Latest news with #CommunityHousingNetwork
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Columbus continues affordable housing fight as some funding drops
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – The City of Columbus will now have a more centralized approach to tackling its housing crisis. It's a plan that's been in the works for years and has now come together as a new division in the city. NBC4 spoke with a man who is almost 70 and spent last year living on the streets and in a shelter. Now, he's in a safe apartment, thanks to Community Housing Network (CHN), a non-profit that develops permanent supportive housing. Police provide updates on Mifflin Township shootout suspect On Monday, Columbus City Council moved to make stories like his more common. The legislation will centralize the work to combat the affordable housing crisis. 'I had my ups and downs; I had my good days and my bad days,' CHN resident Donald Hodge said. Hodge was living on the street, then in a shelter until March. Now, he's in a 55+ living facility built by Community Housing Network. 'Oh, my goodness, I was so happy,' Hodge said. 'I couldn't believe it.' 'It gives stability,' Community Housing Network CEO Annissa Lambirth-Garrett said. 'It allows individuals to have a place where they can focus on their personal well-being. They have a roof over their head, a basic need. Without it, how can you recuperate when you're coming home from the hospital? Or if you're someone who is suffering from a disability? How can you thrive and grow if you don't have a place to call home?' Pilot program testing tasers in Ohio's prisons; may expand statewide CHN is part of a group of organizations working to combat the housing crisis in Columbus. Now the city is making its work with these groups and on housing in general more centralized. 'It's a long time coming to have a place in the city whose main job is to make sure that renters have support and have someone looking out for them,' Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin said. The division will provide legal counsel to low-income tenants facing eviction, ensure people affected by emergency vacate orders are supported, and expand access to information that will help people stay in their homes. 'Now it just has a home where we can have folks that are able to identify when issues are coming around, have a place where we can send folks to engage with the city, and really a place that can hold folks accountable,' Hardin said. Work is already underway and hiring for the division will start at the end of June. Donatos to open fully-automated pizza restaurant at John Glenn International this month Council has also approved the last of the emergency rental assistance funds to be used to help Columbus residents facing eviction; the city approved $1 million, left over from pandemic-era federal funds. It represents the last of the second round of emergency rental assistance that was part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan. This money went to organizations helping keep people in their homes, from fighting back against evictions to direct payments to landlords. Now, the money is gone and the city is tasked with finding new ways to keep people in their homes. 'We will continue to make a forceful economic argument why we need to find a way to support, but there is a truth that we need the federal government to be a partner in this, we need the state government to be a partner in this,' Hardin said. Since the pandemic, Columbus has put out nearly $91 million in emergency rental assistance. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Transportation, hours, shelter beds among gaps in Oakland, Macomb homeless systems
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 and work to identify people living in their vehicles, among other changes to how the city responds to homelessness. The problems in Detroit's homelessness system that led to tragedy are apparent well beyond the city limits. Homeless response systems across metro Detroit are confronting an ongoing — and long-standing — challenge: There aren't enough resources to meet the need. 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 available data shows 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, Elliott 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 a shelter, said Edward Scott, director of Macomb Community Action, an agency within Macomb County's Department of Health and Community Services. If someone is unhoused in Armada Township, it may be difficult for them to get to a facility farther 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 last 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 people 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 highest 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. This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Shelter beds, hours among gaps in Oakland, Macomb homeless systems
