Barwin Discusses City Plan For Homelessness (extended interview)

Posted by Jacob Ogles on Tuesday Apr 7, 2015 10:39 pm

The Sarasota City Commission this week approved an eight-point plan to address homelessness, including exploring a Housing First policy and private sector support to tackle issues facing the chronically homeless. City Manager Tom Barwin spoke in depth with SRQ about the plan.

Why are you confident this plan is the right approach? To be able to impact the problem, you need to be able to understand its causes, and to lay out the city and community response over 26 or 27 years. The city has really stepped up historically, with the Resurrection House and the Salvation Army. The problem has evolved, and for a variety of reasons, the needs have grown. Frankly, the numbers are higher than those institutions can satisfy, especially when you consider those people who can’t utilize those institutions. But a big element of the plan is to focus more directly on providing housing—100 units of permanent supportive housing and 100 units of transitive housing—while also calling for more units to be built throughout the county. We will see if there is support for that in the community. The current approach, though the costs are hidden, is very expensive, and we are starting to put alternatives on the table and backing those up with the experience we have had here, especially on the streets in the last nine months.

Why is this approach better than the come-as-you-are shelter concept that never came together? What was proposed was more or less a jail diversion facility. We’ve toured those, including the one in Pinellas County and have gone to the one in San Antonio. What was proposed and where it was proposed would have further concentrated the chronic homeless challenge in a very small geographic area. The side of the coin that Dr. [Robert] Marbut [a homeless consultant hired by the city and county] was presenting was that we need to have that where the jail and services are. But the other side of the coin that we are familiar with because we lived with it for 26 or 30 years is that when you concentrate all of the services in a small area, the area gets overwhelmed with the challenge. Just walk down the street where these facilities are located. The way the shelter was described, we were talking 250 beds and people coming and going whenever they want. I don’t believe it was a not-in-my-backyard attitude, but a healthy skepticism about the approach and its possibilities for being successful. 

But what makes Housing First a successful model than a shelter model? It is 180 degrees different, and really follows more of a pattern used in how the mentally handicapped situation was addressed with the closure of mental health institutions. It’s more of a scattered approach, and more of a mainstream and holistic approach. The proof is in the pudding. It’s working in other parts of the country. A lot of people early on, including myself, were somewhat skeptical, but when you do a deep dive into this issue, it actually is a prudent and fiscally responsible approach both on the human side and the financial side.

How do you make sure this effort doesn’t fall by the wayside the same way parts of the Marbut plan did? We have put nine months of intensive effort, research and strategies on the table, and suggested actions with specific goals. Now let’s see what we can get done. All of us need to take a deep breath and get into the details and see what we need as a community to work on. We need to find common ground and look for win-win scenarios. What we suggest is less expensive than what was on the table before, though it may not look like that at first blush. It will save in the medium and long run while providing a much more human kind of compassionate approach.

The persistent issue through all discussion has been the chronically homeless. How will you work with that population? There are some with very troubled situations, and there is an important need for mental health beds, and eventually for a small number of cases, court-directed diagnoses and treatments. But 93 percent of our survey respondents living on the street say they don’t want to live on the streets, which I hope is a myth buster.

How much financial burden in this plan can the city take on? We will hire somebody to lead the effort and interface with faith-based philanthropic and community groups interested in the issue, and work with other governmental entities to implement. We have to raise money for rent, gas and have a person working with agencies. We have to start to identify where the units are. This is not about putting them all in one apartment complex. We have also suggested a private decor role and hope the Chamber will begin a conversation and how we can construct low-income housing. We need to get to that part of it. A healthy community needs a whole entire dance of housing needs met. We do god with luxury housing, and even middle-income housing but are kind of weak on emergency, transitional and low-income housing stock. There are tremendous innovations in architectural and building materials if we are creative and can exhibit flexibility in our zoning codes. It’s one thing for a consultant to parachute in and present a cookie-cutter plan, and another thing for a very experienced community and its many actors who were involved in tackling the tough issue to draft the appropriate solutions that will work where they live. We can take everything we learned in the past couple years, including the Marbut experience, and add to it where there were some gaps. 

After the last conversation devolved, how do get everyone to cooperate with this vision? The most important thing is for everybody who wants to participate in finding solutions to discuss the issue with information and facts in a civil tone, and continue to challenge each other with better information. If we approach it that way we should all be confident we will make progress and improve upon this current approach. It doesn’t mean concentrating the challenge and all services in a small area. Don’t penalize the wonderful organizations that have stepped up to the plate by dumping a greater burden on that. We need less pressure on them, not more.  And we need a scattered and regional, holistic approach. Our point-in-time surveys show we have about 1,000 homeless people in the county, and about 300 in the city at any given time. That means about a third of the chronically homeless are highly visible in the city. It;s a challenge though out the county, if we want to be honesty about it, and deal with it wherever it is and let’s stop funneling it into one square mile or two square miles. 

How do you target the chronic cases? There are three primary groups in that area that have to be addressed, and one is the toughest one, but it fortunately is the smallest group. That is those who are living and dying on the streets with severe mental problems. We had two people die here in the last two weeks. You’ve been around town to know a handful are around who are clearly delusional. That may be bipolar or schizophrenic. It’s amazing they are able to stay alive on the streets, but they are there. They need to be handled in the mental health systems, and we need the facilities where if they won’t voluntarily participate they are going to have to be cpurt-ordered or directed to treatment, which is the way it used to work. I was a street cop and was involved with that process and it worked well. It’s not an awful Big Brother approach. It’s a compassionate society using its tools to help people be healthy. Our survey showed 55 percent of homeless self-report significant drug and substance abuse problems, and yes, we see in this case a supportive housing. They need an opportunity to be stabilized, which is less expensive that the current approach of revolving door EMS runs, emergency room visits and jail. That group can be addressed with more housing and we think we’ll see more success. The third group is people relatively new to the streets, who have been there a matter of weeks or months. If they are stabilized in housing much more quickly than we have done, they will not be on the streets for years and the problems will become more manageable. 

How does the financial burden for all of this get sorted out? It’s important to understand how government is organized in Florida. Mental and physical health is officially the legal responsibility of the county health department, but they are under-resourced, and Florida is ranked 49th out of 50 states in funding for mental health, so we feel their pain and we are dealing with the results of that. The other big spender is the criminal justice system. When behaviors deteriorate into antisocial and criminal be gal, its criminal justice who is left to resound. The police do initial responses, and then it’s the courts and ha;. The lion’s share of those costs is covered by us county tax payers, and city taxpayers are also county taxpayers. The other cost is emergency responses and hospital costs, and Sarasota Memorial tells me $1 million in non-reimbursable revenue goes to homeless and transients who continue to revolve through the hospitals. Sophisticated policy suggests that we figure how to reduce those resources, but there are so many embedded costs that it will be a challenge. It won’t be a switch you can flip on tomorrow.

But this is a plan being advanced by the city. Can city officials expect the burden to be undertaken by other entities? The city has been investing heavily, and that is something the rest of the world needs to understand. We have 180 volunteers are the Resurrection House and that’s run on a $600,000 a year budget. The Salvation Army has a $9 million budget and 35 to 40 employees run a shelter there. And then there are our police officers and community residents and businesses interacting with this community daily. We are funding teams on the street that have been making really great gains. I spend a lot of time on this, and the police chief spends a lot of time on this. The business district spends time on this. I think it’s time that is factored in and appreciated. We have a system in place where folks end up in downtown Sarasota no matter they were arrested, and when they are let out it’s in downtown. We see a limited infrastructure that can’t take on any more. This needs to be diversified and decentralized. There is so much angst and frustration about this challenge. What we put on the table are the best practices we have seen and heard of. We will see where people put their resources, and if we get better ideas, so be it. Let’s hear them. And if folks don’t support a renewed, strategic and we hope smarter approach, then maybe we are not as compassionate of a society or a community as I think we are.

Filed under Government

Tags:   featured  Housing First  Robert Marbut  Sarasota City Commission  Tom Barwin

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