Latest news with #RyanHertz
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
COVID-19 Five Years Later: Demand for food & shelter remains high in Metro Detroit
PONTIAC, Mich. (FOX 2) - Half a decade has passed since the COVID-19 pandemic stopped the world in its tracks, with its effects still being felt years later. The backstory The week of March 10, 2025 marks five years since the pandemic broke out, and Metro Detroit pantries and non-profits were met with long lines of people in need of food. Years later, the demand still has not gone down. What they're saying That is what the president and CEO of Lighthouse, Ryan Hertz, told FOX 2. "A lot has happened in those 5 years. At the same time, it feels very recent," he said. Hertz says they immediately felt the impact of the pandemic back in 2020. "It was overwhelming," he said. "Our staff was definitely tested, and I'll just say that during that period of time it was extremely stressful." Stressful because they had to quickly figure out how to keep their high-risk volunteers and clients safe so they don't get sick, and figure out how to re-work their emergency housing services. "As well as moving from providing about 500 households a week with emergency food and groceries, to about 5,000 a week," Hertz said. Big picture view He's grateful to the community for donating to their online campaign at the time. It reached $3.5 million, which they were able to use for a few years. But now the money is drying up, and the demand for food and shelter is still high. "Families with children are the largest growing demographic experiencing homelessness in this country and locally," he said. "We're really trying to target making sure that children in displaced households do not have to experience the trauma of being unsheltered." Hertz says homelessness is the highest it's been both nationally and locally. With dollars from the CARES Act and American Rescue Plan dwindling, along with community donations, leading to the meeting of the growing demand has gotten harder. "We are accustomed to scrambling to pull together what resources we can to do what we can for people in need in our community," he said. What's next Pivoting has proven to be crucial for them. It's what they'll continue to do, especially with recent freezes and unfreezes coming from the Trump administration. "I have confidence that, regardless of where things go, we will be able to find creative ways to deliver on our mission. It just might look differently than it has at other times," he said. He says the uncertainty is the scary part because people still need to be fed. If you'd like to know about how you can give, you can tap here. The Source FOX 2 talked with the non-profit group, Lighthouse and used information from previous stories.
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
