The death of two children while sheltering in a van with their family last month has prompted the city of Detroit to extend a housing hotline’s hours so people can get help around the clock and double its emergency shelter beds, among other changes to how the city responds to homelessness.
The problems in Detroit’s homelessness system that led to tragedy go well beyond the city limits. Homeless response systems across the region are confronting an ongoing — and longstanding — challenge: there aren’t enough resources to meet the need.
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As the number of families and children facing homelessness increases, the services meant to connect people with housing help are stretched thin, overwhelmed and underfunded, area providers say.
“The homeless service system is deeply under resourced across the entire continuum, from the day that somebody picks up the phone to call somebody for help around their eviction, to if they get evicted looking for shelter, to rental assistance for stopping the eviction, for rehousing people, for supportive housing for people. It’s all deeply under-resourced now,” said Ryan Hertz, president and CEO of Pontiac-based Lighthouse, which runs family and unaccompanied youth shelters and develops affordable housing.
Aside from during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hertz said he doesn’t recall a time when there were enough shelter beds to meet the scope of need. Emergency funds and a moratorium on evictions helped meet the need at the time. But now, it’s “significantly worse” than before the pandemic, he said.
If a person calls in the middle of the night for a shelter bed in Oakland County, it would be difficult for them to find a bed, said Kirsten Elliott, president and CEO of the nonprofit Community Housing Network. Shelters are typically full and waitlists are long, making it harder to help people.
“The safety net is taxed, and it is very thin, and the holes are very large,” she said.
It’s difficult to say for certain how many people need shelter versus the number of beds that are available, but what the available data does show is that from January to June of last year, there were 876 people experiencing homelessness in Oakland County. That same year, there were 327 year-round emergency and transitional housing beds in the county, according to a one night count in January.
Oakland County has multiple ways for people to enter its system, including going to a shelter and calling the county’s Housing Resource Center. After a person reaches out, they are assessed and prioritized based on need and placed on a list for openings at housing programs. This list, which is for people who are literally homeless or fleeing domestic violence, has about 400 people waiting for housing, such as rapid rehousing, permanent supportive housing and housing choice vouchers.
The Community Housing Network’s Housing Resource Center has enough funding to operate Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The center takes calls, texts, walk-ins and people can go to its website and fill out a form that asks about an individual’s housing needs. The center helped more than 16,000 people last year but that actually means 35,000 contacts, which includes follow ups and referrals. There are eight full-time and three part-time staff.
One gap in Oakland County is that there aren’t evening and weekend hours for this service, she said. That would cost another $100,000 or so. But making matters more difficult is that there aren’t enough shelter beds and affordable housing units either.
Over in Macomb County, a lack of transportation combined with the size of the county can make it harder for people to get to shelter, said Edward Scott, director of Macomb Community Action, an agency within Macomb County’s Dept. of Health and Community Services. If someone is unhoused in Armada Township, it may be difficult for them to get to a facility further south, he said.
“Many of us operate on regular business hours and homelessness does not and domestic violence does not, or human trafficking does not,” he said. There’s limited funding and there’s not enough housing stock, either.
In Macomb County, people facing homelessness can reach out to several access points, from shelters to a 24/7 mental health crisis hotline, to get assessed and added to a list and then matched to available permanent housing services, such as housing choice vouchers and other programs. That list has 192 people on it, as of this week. To get into shelters, people must contact those facilities directly for bed availability.
“If it were up to me, and there were unlimited resources, I would want to find a way for every facility that is a potential point of entry to be 24/7 somehow,” Scott said. “I think the reality is almost all of us are operating on pretty limited shoestring budgets with the resources we’re able to get, either through government sources or through philanthropy.”
Tasha Gray, executive director of the Homeless Action Network of Detroit (HAND) said it’s not enough to just extend hours.
“If you don’t have access to beds after hours, it’s not going to help … it just increases access to get on a list, but it does not increase access to get into shelters. … if we increase the hours, we also need to make sure that we’re actually going to have resources available to be able to refer people to, and that’s a hard conversation,” she said.
More than 2,700 experienced homelessness in metro Detroit on one night in January of last year.
The number of children and families experiencing homelessness has increased nationally and locally and service providers are trying to keep up.
The number of children experiencing homelessness last year — sheltered and unsheltered — reached the greatest number in a decade, according to a Free Press analysis of HAND data.
“The city, in particular, has really made changes to add more family beds to the system, but I think we’re experiencing family homelessness at a level far greater than the beds that are being added to the system,” Gray said. “In addition to that, it’s not just about adding beds to the system — because obviously for emergency shelter it’s temporary — it’s also being able to have the resources to get people out of the system.”
Lighthouse is raising money to triple the number of emergency shelter beds for families. The goal is to break ground on the first building as soon as this summer.
“We’ve seen kind of a slow trend of families with kids as a percentage of those facing homelessness increasing pretty much for the last 15 years, and it’s just gotten to the place where it’s really exponentially increased,” Hertz said.
Free Press staff writer Kristi Tanner contributed to this report.