Support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The Arkansas Times and Little Rock Public Radio.

And welcome to Arkansas Week.

I'm Don Scott.

Thanks so much for being with us.

Several factors are causing an increase in the number of Arkansans experiencing homelessness or who are on the verge of it.

That is according to the groups who provide assistance.

Families with children and senior citizens are those reaching out for help the most.

Joining me are leaders of three nonprofits from across the state.

First, we have been Goodwin and he is the executive director for our House in Little Rock.

We also have with us in Studio Spring Hunter, who is the executive director for the Conway Ministries Center.

And we have via Skype.

Chris, Joe wanted us and he is the executive director of the Hope Campus in Fort Smith.

And I appreciate all of you being with us.

We're going to dedicate this whole program to this topic.

It is so important really to enlighten and educate many people in our state who don't realize the problem that we have.

And I want to start with you, Ben, Just your first and initial thoughts of where we stand on this issue in the state.

Sure.

So the way I encourage people to think of homelessness is it's a symptom of a lot of other issues that we're dealing with in our society.

Poverty, domestic violence, lack of affordable housing.

There's a lot of different issues that we'll see in the form of homelessness.

But really there's other things that are driving that issue.

And then the other key thing that I encourage people to think about when they think of homelessness is there's probably a mental image that gets conjured up in people's minds when they hear that word of a specific type of person, but just know that whatever type of person you picture there, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

And at our house, the number one group that we see needing our services, experiencing homelessness or at risk of it is families with children.

And they often are not the ones that you see on the street.

They're not the ones that you may come to mind when you think about homelessness, but that's the biggest need and their challenges are the most complex, but the potential and helping them get out of homelessness, the positive impact there is the greatest.

And so that's where we focus most of our efforts at our house.

So much to discuss Spring.

I want to move to you for just introductory thoughts on on where we stand and what you see on a daily basis.

Yeah, I think that Arkansas being a rural state requires us to look at homelessness a little bit differently.

So we've had systems in place for years as a nation on how we collect data on our homeless population and how we count our homeless population.

And I think those have the potential to work in an urban center, but they really don't capture accurate information that reflects the rural states.

And our rural states are the ones that have you know, we are topping the charts in poverty.

We're topping the charts in food insecurity.

And yet we're not capturing quality data on homelessness in rural states like Arkansas.

And we have to come up with a better way.

And, Chris, let's get with you in Fort Smith.

What are the trends that you're seeing there?

We're seeing a couple of different trends.

One of them being our middle age populations are entering homelessness for the first time ever.

It's usually the folks that are have a disability income as an example, and I'll say 755 a month, and they've been accustomed to living on dollar amounts for several years now.

And as inflation has seen an uptick, I have seen an uptick.

It's kind of forced them into homelessness.

No fault of their own.

Ben, I want to get back to you on our house.

How many can our house accommodate right now?

In terms of residence, we can accommodate about 110, and we stay full every single night.

And but and we have to and in fact, we say so for that.

We speaking of data that's being mentioned, you know, collecting better data, we try to track the need in part by the number of people who call or come seeking our shelter services.

And every single month it's more than 400 people who are trying to check into our shelter and only a tiny fraction of them are able to.

And that includes more than 90 families with children.

Wow.

If you're turning them away, then where do they go?

Well, it's a it's a mixed bag.

So here's a few things that we do.

One is we've over the past ten years of tried to get better at working with with families, even if they aren't staying in our shelter.

So every day we're engaged in the lives of at least 80 to 90 additional families beyond those who live in our shelter, providing case management, childcare, access to workforce programs and other supports to help them, you know, get safely housed and achieve their goals.

The other thing we're doing is expanding.

So we're currently in the process of undergoing a significant expansion.

By the by next year we will have doubled in size and will be able to house more than 200 people each night and expand our supportive services.

The third thing we do is we work with every other provider in the community.

I think if, you know, I think there's some great people and great groups working in this area.

We work well together.

We do the best we can, but at the end of the day, there just aren't enough good options.

There's not enough resources, there is not enough support.

And so there's people who fall through the cracks.

There's people who who don't get the help that they need, help that would really help put their family on a on a different trajectory.

And I know spring you mentioned that there's a rural concern here in that populations aren't being counted.

They're being counted in the urban areas of our, say, you know, central Arkansas and northwest Arkansas, but not in the rural part of the state.

And I imagine that poses an issue of funding for you.

There's no certain state funding or federal funding to help you.

Yeah, I think it's important to understand how we count our homeless population.

Maybe people don't understand that.

So when HUD asks for a state or a county point in time homeless count, so one day a year, homeless service providers, homeless shelters, anybody that would like to volunteer, DHS sends workers.

And so one day a year we go out and we find as many people experiencing homelessness as we can find a 124 hour increment of time.

And those are the people that we count.

So the things that we're missing then are the people that we can't find.

So in rural counties, that's a huge concern.

It also should be noted that it's not going to allow us to capture information on people that come in and out of homelessness on the other 364 days a year trying to locate as many people as you can.

A one day in a rural state is a real challenge.

And this year for 2020, for our point in time, count included only a sheltered count.

So we only looked at our homeless shelters, domestic violence shelters, transitional housing to capture information on who was homeless in Arkansas.

But with the vast majority of our counties being rural counties that don't have a homeless shelter, we didn't count them at all.

Wow.

So I am the chair of a local homeless coalition that includes five counties.

One of those counties has a small city, but the other four counties are rural and there are no homeless shelters in those other four counties.

And so we are trying to come up with better ways to look at that population.

And we rely heavily on the Arkansas Department of Education because our school districts are counting homeless shelter and whether they're in a shelter or a hotel or they're doubled or tripled up, or they are sleeping in a car, they count all of our children.

So we actually rely more on our Department of Education for real numbers.

They also count kids per quarter and they report who became homeless during that quarter.

And so I feel like we get much more accurate information in particular about child homelessness from our Department of Education than we do from our point in time count.

Well, I know in January your groups were involved in the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Point in time count.

Are those the numbers you're speaking of that you're missed on that count.

And explain what that count is and what it does for us.

agree with everything Spring said.

And to explain it a little further, there's actually two different definitions of homelessness.

And HUD's count is focused on its definition of homelessness, which frankly, is more constricted than the Department of Education's definition.

So the high definition excludes people who and that's particularly families who are doubled up staying with an aunt or an uncle or a sister in law who are or who are in a hotel, but they're paying for it themselves.

And and so by the high definition, they don't even count as homeless in the first place.

And so that's one of the issues with that count.

The second is that people of particularly families, are children.

They don't want to be counted as homeless in some broad based community count.

You know, they're wanting to protect their children just like any parent would.

They don't want to have them on a list of homeless.

You know, children.

They don't want to get DCFS involved.

And so they're they're just trying by hook or by crook to get through today, get through tonight, find a safe roof over my family's head.

And and so, again, it's sort of different populations of homelessness.

But all that to say the one thing I can really reinforce that spring is saying is that it's a state wide problem and we don't have the data to really point to it.

But here's something that kind of illustrates what springs saying.

So we track in our shelter the zip code of last permanent address for everyone who comes in.

So the last time you had a permanent address, where was it?

And you can map that across the state.

And over the last three years, our residents came to us from 59 of our state, 75 counties.

That's where they last lived.

And to make it even more, you know, interesting, they came from 30 of the 50 states of the United States.

So, you know, people who are homeless, who don't have a families and particularly don't have a roof over their head, they're not going to just sit back and wait for help to come.

They're going to proactively reach out for that help.

And if in their community there aren't jobs, if they're in their community, there isn't a homeless shelter or other resources, they're going to move to where they can find that.

And so Littlerock is, you know, in other metro areas are places that kind of can help fill some of those gaps.

And, you know, people come to Little Rock to access services.

So this is such a multifaceted problem that you can't just offer a shelter and say, here, we're doing something.

You do have to get to the bottom of this.

So how are we doing that?

So I'll I'll speak to we just recently purchased a motel that we're converting into a family shelter.

But one of our primary goals with that is to spend the time that people are staying with us, to connect them to community based resources.

We we don't want to create a system where they would stay with us and have access to resources while they're with us.

And then the minute they move into their own apartment, they lose their resources.

So I feel strongly that the key to making sure that people are rehoused and stay in their homes and prevent them from reentry into homelessness is bringing those services to them.

And that's where we talk about health care, education, making sure that there is affordable housing available for them.

And so the issues are really widespread, but making sure that they're in a safe, affordable housing unit, that they can remain in job training, education, making sure that their kids have before and after school care, making sure that they're connected to health care, making sure that their children are receiving speech and occupational therapy.

All of those are really important factors to making sure that they remain in their homes.

So back to you, Chris, when you hear this of this sort of Conway Motel turning it into a shelter, is it something that you could see done there in Fort Smith?

Do you need that?

Or is is there another need?

I would you know, I love the idea of taking an over.

You know, I think as I said earlier, a mom and pop motel, it converted it.

I think one of the bigger needs that we need here in Fort Smith and across America, honestly, is more transitional housing, more of a step up shelter, as spring is pointed out, is a basic necessity.

But beyond that, when folks from shelter go into thriving and self-sufficient.

So I think converting an old motel would be a great idea.

I think it would bring a lot of legitimacy, make it work, and put these folks back into society better.

Well, let's talk about this, this motel.

The plan is to turn it into a shelter.

How many people could you potentially house?

And what is the status of it right now?

Are you in the process of rehabbing it?

I know it was just purchased.

Yeah, we just purchased it on January 5th.

So we do have to rehab it into a facility that can start accepting.

We will be able to take up to 85 residents at the hotel we are reserving, which we haven't even talked about yet.

We are reserving five of our rooms for something called recuperative care, which is also a huge need in our state.

And so I can explain a little bit more about that.

But the fastest growing sector of the homeless population nationwide are senior adults.

So as much as we're talking about homelessness in Arkansas being families with children, which absolutely is a concern, we have, we have another pocket of concern and we have an aging homeless population and they have all the same chronic illnesses that, you know, any person in poverty would at a certain age.

We have heart disease, strokes.

You know, there are chronic illnesses that are leading to hospitalizations.

But after you've had a triple bypass surgery and your insurance says that you have recovered enough to be discharged, you can't go back to a homeless camp.

Wow.

And so why are we seeing this increase in this specific population, do you think, then there's a, again, a variety of factors that that lead to homelessness being such an issue for our population, for our society.

But I think, you know, one of them is just economic challenge of, you know, making ends meet is hard.

And if you if if you have some other factors that are, you know, already strikes against you, it's it's even harder.

Your sort of margin for error is less if you have a chronic health issue.

And that makes it harder to hold down a job.

It makes it harder to, you know, have a cushion of savings to weather a storm that may come along.

So I think just and then, you know, if you translate that to families, it's similarly true.

Like you've got if you're a single mom with two or three kids, it's hard to keep getting enough hours that pay you enough to pay your rent and all your other bills.

If you have health issues that cause you to miss work, if your children get sick and you have to take off work to look after them.

And if you can't find affordable child care, you know, the economic challenge for parents is even greater as those of us here are parents know.

And then the last thing I'll say is, if you're from a if you don't have the community support, you know, the family support, you're from a family, you know, maybe you're in a family that your parents were poor and your grandparents were poor and you didn't you know, you don't have, you know, family members who can help you during hard economic times.

You don't have connections in the community.

I think groups like ours tend to kind of have to be there to to provide some of those connections to get you through a hard time.

We all can get through hard times.

And when you know.

But what what support networks do you have in place to help get you through those and those who don't don't have the support networks or who have more problematic support networks are more likely to get to a place where they just can't get out of the situation they're in without some help.

Go ahead.

I was going to say, I think that one of the questions that I hear a lot is, you know, why does this family become homeless and this family doesn't?

And I think that social supports is the number one answer that I give to people.

The difference between somebody who is very low income that falls into homelessness and the family that's very low income that stays afloat, I think is that one has social support and the other doesn't.

They're both broke, they're both struggling, they're both paycheck to paycheck.

But maybe one of those has a support network that the other doesn't have.

And and that's I think what we are talking about building across the board is how do you build support systems that keep people in their homes?

And the only other thing I would add is that until we get these shelters open and we get adequate, affordable housing in the state of Arkansas, we have to really be also focusing on eviction prevention.

We need to be keeping the families that have a home in their homes.

And I think we are seeing a housing crisis, an eviction crisis, or I know we are in our community where we are seeing this huge increase in people that are right on the brink of homelessness.

And one of our goals, until we can get the shelter open and absolutely after we get the shelter open, is keeping people in their homes because it's much more cost effective to keep somebody housed than it is to start from scratch.

And talk, if you will, about affordable housing and how much of an issue that is if that's contributing to this what what can we do.

Affordable housing is kind of a hot button for me is I wish I could find a lot of funding for affordable housing.

You know, I was just looking actually yesterday in Sebastian County as an example, a one bedroom, including utilities, is about six seven, eight a month.

So if utilities are running at 100.

That means rent should be around five 5570.

You can't really find decent apartment for 550.

It just doesn't exist anymore.

So we need an influx of funding, which I feel it's going to have to come out of government and hopefully with liberation, Esther's communities, we just need a whole host of it.

And I think nationally we're for affordable housing units or whatever it.

Well that brings me back to you.

Spring and this Conway Motel, turning this into a shelter seems like such a great idea because you're incorporating all the things needed to help pull people out of poverty.

Give them the social services they need, give them the family support they need, and also provide shelter for them.

Is this something that we're going to need to be doing statewide?

I imagine there are places in every community that you could find maybe abandoned buildings or places that you could turn in to do what you're doing here in Conway, even if you're not looking at it as an option for emergency housing.

I think that that's one of the things that we can find As you drive across rural Arkansas, you're going to find what I call like a mom and pop motel that was built in the sixties that, you know, I see in our city, a lot of those have been purchased and torn down.

And, you know, a bank has gone in or a come and go has gone in.

And so I think that there are options for rehabbing those type of facilities into, if not a shelter, affordable housing units.

Because as much as we can talk about homelessness, I'm here to say I am equally concerned about the lack of affordable housing because we can shelter them all day long.

But if they can't exit our shelter because there's not an affordable, safe housing unit available for them to exit to, there is there's a bottleneck effect that can happen.

And so really resolving homelessness and helping people exit homelessness for good, It starts with emergency shelter and then we bring in community services.

Transitional housing, like our house and Bethlehem House provides, but also supported housing, affordable housing, low income housing is a huge issue.

And so there's not one answer.

There's not one solution.

It has to be this whole spectrum of people coming to the table and saying, how do we keep people in their homes?

How do we prevent homelessness?

How do we rehouse them in a way that they don't continue to be in and out of homelessness?

And it's really a housing crisis and income crisis?

Well, sure, because you don't want to just put them in a government housing, for example.

I mean, the goal and the way that I would see it is, is that they would feel empowered to be able to pay a reasonable rent that would correlate with their salary or whatever money that they were making, and then they would feel empowered and then their children would see them feel empowered.

And then you start to break cycles at that point.

But is that something that's even happening?

It's happening.

And, you know, with our house that's sort of our bread and butter is helping families get to that point where they can pay their own rent and, you know, whatever supportive programing we can put them into, we will, but there's not a ton of that.

So at the end of the day, we think the only real way to put that power in your hands so find employment that will pay your own bills and provide for your own family.

And, you know, sometimes I'll I'll walk a person through who's, you know, trying to learn about this issue, that sort of a household budget or one of the families that we work with.

And you know what it look like when they came to us and you know, the mom maybe had two kids.

She's unemployed.

We helped her get a C and A license, and then she's able to get a job that pays $17 an hour.

And that sounds really good.

And it is good.

And she's you know, we're all celebrating that victory for her.

But then when you start putting that budget on paper and you see what apartments are affordable in the community, the math often just doesn't add up.

And our case managers often say, you know, you want housing that safe, adequate and affordable.

And too often our families just have to make these painful choices.

I can only get two of those three.

You know, it's adequate and it's affordable, but it's not in a safe neighborhood or it's it's safe and it's adequate, but I can't afford it.

So I stretch my budget and so my margin for error is even less.

And so if I wind up sick or my child gets sick or we hit a bump in the road, we're going to need help again.

And so so affordable housing is a huge issue.

I'll also reinforce the fact there's no one silver bullet to all of this.

Beware simple solutions.

It takes a lot of resources, a lot of effort, a lot of coordination to to really provide that pathway out of homelessness for folks.

But the thing that gives me hope and keeps me going after 15 years of this work is just how many people in our community really care about that.

And want to help their neighbors and want to help people in their community succeed from all walks of life, from all different perspectives.

So I think the will is there.

We just need people to step up and contribute and work together.

And I think we can we can solve some of this.

I want to ask just we we're coming to the end of our broadcast here, but one misconceptions from people in the community about what homelessness is.

And then also if someone needs help where they can go.

And we'll start with the misconceptions.

Okay.

This may be the number one question that I hear when I'm out public speaking is, you know, they ask about the guy fly in a sign on the street corner.

Are they homeless?

And I don't know.

A lot of them are.

Some of them may not be.

I always encourage people to read the sign because some people are not claiming to be homeless.

They're saying family in need.

God bless.

Anything helps.

I didn't lie to you.

You made an assumption.

And and they are a family that needs help.

But I do want people to recognize that that is just a tiny portion of who is homeless in Arkansas.

And the vast majority of people experiencing homelessness here are not the people holding signs.

You're on the corner.

And so it's it's still a worthy cause to get invested in and go talk to your local nonprofits.

Go hear about the local climate of homelessness in your community.

And don't just assume that, those are the you know, I see those guys all the time.

And quickly, where can somebody go for help if they need it?

Well, in Little Rock, I encourage you to reach out to our house and our website is our house shelter, dawg.

And we also have a hotline that is front and center on that website, a phone number that staffed six days a week.

We get more than 60 calls a day.

We can help people connect to services at our house or at other partners in the community.

And so we would love to help help people who are working with someone who needs, needs, support, get plugged in to the right program.

ARE you will also accept donations at those same website and our phone number.

Yes, just like spring.

The majority of our funding is is private, just generous people in the community that care about their neighbors and want to help.

And we need more of it because we have a lot of work to do.

We appreciate you all been good when the executive director of our house.

Thank you.

Spring Hunter, the executive director of the Conway Ministry Center.

And Chris Joe wanted us who is the executive director of the Hope Campus out of Fort Smith by Skype.

We appreciate you being with us this half hour.

We'll see you next time.

I'm Don Scott for Arkansas Week support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The Arkansas Times and Little Rock Public Radio.