How Detroit helps its homeless population is getting an overhaul over the next 5 years as the city looks to boost services, increase the number of available emergency shelter beds and better provide support.
The need goes well beyond the people so many drivers pass on main roads and above freeways or who they see tucked on street corners: More than 1,500 people faced homelessness on a given night in Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park. Among them, roughly 200 people were unsheltered, living in places not meant for human habitation — out on the streets or in cars and abandoned buildings.
Over the course of a year, however, more than 8,500 people experienced homelessness and about 1,000 were households with kids. At the same time, the city’s homelessness system itself is squeezed. To fully meet the need of people estimated to experience homelessness in Detroit a year, the system needs to add at least 275 emergency shelter beds and 870 units of permanent supportive housing.
That’s according to a five-year plan the city of Detroit and its partners, including the Homeless Action Network of Detroit (HAND) and the Detroit Continuum of Care, released on Thursday.
The 119-page plan, developed over a year, is meant to serve as a roadmap to improve Detroit’s homelessness response system, which includes shelters and housing programs. That looks like improving shelter facilities, bulking up the housing supply and reducing the number of people sleeping outdoors, among other areas of focus.
“No Detroiter should go to sleep at night without a roof over their head and a safe, quality place to call home,” Julie Schneider, director of the City of Detroit’s housing and revitalization department, said in a news release. “With this plan, we commit to collaborating with our partners to improve programs so that residents who enter the homelessness system find services that respect their dignity, quickly connect them to housing stability, and put them on a path to fulfill their household goals.”
The detailed plan focuses on eight areas of improvement:
- Increasing the supply of affordable housing, engaging with landlords and funding new permanent supportive housing. There are currently 1,600 permanent supportive housing units, or 160 slots open a year, but the system needs hundreds more.
- Reducing unsheltered homelessness by ramping up street outreach teams who go out to people sleeping in uninhabitable places and connecting them to shelter and other housing services.
- Improving the quality of shelter facilities and case management. Each year, more than 3,600 households use emergency shelter or transitional housing programs, including 500 families with children. People stayed in shelters, on average, 471 days.
- Continuing to improve existing systems and programs, including the Coordinated Assessment Model (CAM) service — the main entry point for people to access shelter and other housing help. The CAM hotline, which now includes in-person services, sees 8,000 intakes from households facing homelessness each year.
- Increasing wages and benefits of staff in homeless service organizations, reducing turnover and providing trainings.
- Advocating for more federal, state and local dollars to improve homelessness services and housing programs. People facing homelessness have reported being treated poorly within programs.
- Creating a more just and equitable system by looking at the experiences of people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ groups and survivors of domestic violence, while also supporting the professional growth, within the homelessness response system, of people who have experience living without a home.
- Developing committees and strategies to implement the improvements laid out in the plan.
“The release of Detroit’s five-year improvement plan marks a critical step forward in addressing homelessness in our city,” said Candace Morgan, chair of the Detroit Continuum of Care Board, in a news release. “This comprehensive strategy not only highlights our commitment to ending homelessness but also ensures that we are providing sustainable, dignified solutions for our most vulnerable residents. This plan paves the way for a future where everyone in Detroit has a safe and stable place to call home.”
Barbara Poppe and Associates, a consulting firm, helped develop the plan. That process included interviews, listening sessions, observations of programs and focus groups. Last fall, the group published interim findings. People experiencing homelessness shared their encounters with the shelter system. They reported difficulty accessing shelter.
They had concerns about the physical conditions of shelters, with some reporting staying in basements with bugs and vermin and facilities with mold and leaking water. Some said that shelters have 10 families in one room and people have to sleep on chairs. Some shelters, others said, are not accessible for people with disabilities. The document released Thursday also includes quotes from people without their names.
“I am in a wheelchair and have a disabled child, we have to leave the shelter every day and wait in the neighborhood regardless of the weather until it re-opens … The shelter doesn’t have transportation that is wheelchair accessible, so I am on my own with my child,” one person said.
Detroit used about $436,000 in pandemic-related funding to develop the plan.
Over the past year, the city of Detroit has ramped up its homelessness safety net, including 24/7 street outreach, more shelter beds and a housing resource hotline. The increased services and outreach is supported with funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, as part of the city’s broader $203 million housing plan.
Recently, the city for the first time funded a street medicine team, which gets medical care out to people facing homelessness on the streets.
To read the full 5-year plan, go to https://shorturl.at/SwhiC. Implementation is underway, according to a news release.
“Detroit used about $436,000 in pandemic-related funding to develop the plan.” Why would it cost so much simply to develop a plan? That money could have been spent to help alleviate the problem.