent of the median - $64,320, based on the 2000 census - but participating organizations deal with a wide range of incomes. John Lewis, for example, is targeting housing for households below 30 percent of the median, while Vera French (which offers mental-health services) serves households generally below 50 percent of the median. Interfaith Housing, at the other end of the spectrum, creates housing for households in the 80-to-120-percent-of-median range.
John Lewis Coffee Shop, Interfaith Housing, and United Neighbors have collaborated on a program that offers $1,000 down-payment assistance as well as lead remediation. The organizations have assisted 60 families buying homes this year and plan to help another 90 this year.
John Lewis Coffee Shop is also rehabilitating 20 rental-housing units west of downtown Davenport, several of which should be ready in February or March.
There are more things afoot. Five entities from the Quad Cities have low-income-housing-tax-credit applications in with the State of Iowa, including one from John Lewis Coffee Shop that would involve the rehabilitation of two buildings, one at Taylor and Third streets and the other several blocks east on Third Street.
The Housing Cluster has as its goal for July 2002 to July 2004 to provide minor housing assistance (such as a down payment) to 500 households, build 25 new single-family homes, build 22 new housing units in multi-family facilities, rehabilitate 40 singe-family homes, and rehabilitate 35 units in multi-family buildings.
Money is the main reason social-service agencies are left to create affordable housing. "Developers don't fight us for dollars," said Kris Clements, director of property services for John Lewis Coffee Shop.
Ridge said that John Lewis makes $2,000 to $3,000 a year for each eight-unit affordable-housing complex it runs. People who offer low-income housing typically operate with very small margins, and that makes the projects unattractive to developers. "How many dollars does an entity that owns a building want to squeeze out of it?" Clements said.
Dark Clouds?
Yet with all the positive things happening in terms of low-income housing in the Quad Cities, there's a sense that it's a few steps forward and a few steps back. The news late last week that the Quad Cities could lose more than $670,000 in continued funding and $1.1 million for a new project (supposed to provide 18 units of housing for extremely special-needs homeless) was a devastating blow.
Add to that the state of the current housing stock in the Quad Cities, and the picture could be seen as bleak. John Lewis Coffee Shop has labeled a handful of buildings that provide low-income housing as endangered because of fire-code violations. If the problems aren't fixed, the buildings could close. It presents a quandary, because while advocates for low-income people don't want residents living in a dangerous building, they also don't want the housing to disappear.
"Two hundred units in our community are in great distress," Ridge said. "If those 200 units don't go out of commission, we're okay." But if they are closed or demolished, "We're in a holding pattern."
"That problem looms in the future, unless we do something about it," Schloemer said. The city needs to realize, he added, that there are consequences to active enforcement of the fire code. "You need to give some consideration to what you're going to do if you get to a point where you want to shut these places down, because there's no place for these people to go."
Yet even here there are positive signals that low-income people aren't willing to let their buildings be closed. At a meeting last week, several residents of the Schricker building expressed an interest in creating a neighborhood association.
And organizations such as John Lewis Coffee Shop and the Quad Cities Housing Cluster are aware of the problems, in addition to working on new low-income-housing projects. The goal, ultimately, is to have neither a homeless problem nor an affordable-housing shortage.
"One day we'd like to work ourselves out of a job," Ridge said.
"I can't believe this," Kate Ridge, executive director of John Lewis Coffee Shop, said on Monday. She said the loss could result in hundreds of people out on the street within a few weeks, and thousands over the course of the next year. Her agency, which provides services ranging from homeless shelters to transitional housing to low-income housing, might be forced to cut 12 of its 28 social workers.
Three grants in the Iowa Quad Cities are in jeopardy, including two renewals totaling $670,000 and one new three-year grant for $1.1 million. John Lewis Coffee Shop was the lead applicant for the grants, with nine local agencies participating in the programs.
The two existing programs provide transitional housing for youth, and social-service and housing support for homeless families and individuals. Their current federal funding expires in April 2003.
The state's application, which was submitted by the Iowa Department of Economic Development, was weighed at the post office at 5 pounds, 13 ounces but arrived in Washington as only 11 pages. "It was some kind of error somewhere," Ridge said.
The state, social-service agencies, and Iowa's congressional delegation will surely be urging the federal government to reverse the funding decision - "Our plan is to continue to work with our elected officials," Ridge said - but the situation illustrates just how fragile the social safety net can be. One bureaucratic error can potentially result in hundreds or thousands of people going homeless statewide.
And that's not the only bad news. A number of rental properties in the Quad Cities that cater to low-income people are threatened, and that could mean the elimination of as many as 200 affordable-housing units. In November, for example, Davenport city inspectors found 275 fire-code violations in the Schricker Apartments, home to 50 low-income families on Fourth Street.
Yet while these developments paint a bleak picture, there are also positive things happening. John Lewis Coffee Shop plans in April to open a new $1.3 million emergency shelter at 1016 West Fifth Street in Davenport that will provide beds for 78 homeless people. And around the Quad Cities are projects that could alleviate the problems of homelessness and one of its main causes - a lack of safe, sanitary, affordable housing - by building or rehabilitating housing for low-income people.
Portrait of Homelessness
Like any urban area, the Quad Cities have a distressing number of people without any permanent place to live. They might live in homeless shelters, on the streets, or move around from friend to friend or family member to family member. A February 1999 count found 590 homeless people in the Quad Cities. A February 2002 tally found 692.
"Those are the people we can find and count," said Janine Johnson, director of supportive services for John Lewis Coffee Shop.
Five shelters in the Quad Cities currently provide shelter and services to the homeless: the Salvation Army Shelter for Families in Davenport, Family Resources Domestic Violence Shelter in Davenport, Christian Family Care Domestic Violence Shelter in Rock Island, Christian Family Care Rock Island Rescue Mission for Men, and John Lewis Coffee Shop's Miriam House in Davenport (which serves mostly homeless men).
Twelve years ago, Ridge said, eight agencies provided services for the homeless, with little coordination. These days, the organizations are reaping the benefits of collaboration. "We have great partnerships within the service providers," she said. Joint grant applications have resulted in $4 million in federal funds, and the result is that while there are a lot of chronic homeless people in the Quad Cities, they're receiving services. "You don't see a lot of homeless people on the street in the Quad Cities," Ridge said.
You can find them in shelters and at social-service agencies, though. "The majority of people who are homeless in the Quad Cities are women and children," Ridge said. Other factors that often lead to homelessness, she added, are mental illness, addiction, domestic violence, and the costs of child care, transportation, and health insurance. Those are all problems local social-service agencies address with the now-threatened $450,000 in HUD Permanent Supportive Housing Program funds.
The Salvation Army's shelter at 301 West Sixth Street in Davenport has room for 56 people - 14 families and six single women. Christine Butterfield, director of social services for the Salvation Army, estimates that the shelter will have served 710 different people by the end of the year.
Yet she also notes the shelter turns people away because it doesn't have enough room. "We're usually at capacity," Butterfield said. By the end of the year, the Salvation Army will have denied 435 requests for shelter. (The same person might call several times a day, and each call is considered a request.)
People staying at the shelter meet with a caseworker weekly to develop and discuss follow-through on a plan to get the client back into housing. Clients are typically required to look for a job or go to work, and save money. The center operates on a "four strike" rule; if a client fails to follow through with an action plan for four weeks, that person is forced to leave.
Butterfield said between 40 and 50 percent of Salvation Army shelter clients stay a week and leave voluntarily. The remainder stay less than three months.
"Too often they leave too quickly and go to a place that's cost-prohibitive, and they can't afford it, and they're back here quickly," Butterfield said.
Most of the shelter's clients, she said, are single women who live with men in uncommitted relationships. When the man leaves or kicks out the woman, she can't afford housing. "They have nothing ... and they have to start over," she said.
John Lewis Coffee Shop's Miriam House, similarly, requires the people it serves to develop and follow-through with a plan of action. People are allowed to stay at the shelter for 30 days, and if they're making progress toward their goals, they can stay another 30, said Jim Naguina, outreach coordinator for John Lewis Coffee Shop. The goal, he said, is to "keep them urgent about what their challenges are." Miriam House has 21 mats for people to sleep on, but it's not uncommon for the shelter to have 40 to 50 men sleeping there. "Nobody gets turned away," Naguina said. "We'll find a space."
The goal is to work the people in the shelter into permanent housing. After staying at the shelter, they might move to transitional housing, where they pay $2 a day for a bed and share a room with other people.
Transitional-housing programs take referrals from shelters, but also from drug- and alcohol-rehabilitation, mental-health, and corrections facilities, said Mary VoPava, service coordinator with John Lewis Coffee Shop. People participating in transitional-housing programs can stay in them as long as two years, but they must work with a coordinator on goals such as employment and saving money. "There's more accountability," VoPava said.
A key component of transitional housing, and homeless services in general, is ensuring people are getting the help they need. VoPava estimated that 80 percent of people in transitional programs have some form of drug or alcohol addiction, and most women have experienced domestic abuse. Support services "give them more of a firm footing in dealing with their issues in healthy ways," VoPava said.
Ken Johnson said he has been homeless by choice since 1995. He was stranded in Davenport in August 2001 and is now in the John Lewis Coffee Shop transitional-housing program. He started working at Goodwill in October 2001, and "I worked myself into a full-time position in August.
"I'm back in the system now," he said. "My goal is my own place."
Still, there's a high recidivism rate among the homeless. Naguina guessed that perhaps 30 percent of homeless people get back on their feet and stay there - people who "get out and stay gone."
"The bottom line is, you're not going to tell people how to live," Butterfield said.
Strides in Affordable Housing
Any discussion about homelessness in the Quad Cities must eventually become a discussion about affordable housing. The stereotype of the homeless is people with mental illness, but the reality is that (according to the 1999 homeless count) 68 percent of Quad Cities homeless are employed in some capacity. They're earning money, but not enough to afford housing.
That's not surprising. A person working full-time at the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour can afford monthly rent of $268, based on the long-standing federal standard that a family should spend no more than 30 percent of its income on housing. Fair-market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the Quad Cities is $414 a month, while fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $512, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, using 2000 census figures.
And people on disability can't afford much in the way of housing, either. A single person on SSI can afford a housing cost of only $164 a month, based on the same federal guideline. "I got evicted in my room last April," said Ron Schoen, who is in John Lewis Coffee Shop's transitional-housing program and receives an SSI disability check of $545 each month. "I spent all summer by the river." Schoen has been on disability since 1992, and he's been off-and-on homeless since then, once spending a whole year on the street.
According to a needs assessment presented in 1999 by the Quad Cities Housing Cluster, 23 percent of households in Scott County earn less than 50 percent of the area's median income. Yet only 7 percent of housing in Scott County is assessed at a value that would be affordable to households at 50 percent or less of the median income. The Area Median Income in this area was $36,160 in the 1990 census, meaning that a household making 50 percent of that could afford monthly rent of $452. (According to the 2000 census, the current Area Median Income is $53,600. A household making 50 percent of that could afford rent of $670 a month.)
One can also see the need for more affordable housing in the federal Section 8 voucher program, in which the federal government offsets a portion of rental costs for low-income people. Currently in the Quad Cities, there's a four-year waiting list to get a Section 8 voucher, and that doesn't even account for the challenge of finding a landlord who accepts Section-8 recipients.
Collaboration has been important in making strides in the affordable-housing realm. When the State of Iowa encouraged local organizations to band together to apply for funds under the Local Housing Assistance Program (LHAP) about five years ago, the Quad Cities Housing Cluster came together. It and the related organization Scott County Housing Council spearhead local affordable-housing initiatives and have to-date gotten more than $2 million in funding, according to Rick Schloemer, the housing council's resource director.
That money has been used to create 330 units of new and rehabilitated affordable housing, Schloemer said. All of those units are affordable to households within 120 percent of the median - $64,320, based on the 2000 census - but participating organizations deal with a wide range of incomes. John Lewis, for example, is targeting housing for households below 30 percent of the median, while Vera French (which offers mental-health services) serves households generally below 50 percent of the median. Interfaith Housing, at the other end of the spectrum, creates housing for households in the 80-to-120-percent-of-median range.
John Lewis Coffee Shop, Interfaith Housing, and United Neighbors have collaborated on a program that offers $1,000 down-payment assistance as well as lead remediation. The organizations have assisted 60 families buying homes this year and plan to help another 90 this year.
John Lewis Coffee Shop is also rehabilitating 20 rental-housing units west of downtown Davenport, several of which should be ready in February or March.
There are more things afoot. Five entities from the Quad Cities have low-income-housing-tax-credit applications in with the State of Iowa, including one from John Lewis Coffee Shop that would involve the rehabilitation of two buildings, one at Taylor and Third streets and the other several blocks east on Third Street.
The Housing Cluster has as its goal for July 2002 to July 2004 to provide minor housing assistance (such as a down payment) to 500 households, build 25 new single-family homes, build 22 new housing units in multi-family facilities, rehabilitate 40 singe-family homes, and rehabilitate 35 units in multi-family buildings.
Money is the main reason social-service agencies are left to create affordable housing. "Developers don't fight us for dollars," said Kris Clements, director of property services for John Lewis Coffee Shop.
Ridge said that John Lewis makes $2,000 to $3,000 a year for each eight-unit affordable-housing complex it runs. People who offer low-income housing typically operate with very small margins, and that makes the projects unattractive to developers. "How many dollars does an entity that owns a building want to squeeze out of it?" Clements said.
Dark Clouds?
Yet with all the positive things happening in terms of low-income housing in the Quad Cities, there's a sense that it's a few steps forward and a few steps back. The news late last week that the Quad Cities could lose more than $670,000 in continued funding and $1.1 million for a new project (supposed to provide 18 units of housing for extremely special-needs homeless) was a devastating blow.
Add to that the state of the current housing stock in the Quad Cities, and the picture could be seen as bleak. John Lewis Coffee Shop has labeled a handful of buildings that provide low-income housing as endangered because of fire-code violations. If the problems aren't fixed, the buildings could close. It presents a quandary, because while advocates for low-income people don't want residents living in a dangerous building, they also don't want the housing to disappear.
"Two hundred units in our community are in great distress," Ridge said. "If those 200 units don't go out of commission, we're okay." But if they are closed or demolished, "We're in a holding pattern."
"That problem looms in the future, unless we do something about it," Schloemer said. The city needs to realize, he added, that there are consequences to active enforcement of the fire code. "You need to give some consideration to what you're going to do if you get to a point where you want to shut these places down, because there's no place for these people to go."
Yet even here there are positive signals that low-income people aren't willing to let their buildings be closed. At a meeting last week, several residents of the Schricker building expressed an interest in creating a neighborhood association.
And organizations such as John Lewis Coffee Shop and the Quad Cities Housing Cluster are aware of the problems, in addition to working on new low-income-housing projects. The goal, ultimately, is to have neither a homeless problem nor an affordable-housing shortage.
"One day we'd like to work ourselves out of a job," Ridge said.
