Housed with help

Homelessness is a solvable problem, locally speaking, if the community bands together and prudently directs resources. That’s what Ed Mayer believes.

“We’re all working on the same problem, but we’re not on the same page,” he said.

Mayer is executive director of the Butte County Housing Authority, an organization established in 1946 to provide rental assistance to very low-income and homeless people. It currently serves about 3,000 households throughout the county. Mayer spoke at a quarterly meeting of the Local Government Committee held at the Chico Municipal Building on Wednesday (Nov. 4) and attended by politicians, service providers and government administrators.

The secret to getting people off the streets and under roofs, Mayer argued, is “lining up affordable housing with supportive services.” There isn’t a support system in place for homeless individuals or families once they leave boarding facilities such as the Torres Community Shelter or the Esplanade House, Mayer said. To keep those people housed, it’s essential to find affordable living situations and help them become self-sufficient.

That’s a philosophy supported by the Housing First model, which attempts to remove barriers (such as sobriety and mental health requirements) to placing homeless people directly into their own independent living situations. As the federal government pressures local service providers to embrace Housing First under the threat of withholding grant funding, there’s an opportunity for the community to align its efforts, Mayer maintains. He urged the elected officials in the room—Chico Mayor Mark Sorensen, Councilwoman Reanette Fillmer and Butte County Supervisors Maureen Kirk and Larry Wahl—to “find the political will to address homelessness.”

“We have a dichotomy in that service providers have done their best to coordinate at this point. Then we have the political arena,” Mayer said during a follow-up interview. “We need to have all parties stand up and make that commitment.”

Mayer isn’t alone in touting Housing First. Dorian Kittrell, who also attended the meeting on Wednesday, is executive director of Butte County Behavioral Health. His department spends around $7 million annually on programs related to housing. By phone, Kittrell said he believes that “housing is treatment.”

“We know what works, which is supportive housing,” he said, adding that challenges abound. “The first major difficulty we have is finding enough units or enough real estate, if you will, to house people.”

In Chico, finding housing certainly can be difficult for people with low incomes. According to the North Valley Property Owners Association, the vacancy rate for apartments in Chico was just 1.2 percent as of October 2014. Staying housed is another matter. Butte County is what the Housing Authority defines as a high-cost area, where low wages relative to the cost of living have forced many households into high-risk lifestyles, Mayer said.

According to the city of Chico Housing Element, more than 30 percent of renters in Chico reported paying more than 50 percent of their incomes toward rent and utilities during the last census. In other words, a great segment of the community is one paycheck away from homelessness.

Locals who fail to make ends meet comprise the majority of homeless people in Butte County—not, as is often suggested, transients from out of town, Mayer said.

“The folks we’re concerned with, of course, are those who don’t have the wherewithal to take care of themselves due to mental illness or chronic substance abuse.”

That’s why it’s essential to extend supportive services once people are housed, Kittrell said, whether that’s counseling, individual and group therapy, case management, brokering primary care, medication management or alcohol and drug treatment—the “whatever-it-takes model.” Placing formerly homeless people into a living situation without that support can be disastrous for everyone involved, including landlords.

And from Mayer’s perspective with the Housing Authority, maintaining good relationships with the 800 or so landlords his organization contracts with is critical. In fact, that’s a compounding factor of the housing shortage—many property owners hesitate to rent to people who are mentally ill or struggling with drug addiction.