Street roots., May 18, 2018, Page 9, Image 9

Page 10
Street Roots • May 18-24, 2018
Rural Housing
RURAL HOUSING, fro m page 7
Don Senecal, the organization’s grant
writer and former chair of the Homeless
Leadership Coalition, a regional organization
of homeless service providers in Central
Oregon, admitted the services Jericho Table
provides barely meet the need in Redmond,
a town of nearly 30,000 and where hundreds
of people experiencing homelessness camp.
“There isn’t much we can do,” he
laments. “As a volunteer organization, we
don’t have the organizational structure.”
There are growing calls for the city of
Bend, a city of nearly 100,000 and which has
experienced exponential growth in the last
decade, to fund services to combat
homelessness.
“They’ve got to remember that in growth
comes all this other stuff and it’s got to be
dealt with,” Terry, COVO’s executive
director, said.
The learning curve of why government
should put dollars into homeless programs
is steep. Even the concept of “housing first"
is new to many in Central Oregon.
Housing first is a decades old, evidence-
based practice of providing housing to a
homeless person first, despite whatever
barriers they may have to staying in that
housing, with services attached to the
housing.
The alternative, historically, has been to
require people to be clean and sober, and
often in a treatment program, prior to
receiving housing.
The thinking in a housing first model,
however, is that housing will help stabilize a
person’s life and health, making them more
willing to access services and receptive to
recovery. It’s an approach adopted in cities
across the country, including Portland.
“We have been working to slowly
introduce that concept to the community,”
Molly Taroli, the co-chair of the Homeless
Leadership Coalition, said. “There’s been a
lot of conversations happening.”
At the same time, Taroli said, service
providers and advocates have been focusing
more on ways to broaden the services
available to homeless people, including
mental health and drug treatment.
“If you put someone into a home, that
won’t necessarily fix the problem,” Taroli
said.
Senecal and others agree. Many of the
homeless people he works with in
Redmond, he said, have “a conglomerate of
challenges” from being homeless for years.
“You can’t put them in a shelter overnight
and say that you’ve taken care of the
situation,” said Terry, with the Central
Oregon Veterans Organization. “That’s not
their home.”
But, he said, if a system in Central
Oregon were created that allowed homeless
people to stay somewhere “for six months,
and you’re providing some wraparound
services (that help with) whatever it is that
got you here - it’s a good thing.”
The first project modeled after housing
first is about to launch in Central Oregon.
Created by the Central Oregon Health
Council, the entity that oversees the area’s
Medicaid service provider, the FUSE
Project will provide housing for between 25
and 30 homeless people who are frequent
users of the health care and law
enforcement systems.
The project is currently hiring a director
and is expected to launch later this year or
P H O T O BY A M A N D A W A L D R O U P E
Don Senecal is the grant writer fo r Jericho Table, the only direct social service fo r homeless
people in Redmond, where he said the region is trying to protect an image and hide
homelessness. He s also the form er chair o f the Homeless Leadership Coalition, a regional
organization o f homeless service providers in Central Oregon,
early next with plans for expansion if
successful.
Time will tell if Bend city government, or
any government in Central Oregon,
becomes the first governmental body in the
region to dedicate dollars directly to
homeless concerns.
Dave Beckett, the pastor of Bend Church,
which hosts a Wednesday morning breakfast
for nearly 150 homeless people, began
reaching out to members of Bend’s City
Council after he decided that his church
would not host a women’s shelter last
winter.
He said he has urged members of the
City Council “to make (homeless funding) a
priority.”
“There hasn’t really been any action,” he
said.
Senecal is critical of local government’s
attitude, comparing the situation to the one
in the movie “Jaws,” when, after the initial
shark attack, the mayor refused to close the
town’s beach for fear of losing tourist
dollars.
“It’s the same mindset,” Senecal said.
“(Central Oregon) has an image to
maintain.”
“There are people in positions of
authority and people in positions of financial
responsibility who refuse to acknowledge
the fact that this community or any
community has that kind of a challenge,” he
continued. “They won’t help.”
The city of Bend does consider
homelessness and creating more low-
income housing one of the city’s top
strategic priorities in the coming years,
according to the city’s 2017-2019 “goals and
objectives.”
Brant Kucera, the city manager of
Sisters, said the small city of 2,500 is not
immune from rising homelessness.
“We just have no funding dedicated to
homeless services,” he said. “We’re
struggling to get our hands around the
affordable housing idea.”
“At some point, we’re going to have to
come to grips with this subject,” he
continued. “It’s unavoidable.”
In the meantime, service organizations
are doing what they can to respond to the
need.
Over the winter, Sally Pfeifer, the owner
of the drug and alcohol counseling service
Pfiefer & Associates, started a low-barrier
warming shelter for nearly 30 people,
housed in her offices.
She and other advocates also created the
nonprofit Sagewood Sanctuary, and are
among a chorus of advocates and service
providers calling for the creation of a
sanctioned camp in Bend, similar to Dignity
Village or Right 2 Dream Too in Portland.
There has already been pushback.
“I don’t see how that’s going to
necessarily solve our homelessness issue,”
Taroli said.
COVO, for the first time, is building its
own housing. The city of Bend gave the
organization a small, vacant lot of surplus
land, with the agreement that COVO would
build affordable, low-income housing.
Short on funding, COVO scaled back it’s
project from two fourplexes to one duplex
with four units of housing. The organization
will maintain ownership of the remaining
land and hopes to build additional units as
funding becomes available. Construction is
expected to start this summer.
HILE TH E CASH flow for
homeless
services is still scant, the cities in
Central Oregon have taken a variety of
actions to incentivize housing construction,
including construction excise taxes, which
tax construction permits and dedicate the
revenue to affordable housing, grant system
development waivers, or other measures.
In addition, Bend is revising its scoring
criteria for how it awards grants from its
Affordable Housing Fund, Bend’s Affordable
Housing Fund supports the construction of
housing affordable to people who make 80
percent of the area median income or less.
Since it was started in 2006, the fund has
helped support the construction of 770
units.
The city of Sisters will consider adopting
a 1 percent construction excise tax in the
coming months.
The tax would generate, Kucera
estimates, about $187,000 a year, increasing
the city’s general fund by 1 percent. “It’s
W
significant,” he said.
The city of Madras, a city of 6,729 at the
northern edge of Central Oregon, has
created its own city-wide housing plan which
it will be implementing over the next five
years.
The housing plan, which Madras’ city
council identified as a priority last year, is
being developed in collaboration with
ECONorthwest, a Portland-based economic
consulting firm.
Nick Snead, community development
director for the city of Madras’, said the
plan will propose changes to the city policy,
zoning and other regulations, fee structures
and other factors that affect housing
construction.
The housing plan will focus on ways to
build all types of housing: housing affordable
to low-income or formerly homeless people,
workforce and middle-income housing,
Snead said.
Like officials at the city of Prineville,
Snead believe natural economic forces will
be the biggest factor in solving the city’s
housing shortage, especially filtering, a
process that happens when people of higher
incomes move into slightly more expensive
housing, thereby creating vacancies in lower-
cost housing for people who make lower
incomes.
“As a small, rural community, we need all
types of housing to really cause the housing
cycle to start,” Snead said. “It doesn’t mean
we’re ignoring low-income housing.”
egionally , th e
R
C entral O regon
Intergovernmental Council is convening
a “Housing for All” workgroup.
The group’s mission, according to it’s
charter draft published in March, is “to
address the full spectrum of Central
Oregon’s housing needs - from
homelessness to middle income market
housing - through integrated regional effort
and action.”
The workgroup will have 19 members,
representing state and local government,
public health, law enforcement, social
services, large employers, builders and
traders, and the Confederated Tribes of
Warm Springs.
The group intends to publish a joint
action plan later this year, and launch a
public information campaign to raise
awareness about Central Oregon’s housing
crisis, the role that stable housing plays as a
community and economic force, and “help
those that are not housing vulnerable to
understand Their enlightened self interest’
in supporting housing for all.”
“(We want) to help people understand
why we should care and what we should do,”
Scott Aycock, the Intergovernmental
Council s community and economic
development manager, said.
Kemper is like many others when he said
that the very fabric of Central Oregon’s
community is at stake if the unavailability of
low-income housing is not quickly dealt with.
There s a lot of affluent people who live
in (Central Oregon),” Kemper said. “If you
want someone to pour you coffee or pump
your gas or check you out in a grocery store,
you’ve got to have places for those people to
awaldroupe@gmail. com