Joel Burgess

jburgess@citizen-times.com

ASHEVILLE - It was a lofty goal. It was a rallying cry. It was noble. And it didn't work.

Exhibit A is Gary Briggs.

Homeless, mentally ill, in and out of jail, Briggs is exactly the type of person the 10-year plan to end homelessness in Asheville and Buncombe County was supposed to help. Instead, Briggs sleeps on the streets, bundled in a sleeping bag and clutching a knife. He's one of 509 homeless counted in a 2016 one-day tally. That's a higher number of people than were counted in 2005, the year the plan was written.

The local plan didn't fail alone. There are more than 200 current and past plans to end homelessness around the nation - and none have succeeded yet, a top homelessness prevention advocate said. It's not clear how much federal money was allotted nationally, though an estimate by the Citizen-Times, showed at least $15 billion was sent to local programs. One local homelessness expert estimated $10 million flowed to Asheville area agencies.

Plan advocates say that wasn't enough money and that federal officials who championed the plans left the communities across the country without the resources to carry them out. This region also faced an increasingly expensive housing market that has resulted in what is widely seen as a crisis for those on the economy's lower strata.

Critics of the plan say strings attached to federal funding hampered efforts.

"In Buncombe County, we have our own situation, and the things we need in Buncombe County maybe shouldn’t be dictated out of Washington, D.C.," said Micheal Woods, director of the region's biggest emergency shelter. Greater flexibility would have aided local efforts, he said.

Both proponents and critics say the plan achieved some good things. There's greater cooperation among charities and the government. And a population known as the "chronically homeless" has decreased. Those working in the field of prevention now say a greater commitment by the federal government has led recently to elimination of veteran homelessness in some communities.

The idea

The idea behind the plans started with surging homelessness in the 1980s. By 2000, high homeless populations seemed like the norm.

That year, wanting to push back against acceptance of large-scale homelessness, the nonprofit National Alliance to End Homeless wrote "A Plan: Not A Dream How to End Homelessness in Ten Years."

The document was meant to inspire and was "not really a detailed plan," said Steve Berg, alliance vice president of programs and policy.

"It was more of a guideline," Berg said.

To date, none of the 243 or more current or past plans around the country have succeeded, he said.

"The main strategies were to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place, get them housed faster and to make housing more affordable."

The liberal-leaning alliance found an unlikely ally with the administration of President George W. Bush, which saw the plan as a way to cut costs to services such as jails, ambulances and emergency rooms frequently used by the relatively small population of chronically homeless.

The government defines a person in that group as someone who has been homeless or living in an emergency shelter or in a place not "fit for human habitation" for a year, either continuously or on at least four separate occasions totaling 12 months over the last three years. A chronically homeless person would also have some kind of disability.

The money

Through the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Bush administration championed the creation of individual community 10-year plans. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was a key member of the interagency council and was the primary source of funding.

A HUD spokesman didn't respond to questions about spending or the success of plans, but an estimate by the Citizen-Times showed funding at more than $15 billion from 2005-2014. Money flowed to "continuum of care" services, which were locally created systems to provide a broad range of assistance, such as emergency shelters, mental health services and permanent housing. Nonprofits were the service providers and the main recipients of the money, which was funneled through local governments.

In Buncombe County, officials said they didn't know how much federal or local money had been spent in the decade of the plan, but Christiana Glenn Tugman, who heads the Asheville-Buncombe Homelessness Initiative through the city, said the continuum of care got $5 million over the last five years. That part of the initiative has been recognized as a national model.

Woods, whose emergency shelter, Western Carolina Rescue Ministries, received none of the funds but who participated in the local coordinated initiative, made an estimate that extended that $1 million a year to a total of $10 million.

One key part of the 2005 plan said there would be a "measurably reduced burden on courts, police, jail, EMS and emergency rooms."

Eleven years ago in Buncombe, 37 chronic homeless people cost the community over $800,000 annually in those services, the plan said. That amount didn't include more than 100 other people deemed chronically homeless.

City spokeswoman Joey Robison said Tugman and others were still analyzing the outcomes of the 10-year plan. Robison said they weren't sure whether total federal funding or a reduction in cost to public services would be part of that analysis.

The numbers

In 2005 when the plan was formulated, the number of homeless was calculated at 502 people, about 0.2 percent of the county population.

This year, the number was actually higher at 509 and was still 0.2 percent of the 248,000 people living in Asheville and the rest of the county.

That number would have been even higher had it not been for the efforts associated with the plan, according to Tugman, who said that in the last five years 1,100 homeless people had been housed.

Her office and nonprofits working on the initiative had greater success with the most difficult cases, said the homelessness initiative leader.

"The primary focus as far as actually ending homelessness was on the chronic homeless, and we made great strides toward that end," she said.

Numbers in 2005 showed 169 people in the chronic category, though Tugman said it was as high as 293 prior to that. The most recent count showed 72 chronically homeless.

The man

It's not clear whether Briggs was part of that count. But the 55-year-old Caldwell County native fits the description.

After a car accident caused a brain injury in 1983, Briggs said his already bad temper got worse and he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He went to jail in 2014 for what would be the first of several times because of assault or related charges, he said.

"If you come to that sleeping bag and think I won’t get you, you better think again. And once I get you, I’m going to get you good," he said showing the knife he sleeps with. "I ain't got nothing to lose."

He said he's been "on the street" for a year, and that medication helps his temper, but he has a hard time affording the pills and has difficulty remembering to take them. He said he wants to work so he can rent a place to live, but he forgets things he's been taught and said he would prefer if an employer arranged his room and board for him, since those are tough for him to manage.

"If you work, that way you ain’t doing this," he said, holding out an open hand, "'Hey, man gimme. Ma’am gimme.' That way you ain’t doing that. You are making your money. You’re in your crib, kicking back watching television. You can go fix yourself something to eat."

Tugman said she and other groups associated with the plan think they can help people such as Briggs by continuing an emphasis on a "housing first" approach.

"We believe we can eventually reduce that number to zero — or very close to it — by moving folks into housing before they reach the chronic stage," she said. "This will continue to be a primary focus of the new strategic plan."

The strategy

Controversial at first, the housing first model came to replace the idea of soup kitchens and emergency shelters as the best approach. The idea was that spending public funds to put a person in a permanent home would save money in the long run since that housed person would be using fewer charitable and taxpayer funded services. That person would also be spending less time worrying about finding a place to sleep and could concentrate on getting work or help with mental health issues.

Critics of that approach, such as Woods, say federal officials became fixated on the housing first model and made it the focus of funding, neglecting other strategies that might work better in different places.

There should be larger emphasis on poverty-prevention programs, since being poor is what leads to homelessness, the shelter director said. Some who come to the shelter need a job and "transitional housing." Then they are better able to make the step to independence and permanent housing.

Labeling someone with a disability and putting them into taxpayer-funded housing is appropriate for some people, but for others it can be a convenient trap, he said, where they are secure but face the penalties of losing benefits if they try to move on.

"They consider it a win when they get someone off the street and put them in subsidized housing. Now that person is forever on that. And if they ever do anything to get out off that, they actually lose that security."

Others, though, say housing first does work and doesn't need to be a form of "velvet handcuffs," forever trapping those who benefit.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, a community of over 1 million people, there were 1,800 people counted as homeless in 2008. This year, that number's dropped to 1,000, said Dean Klein, director of the county's Office to Prevent and End Homelessness.

Like Buncombe, Fairfax, which is next to Washington, D.C, is facing an extremely tight and expensive housing market. It cracked that problem, in part, by facing the real estate issues head on, said Klein.

"One of the things we did was establish a housing locator network. When there were federal resources available... maybe four or five years ago, we established a pilot that hired staff that had skills in securing apartments," he said. "Their core professional expertise was in real estate, they were former brokers or other professionals in the business."

It worked so well that his office began to encourage every nonprofit that got federal funds through the county to drop a social worker and add a real estate specialist.

A large budget made hiring personnel easier. This year, Fairfax got $8.3 million from HUD, about eight times that of Buncombe, and has an overall homelessness prevention budget of $13 million this year including state and federal funds.

The funding difference was not lost on local officials such as Tugman who said flatly, "that would be nice" to get that kind of support.

The new plan

She and other prevention officials said funding has in fact picked up since 2010, though, the emphasis has shifted. Under the administration of President Barack Obama, overall allocations including the continuum of care support have climbed from $3.8 billion to a proposed $5.5 billion over the last seven years.

The focus now is on ending veteran homelessness, something that is an easier bipartisan pitch. Chronic homelessness, children and youth as well as an overall end to homeless are also on the list, said Amy Sawyer, who first worked on the Asheville-Buncombe plan before becoming a regional coordinator for the interagency council.

"We can actually demonstrate that with the right investment with the right implementation we can end veteran homelessness," Sawyer said.

That has happened in places as New Orleans, Philadelphia and Winston-Salem, she said.

"Now there are mayors, there are people from the VA medical center, people that are together saying we will end homelessness."

She and those such as Woods, though, will continue to disagree about whether that is a realistic goal.

"It can be reduced but not eliminated," he said.

"There are too many factors that contribute to people being homeless. You have people experiencing traumas every day, mental health issues, abuse, divorce."

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