Stability Site

• James’ 2 second overview of the Stability Site:
  • Somewhere between shelter and transitional housing
  • Have to be a City of Tacoma resident - get there through Tacoma Rescue Mission Search and Rescue Street Outreach
  • Has a shelter component, but also lots of services like a transitional housing  program.
  • People sleep in their own tent or shelter
  • We started this group as a way
• Faatima Lawrence, Catholic Community Services - FaatimaL@ccsww.org
• Have 24 pallet shelters and 61 tents – 85 total units.
• Facility has
  • Showers
  • Laundry
  • Transportation around town provided by the Salvation Army
• Volunteers come
  • With meals
  • Bible study
  • Daily Meaningful Activity programs
    • Tacoma strength – a personal trainer meets with a group of our residents and helps them work out, eating habits, trainer to their needs.  It is a good turnout.  Case managers work with them and go work out with them.  Want the guests to know the staff and see them as part of their community
    • Gardening – just got some vegetables – have some raised beds so they can do some gardening.  We’ll move them inside with some growlights to do vegetables all year.
• Supportive Services
  • Had some turnover in the case management staff recently –
  • Have MHP that comes to the site, do peer support and case management
  • We refer out to MH agency if they want  to go somewhere else
  • Work to help them find housing
  • Connect them to substance use programs
  • Help them get ID and SSN
  • Whatever their goals are to get housed, we support
  • Dawn Bohl, Catholic Community Services
  • After care –
    • We stay connected with clients that exit to housing
    • Often they end up in areas without friends nearby – they may not know anyone or they isolate themselves.  It is a tough transition. 
    • We currently have 2 people in aftercare.  It isn’t a requirements, but something we offer.  We help with whatever they need. 
    • Faatima - Case management will talk with the landlords – we’ve helped folks not get evicted.  A client kept threatening to leave, and the case manager helped introduce them to their landlord, and then they connected with the neighbors and build community and was able to stay housed since 2017. 
    • Another client that exited but has stayed connected wanted to check in
    • Two women were exited from the stability site, and were exited a couple times because of not following the rules.  Both women contacted Melissa on Facebook, one getting married, the other finished their GED.   Both housed, and both were thankful for the Stability Site, as it was part of the path to getting and staying clean and sober.  Dawn – one lady married a gentleman from the stability site – they both exited at the same time and are now doing well together.
  • Valeo Vocation – has helped get jobs, some are working at the Salvation Army.  We appreciate everyone providing services at the site
  • There is a 90-day stay policy – lots of folks were happy just to be at the site.  The 90-day policy has been a boost to help folks start working on their housing.  At first they didn’t like the 90-day policy – but if they are working with their case manager, they can still stay.  Working can be small things.  For instance, a gentleman at the site – still working with case managers – was looking for his birth certificate.  He was taken from his tribe and adopted out to families – eventually kicked out of house and on streets since he was 15.  Can’t work because of no Social Security Number, and is looking for his birth certificate in Canada and US and all over.
  • Got someone a birth certificate and a green card
  • Needs –
    • Sundays, most Tuesday and Wednesdays, need more meal volunteers.  Salvation army does awesome – bringing breakfast many days.
    • Donations of water bottles – people take water to go – could use refillable and bottled water.
• Theresa – Curious about the employment opportunities you have.  Sometimes we have interns that are amazing – I don’t know what your requirements are.  Faatima – criminal history is looked at on a case by case basis.  Our human resources persons reviews the crime and ask the person about it.  A good explanation is often adequate.  For case management, employees need an Associates Degree or equivalent experience.  Pay is $17.82 for case management.  $16.64 for a generalist – a position that is security and making sure things are OK.  They staff the gate and get to know the residents so they know who belongs. 
• Al – I’ve never been to the stability site – and had a tour yesterday.  Over the period of time you’ve been involved with this program – what are some of the important things that have made the program work.  Faatima – we’ve found that people really just need space.  If folks are having an argument, we don’t always intervene.  With couples, we usually give folks their own tent.  Originally, many folks said they were couples just to get in the site.  or they came in and there were some Domestic Violence issues.  Having a separate tent for each person has been useful.  We do have couples in our pallet shelters.
• The pallet shelters are an incentive program. 
• Questions – who to talk to about delivering food?  Faatima – Emerald Gibson - emeraldg@ccsww.org
• Question – difference between tent and pallet shelter?  Faatima – tents are a 4 person tent in a somewhat climate controlled big tent.  The pallet shelters are very primitive tiny houses.  Have fans and heaters, also have electricity for charging things.
• Gerrit Nyland, Catholic Community Services of Western Washington – gerritn@ccsww.org
• You have in front of you the Stability Site Weekly report – the City is very interested in data about the site, and gets it on a weekly basis.
• The weekly Stability Site dashboard tells you a bit about where clients come from and where they go to. 
• The Client Exit summary is a bit of an odd chart – it is a count of the clients we exited to permanent housing, as well as clients that entered permanent housing at any point after exit from the site.  Kind of an abnormal statistic – but it shows the impact of the site.
• Al – what do you conclude about the effectiveness about the program?  Gerrit – what do I conclude about the effectiveness of the program with both me and the funder in the room?  That is the question? Well, this is a really vulnerable population –the most vulnerable population in the County – when I look at vulnerability of clients at the Rescue Mission, at the nativity House, around the County, these folks are really vulnerable.  I look at the data through this lens.  And the stability site isn’t a permanent housing program.  This is mostly a shelter, and slightly a transitional housing program.  But not like a transitional housing program, in that there isn’t funding to move them out into their own place.  Without the Stability Site, our community has little to offer someone unwilling to stay in the large shared living bays in traditional homeless shelters, and who have been unable to exit homelessness on their own? Where should these folks be to get some stability to work on housing – the site is very successful.  But, this is still a really expensive way to house people.  I often wonder if Permanent Supportive Housing would be a better use of funds.  But we don’t have funds to move them into Permanent Supportive Housing or Rapid Rehousing.  There is often an undercurrent in the City of “why are so few going into permanent housing”.  My answer is that we are paid to pay to keep folks safe in a shelter, and we don’t have funds for permanent housing.
• Al – do you have data that shows offsets of costs – what is saved by the community by these folks having safe shelter?  Gerrit – we don’t have great data on this right now – our community doesn’t share this data well.  I do have a project trying to look at medical costs of residents before and during their stay – a project with the Healthcare Authority.  But I don’t have that yet.  However, $40k is a good number of the costs to the community annually of someone who is the most vulnerable of the chronically homeless.  These are costs outside the cost of shelter.  I think shelter bed costs are around $20k per bed per year, but I’m sort of making that number up.  
• Maureen – the Continuum of Care is working on the strategic Plan for the next 5 years – it would be helpful to have some bullet points on how many permanent housing units per year we need to accommodate the need.  It seems to me the moment to put that stuff in.  James – that is exactly what we are working on now – Gerrit is feeding us those numbers.  Gerrit – yeah, we need about another 1,000 permanent supportive housing units to have enough becoming vacant to meet the inflow.  Talking County-wide.  I always talk county-wide, because the homeless system operates County-wide, although the City of Tacoma has to focus just on Tacoma.  And people move to Tacoma from other areas.  When you become homeless in Gig Harbor, you typically move to Tacoma.  That is a real thing.  And people move to Puyallup too – to become homeless there.
• Theresa – as someone who lives in a permanent encampment – this one 911 call in a month is an amazing number.  We get so many on our block.  Just the 3 EMS calls – these are really valuable that these folks are places where they can get services.  Many folks also struggle to be in a bay with lots of beds – they get their own space here.  I just really love you guys.  (it is mutual, Theresa –ed).  When folks moved into the site from the encampments, there was a narrative that they had never touched the homeless system before.  I didn’t find that to be true – what happened was many had a single connection with a shelter or some-such years back, but just one touch years back.  They engaged, but stayed homeless and didn’t really engage again.  Oh, Nativity House gets about 400 911 EMS calls per year – at a cost of some $400k.  It is a bit higher for the rescue mission.  A comparison of 40 calls at the nativity house in a month to just 3 calls at the stability site.  We are saving some money there.  It isn’t a pure apples to apples comparison, but there is something there.
• Maureen – if the economy stays stable, we need 1,000 units to address the folks at the stability site over a decade.  Gerrit – if I’m changing the homeless system across all of Pierce County, I’d have to change a $15M homeless system and turn it into a $35M homeless system – annual operating costs.  I’d also need 1,000 permanent supportive housing units.  Say 50% were tenant-based – where units are leased market rate from a landlord – and 50% project based, where a nonprofit owns the building – at some $200k per unit – some $100M in new housing construction. 
• Maureen – if we don’t talk about it, it won’t happen.  We need to start bringing these units out there.  Plymouth Housing and Bellweather have big project in Seattle.  We need to do that here.  Gerrit – I think a lot of us tell this story to anyone that will listen all the time.  I don’t sleep at night much, because I spend my day time talking to City Council member and funders, so my work has to be done at night.  Are we talking to the right people?  I don’t know.  How do we get this message out.  If you want to set a meeting up, I’ll come.  I have a whole song and dance. 
• Carolyn – I appreciate your data so much.  How does your stability site data line up racial with the larger homeless population? Gerrit – the stability site is whiter than the average homeless population.  Some of that probably has to do with the higher vulnerabilities of the people at the site.  We have a disproportionate number of lower vulnerability people of color experiencing homelessness because it takes fewer bad things for them to become homeless.  People of color have the same social network as white people, but when white people have a crisis, the social network has enough wealth to see them through.  A white person’s car needs new tires, and they can borrow the money from a brother.  The person of color has less wealth, so the same situation ends with no new tires, an unusable vehicle, loss of a job maybe, and homelessness.  I can slice the data anyway you’d like to look at it – comparing the stability site population broken down by race with the general homeless population and the general pierce county population.  I’ve not notice much in the way the homeless system responses differently to people of color vs. white people.  There are some differences – more people of color choose certain interventions, there are some minor blips in declines in the referral system, but by-and-large, there  aren’t significant differences in program outcomes, when you look at race.  However, returns to homelessness are a different story.  We see the same discrimination that causes disproportionality by race in the homeless system in returns to homelessness.  The same discrimination that drives homelessness is still present. 
• Nate – Lots of our homelessness has to do with the missing flop houses.  Gerrit – when you look at the exit rates at the Stability Site – some 40% - they map pretty good to a high service shelter.  At the Nativity House, we are lucky if we see 2% of exits to permanent housing.   Although some we never see some 40% again.  The rescue mission is better, but still only 5%.  To have nearly 40% is a pretty good story about what shoving resources into a place can do.  When you start stacking all the barriers to housing – an eviction where they owe a few thousand dollars, and bad credit and they are a sex offender, not to mention some of the demons they might be struggling with.