Chattanooga stepping up its efforts to house the homeless

Tammie Carpenter, right, and Theresa Biggs, center, ask Josh Lillard questions at a homeless camp during the annual Point in Time Homeless Count on Jan. 25 in Chattanooga. Volunteers conducted surveys of homeless individuals and families in the region to provide data that will help service providers to offer targeted care and outreach.
Tammie Carpenter, right, and Theresa Biggs, center, ask Josh Lillard questions at a homeless camp during the annual Point in Time Homeless Count on Jan. 25 in Chattanooga. Volunteers conducted surveys of homeless individuals and families in the region to provide data that will help service providers to offer targeted care and outreach.

Building on lessons learned from its push to end veteran homelessness, Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke's administration is stepping up with more energy and resources to get more people housed.

The first step is to fix a broken system, Tyler Yount and Sam Wolfe from the mayor's office told city council members during their strategic planning session Tuesday.

That means rejecting traditional wisdom, creating effective partnerships with people and agencies and rebuilding trust among people who may have completely lost faith in the system.

Yount is director of special projects and Wolfe is the city's new homeless program coordinator.

To start, the city needs to know who is homeless, by name. Wolfe told council members the 2017 Point in Time Count found 576 people who said they were homeless. But, he noted, the Homeless Health Care Center across from the Community Kitchen served 3,000 people last year. That's a significantly larger population.

The 2018 count was conducted Jan. 25 and the results have not yet been tallied, Yount told council members.

The old way of doing things called for providing services to the homeless to get them ready for housing. Now, the approach is "housing first," Yount said. That helps people stay out of jails and emergency rooms, preserves their dignity and makes it easier to deliver the other things they need - from physical and mental health care to training, jobs, transportation, or other needs, he said.

He and Wolfe said the city wants to use the approach it developed to combat veteran homelessness and apply it either to the whole homeless population or subgroups such as families, women or youth. That approach focused on case management, so each homeless vet had someone focused on helping him or her connect to the array of services needed.

"If we can do that with veteran homelessness, we can do that with anyone," Wolfe said.

There's a need to break down divisions and get various agencies, organizations, businesses and individuals involved in the problem working together in a systematized approach, they said. That could include everything from persuading more landlords to accept rent vouchers to offering businesses plagued by panhandlers a way to stop the problem.

Council members had a lot of questions, from whether homelessness is growing or shrinking in the city to how much shelter is available, what funding sources could be tapped and how to deal with people who choose to be homeless or whose financial stability is precarious.

The council has its own committee looking at homelessness, and several members have said they see more and more people in their districts on the street or living in tent camps.

"This is a very passionate subject for me. I don't think we're doing enough," Councilman Darren Ledford said. "What do we do as a community?"

Stacy Richardson, Berke's chief of staff, said the administration "heard loud and clear from the council" its concerns about homeless people in the city and is taking the lead on working to solve them.

She said the briefing from Wolfe and Yount was meant as "an educational session that kicks off the first of many discussions."

Contact staff writer Judy Walton at jwalton@timesfree press.com or 423-757-6416.

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