ANDREW HEID AND DANICA NOVGORODOFF/YH

Making the move off the streets for good

Ed was 20 years old when he first "got homeless," as he puts it. "I was living at my sister's house," he remembers. "They were drinking and drugging and fighting, and they took it out on me—they put me out."

Ed spent more than 20 years as a homeless alcoholic. He worked odd jobs or collected cans and bottles, spending nights on the street or in a shelter. Most of the time, he says, "I was so drunk I didn't know where I was, I didn't know who I was." One morning Ed woke up underneath a car. The car's owner got in and would have started the engine if an onlooker hadn't noticed Ed. "If he hadn't yelled, I would have been dead," Ed says.

Finally, Ed had enough of life on the streets. "I got sick and tired of being sick and tired," he says. "I was tired of going out and trying to find a drink all the time. I didn't care about myself." He went through alcohol treatment at the Grant Street Partnership and then lived at Davenport House, a transitional living facility, for two years.

Ed is 57 now. He lives on disability payments he receives for his bad back. He has had a place of his own for two years and two months: a boxy studio apartment, neat and sparsely furnished. He has his own TV and stereo. He even has two suits in his closet. Things we take for granted—cooking, paying bills, saving money—Ed is doing for basically the first time. He's even planning a vacation to Canada this summer. "My dreams are coming true," he says.

Ed's dreams wouldn't come true in a normal apartment. He lives in the Cedar Hill Apartments on State Street, an experiment in "supportive housing." Of Cedar Hill's 25 units, 13 are set aside for "dual-diagnosis" cases (mental illness and substance addiction), five for people who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless, and seven for those with incomes below $20,000. The residents pay 30 percent of their income as rent. A full-time case manager keeps in touch with them and refers them to any necessary support services.

Ed is lucky—hundreds have applied to live in Cedar Hill. He's lucky he got out of the shelter system and found a series of service programs that worked. Although recent controversy has focused on New Haven's homeless shelters, a place to sleep for a night is not a place to sleep for good. To this end, the city offers a bewildering array of programs for substance abuse, mental illness, job training and placement, and housing.

"Shelters have their place in the short term, but people need support in the long term," Janice Elliott, Connecticut program director for the Corporation for Supportive Housing, said. "There's a lot of attention and focus on what happens at the shelter level, but they're intended to be an emergency resource, not a permanent one. We have to move beyond and ask, How do we get people out of the shelters? How do we keep them out?"

Beyond shelters

The first step to getting out of the shelter system is often treatment for substance abuse or mental illness—or both. "Mental ill-ness and substance abuse have traditionally been thought of as different pieces of the puzzle, but we're seeing that they overlap more and more," Alison Cunningham, director of the Columbus House shelter, said. City figures estimate that 50 percent of New Haven's homeless suffer from both severe mental illness and substance addiction.

ANDREW HEID/YH The Cedar Hill Apartments, at 1465 State St., are a HUD-sponsored experiment in "supportive housing."

Wilhelmina fit the dual-diagnosis description. Now 46, she lived on the streets of New Haven for 10 years off and on, plagued by depression and alcoholism. "The depression goes back to my childhood, but I never understood it or realized it or knew what it really meant," she said. "Whenever I set out to do something, I couldn't seem to do it on my own. I'd get jobs sometimes, but then I'd mess up at work, get fired, then workfare would cut me off, and since I couldn't pay my rent I'd be homeless again." Wilhelmina eventually made it to transitional housing—longer-term,

boarding-house-style facilities that help people get treatment and jobs and find permanent homes—but that experience ended up discouraging her even more. "I was living with people who were very hostile and violent. They didn't support me in any way whatsoever," she said. "They didn't seem to care."

Dennis Phelan is the director of Davenport House, a transitional living facility for men, and he says the need for effective women's transitional housing is being addressed. By July 1, a new, 16-bed facility for women, owned by Columbus House, will open on Howard Avenue.

Wilhelmina attributes her move off the streets and into Cedar Hill to two factors. First, she decided to get sober on her own. Second, she got a permanent caseworker through a project called Access to Community Care and Effective Services and Support (ACCESS). In the 1980s, when reducing the federal government was politically fashionable, an experiment was designed to streamline social services. ACCESS attempted to "integrate" social service providers by creating meta-organizations to help them communicate and cooperate. The government chose 18 cities and applied integration strategies to nine; the other nine formed the experiment's control group, which received the same amount of staff and funding without any attempt to integrate their services. No formal structural change took place in New Haven, but more staff and dollars were applied, to see if structural change in the other cities was really having an effect. Many Cedar Hill residents still have an ACCESS case worker with whom they keep in touch.

As it turned out, services integration didn't seem to affect clients, said Robert Rosenheck, a Yale professor of psychiatry and public health and the director of the Veterans' Administration's evaluation center. Rosenheck supervised the outcome study for ACCESS in New Haven. Even in the "integrated" cities, Rosenheck said, "People benefited from the ACCESS study, but they didn't benefit from services integration. They benefited from having case managers to get them through the system, and money for housing."

"The way to get help to individual clients is not necessarily by having administrators from the different agencies talk more to each other—it's to have people on the ground initiating contacts," Rosenheck concluded. "Cooperation is fostered by sustained contact, when people know they're going to be dealing with each other over the long term." The moral of the story: anything is possible with long-term, one-on-one human interaction—and plenty of cash.

Making a house a home

Six of New Haven's neighborhoods got a cash boost two years ago when they were designated HUD Empowerment Zones (EZ). Alma Ayala, CC '86, the city's director of human services, said the EZ will focus on job "linkage": "There's a lot of focus on bringing businesses to the city, but then no one pays attention to who's getting those new jobs," she said. "This is the first time in recent history that the city has made a commitment to a policy of not just creating jobs, but making sure low-income, unemployed residents get connected to them."

But Sherri Killins, president and CEO of the Empowerment Zone Corporation, isn't sure the homeless will benefit directly. "Anybody who's homeless faces a lot of difficulties when it comes to getting employment, such as not having an address or a place to live," she said. "It's not just job skills. You need housing."

Most issues surrounding homelessness inevitably return to housing. It may seem an obvious point, but if homeless people had homes, they wouldn't be homeless. And in New Haven, finding a home isn't easy. "What we're remarkably bad at is that we do not respond to a homeless person quickly," said Bob Solomon, a Yale Law School professor who is taking time off to work as director of the New Haven Housing Authority. "We have 2,400 people on our waiting list [for public housing], and no priority is given to the homeless." Getting off the list can take several years.

It's not that New Haven doesn't have public housing—the city owns 3,100 units, inhabited by over 10,000 people, and administers another 3,200 units through public-housing vouchers. "About one-sixth of the New Haven population uses public housing—the greatest percentage in the country," Solomon said. But since New Haven has all the public housing—and all the social services—in the entire region, homeless from surrounding communities tend to make the Elm City their home.

CAYTE PUSHKAREVA/YH Soup kitchens like this one make homeless people's lives easier in the short term, but they don't attack the roots of hommelessness.

Meanwhile, "the suburbs do nothing," Solomon said, and they have no reason to. "The federal government needs to give incentives to developers to build low-income housing in the suburbs. There are virtually no incentives on the state level, so the suburbs make it expensive to build housing projects, or they use exclusionary zoning to keep projects out." In the '50s and '60s, the middle class fled to the suburbs, leaving behind those who couldn't afford to move. Inner-city housing deteriorated as the city lost tax revenue. Then, in the '80s, cities became trendy again—suburbanites moved back, gentrifying the city and driving up rents, resulting in a reduction in available low-income housing. The poor still had nowhere to go, and meanwhile, public assistance remained at the same level or faded out. Now cities like New Haven face a devastated infrastructure, declining population, and hordes of poor people with no affordable housing.

Lobby groups like the Partnership for Strong Communities are pressuring the state to unfreeze its budget surplus and apply funds to projects like a housing trust fund, which would set aside $50 million for low-income construction loans. The Partnership is also pushing for $2 million in additional supportive housing funds from the state. "People assume that all you need is to get housed and everything will be all right," Robinson said. "But if these people"—people like Wilhelmina and Ed—"didn't have support, they would not be housed. It's not just giving people an apartment—it's being there for them." This combination of services and housing is "supportive housing," the latest buzzword in social work.

Cedar Hill is one of 12 HUD-funded supportive housing experiments in the state. It's now in its third year. "The first evaluation was completed in November, and it shows terrific results thus far," Elliott said. "Now we know it works, but we have to push the legislature." Of Cedar Hill's 25 original residents, two have died. One got a public-housing voucher and left. Five relapsed. One got a job and began making so much money that 30 percent of her income would be better spent on non-subsidized digs. Eleven of the original residents still live there.

"It's a simple concept, but it's hard to do," Elliott said. "Groups think of themselves as housing providers or service providers, but you need both pieces."

Money talks

Who do we call "homeless," anyway? "If someone's living on the street or in a shelter, you'd probably say they're homeless," Solomon said. "But what if they're literally crashing with someone they know? What if they're doubling up with their family because they can't afford their own place?" Homelessness is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from plain old poverty.

At the root of New Haven's housing crisis is a larger economic problem. "People have jobs, but their income doesn't support them," Cunningham said. "The unemployment rate is the lowest it's ever been, but people are making nowhere near what it takes to live in this area. Those who are capable of holding jobs above the minimum wage sometimes get established and move out [of Columbus House], but not a lot of people coming through here are highly skilled."

According to Rosenheck, these workers are being edged out of the Information Age, as fewer and fewer unskilled jobs are available. "It's a function of the changing economy, in which the uneducated do worse and worse," he said. "The economy is increasingly technologically based." Although he believes public support can help, he acknowledges that there's a dilemma involved. "Do you provide poor people with goods and services to make them not poor? The worry is that you'll sap their incentive to do it themselves."

The homeless are simply our most visible reminder of a much deeper problem in society. "Homelessness is not the biggest problem, it's just the most visible," Ward One Alder Julio Gonzalez, CC '99, said. "The problem people don't want to face is the working poor—people who are employed but can't live on their wages."

Gonzalez, who has made homelessness his signature issue, believes the situation will continue to deteriorate until it seeps into the region's wealthier areas, forcing them to acknowledge the reality of poverty. "Eventually, New Haven will not be able to sustain economic growth, and it will start hurting the suburbs," he said. But progress will only come when those with economic clout speak up.

Connecticut has plenty of rich suburbanites, but they have yet to demand the changes that could benefit the urban poor. According to Dennis Phelan, 100,000 millionaires live in the state, which has the highest per capita income in the country. Yet Connecticut ranks 30th in charitable giving. "It's a sad discrepancy," he said.

It all comes down to money—having it, not having it, and giving it away. Social services are constantly wrangling for funds, and politicians are constantly making empty promises. For example, New Haven was originally promised $10 million a year for its Empowerment Zone initiatives. The first year, that was cut to $3 million; this year, it was $3.67 million. Next year, the group is budgeting for $10 million again, but there's no telling what might happen in Congress—again.

"Money is the biggest barrier to helping the homeless," Cunningham said. "You turn around once, and there are funding opportunities—you turn around again, and they're taken away." Where, in her opinion, should the money come from—the city, the state, the federal government, private organizations? "I don't care where the money comes from," she said. "Everybody needs to pitch in to create solutions."

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