- November is National Homeless Awareness Month, a time to shine a light on the urgent need to address, end, and prevent home insecurity.

According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's Point-in-Time Count, more than 650,000 people who are experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2023.

That is a 12% increase from the previous year.

My next guests are providing support and hope for homeless adults and youth here in Michigan.

Here's my conversation with Father Tim McCabe of Pope Francis Center and Courtney Smith from the Detroit Phoenix Center.

I actually wanna start with both of you just giving us a sense of what homelessness and housing insecurity, which run hand in hand, what they look like right now in our city.

You guys are on the front lines of trying to mitigate some of these issues.

I just want to hear what things look like from your perspective.

Courtney, I'll start with you.

- Yes, so I would say that we primarily support... At the Detroit Phoenix Center, we primarily support young people that are experiencing housing insecurity youth between the ages of 12 to 24.

And youth housing insecurity looks very different from adult housing insecurity traditionally because young people are often hidden right in plain sight.

They may be couch surfing, they may be living doubled up, they may be living with family and friends.

They may be in homes with no running water or heat.

They blend in right with our society.

They may be the young person that you see at the grocery store, or at the bus stop, or at the traffic light.

And so we are really just looking to shed a face that really doesn't have a face, right, to what youth homelessness or youth housing insecurity.

We use those words interchangeably within the work that we do.

- Yeah, yeah, Father Tim.

- Thank you, Stephen.

At the Pope Francis Center, we're seeing a pretty large increase of our numbers on a daily basis where I think pre-pandemic, we would... If we saw 120 people a day, it would be a large number.

Now, we're rarely below 250.

- Hmm.

- So I feel the strain of that and also feels like there's not enough shelter beds available for people.

So, we're fighting with that system that doesn't really have an emergency shelter or enough emergency shelter beds for folks that are experiencing homelessness right now.

- So let's talk about Homeless Awareness Month, Homelessness Awareness Month and the things that will draw people's attention more to this issue.

And I guess the hope for, again, awareness and support.

Courtney?

- Yes, so at the Detroit Phoenix Center, we acknowledge Youth Hope Month, which is Youth Homeless Outreach Prevention and Education Month was is critically important to really to shine a light on not only the challenges that young people face, but their hopes and vision for the future.

We partner with young people to drive systemic change.

And so right now, we have a billboard campaign featuring young people that we partner with that have lived experience with housing insecurity, but to partner with them to create a world where every young person has a home.

So we have billboards all around the city with their voices.

One of the billboards is from our youth board members, Arya, who said that we need to create safe spaces that are youth-centered and youth-friendly for young people.

We have a host of activities.

We have our culminating youth service event, which is a 12-hour event on November the 29th, where we're partnering with young people to mobilize our community to participate in activities, such as educational activities, to make blankets, to distribute care packages, to distribute resources to young people, and need to really create a world to co-create our vision to create a world where every young person has a champion and a place to call home.

We have our annual Friendsgiving Event, we have a skating party, really youth-centered, youth-centric, because that also lean into prevention because the best way we believe to end youth homelessness is also to prevent it from happening.

So those community connections are critically important and for the work that we do as well during Youth Hope Month, in addition to partnering with our local organizations to provide additional resources.

- Yeah, one of the things that I think is maybe a misnomer about youth homelessness is the idea that the simple solution is just to get children or young people back with their families, right?

- Yes.

- And of course, that's the ideal, I suppose, in some ways.

But talk about the ways in which that is more complicated and more nuanced than many people might believe.

- Absolutely.

So, it is very much more complicated, because as Father Tim said, we're just now recognizing the impact of COVID-19.

And when we started, we used to serve primarily unaccompanied youth that were not in the physical custody of their parent or guardian, but many of the young people that we're seeing today are experiencing housing insecurity homelessness with their parents, with their families.

So they're looking for resources and support to be able to stay together.

And then also some of the young people that's unaccompanied, that's not in the physical custody of their parent or guardian, we are working with and dealing with systems such as the child welfare system, or a young person may have aged out of foster care and may not have those social, permanent connections that they need to thrive.

And ultimately, we become that ecosystem for them to lean on so that they can have the support that they need.

And also, youth homelessness.

Many of the young people that we service are literally living with parents, right?

They're couch surfing, they're living doubled up in apartments with 10 people in a two-bedroom, right?

And so it's a very nuanced, it's very, very, very nuanced.

And so we really just wanna shine a light on that this month.

- Yeah, yeah.

Father Tim, I know at the Pope Francis Center, you guys are focusing even harder now on long-term solutions to homelessness.

I mean, obviously getting people emergency shelter and getting people off the streets is a focus, but you're looking at things that move people to more permanent stability.

Talk about what that looks like during Homelessness Awareness Month.

- Yeah, we just opened our Bridge Housing facility and after years of research about what is most effective in treating chronic homelessness, we really feel like we've got a good program in place to help people heal from the traumas that have caused the homelessness and allow them some space for stability and then to move them into permanent housing.

We are in this country in a national humanitarian crisis with the numbers of homelessness that we're seeing across the country.

While Detroit's done a great job of addressing large numbers, there's still way more than we should have ever see on our city streets.

And we can talk about adding affordable housing onto the market, but if affordable housing is 30% AMI, that's kind of disenfranchising people who have extremely low income.

And so we've really gotta... We're not trying to cure cancer here.

It's a problem that's solvable and we just have to really partner together with all branches of government and the private-public sector to really work towards a common solution to end this blight on our society.

- Yeah, talk about some of the things that you're doing at this Bridge Housing Center that you think will work.

What are some of the solutions to this chronic homelessness problem?

- Well, understanding homelessness as response to trauma.

So a trauma-informed care, understanding the individualized care programs are necessary because everybody's story's different.

Everybody has different reasons for ending up without shelter, without a home.

So we really taking that approach and it's really like, I often say to people, like, the thing that stops us from falling into homelessness is really having family and community if we were ever into a crisis.

So we create a family, we create community within our program, within our Bridge Housing facility so that we provide that wraparound support that folks often who are on the streets don't have.

And so we have a medical, we treat the body, mind, and spirit, right?

We have a medical clinic, we have a gymnasium, we have an outdoor shelter for people whose trauma prevent them from coming indoors so they can sleep and stay protected from the elements.

So there's a variety of approaches that we take, but really, and then ultimately giving them the agency that they need to be self-determining and allowing them the space to heal, and to determine what direction their lives are going, and to help them find those places.

- Yeah, yeah.

So I wanna ask both of you this next question.

We just got through a presidential election and many local elections as well.

Homelessness doesn't come up much in the discussions about who should be leading us.

It's kind of thought of as a maybe a partner issue or an aside issue with poverty.

But I know that it's not, that it is its own, its own problem in many ways with its own characteristics.

I wonder what each of you would prescribe from a government standpoint, one thing that you think would make a huge difference in the homeless.

The number of people who find themselves housing insecure or homeless, and in getting them into more permanent housing, Courtney.

- I would say people power.

I would say really centering the lived experiences of young people who experience housing insecurity.

To really listen to them, to learn from them of their challenges, invest, right, in the solutions that they propose, because ultimately, those who are approximate right to the problem need to be the ones that are driving the solution.

So partnering with the government to really, really listen to what the young people have to say, and their solutions, and resourcing those solutions, so that they manifest within the work that we do every single day through our rapid rehousing program, through our drop-in center, through our prevention programs, because they know exactly what it is that they need that's not just only focused right on the trauma that they've experienced, but also on the healing that we need as a community.

So to listen and to learn from people and to create people-centered policies and programming.

- Yeah, yeah.

Father Tim?

- I would say that we've... I love what Courtney said.

I think empowering the folks is really important, but there's really... The system is so broken, and we really gotta cut through this bureaucracy.

We take the time somebody is documented as homeless, so the time they get keys can be a year, it can be longer than a year.

So this is unacceptable, and it's unnecessary, and it's a really about HUD requirements of money coming into the city and what data needs to be collected.

I think there's a... We can streamline that system and really be much more effective in making sure that people are housed.