Living with Bed Bugs Better than Living on the Street
Written by admin on June 7, 2010 – 8:08 AM -It’s more costly to live on the street than in Bed Bug ridden government housing.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Bill Victoria, a former heroin addict, tries not to think about the past.
When he was 21, Victoria crashed a motorcycle and paralyzed his left hand. Years later, his father died and his mother sold the family home in Bristol.
Depressed, suffering from seizures, he spent the next 30 years in a homeless haze. During a time when most people marry, raise kids and change careers, Victoria stayed with friends, lived on the streets, panhandled, took drugs and slept in shelters.
Bill Victoria, homeless for 30 years, in his subsidized Providence apartment, part of the Housing First program.
The Providence Journal Andrew Dickerman
With his hard face, soft voice and years of addiction, Victoria hardly seems a candidate for subsidized housing. He has a criminal record. He’s overdosed dozens of times. “I have a million excuses,” his T-shirt says. “Which do you want to hear?”
But for the past four years, the Providence-based Housing First has helped Victoria pay for an apartment and get psychiatric help. The program is part of a growing trend by major U.S. cities to provide the chronically homeless with cheap housing, case workers and an assortment of services.
Supporters say it’s not only good for the hardest-to-serve, but makes economic sense, too, by keeping them out of emergency rooms, shelters, detox centers and jails.
“Being in a shelter is traumatizing, and being homeless is disorienting, because you don’t know where you are living from day to day,” says Michelle Brophy, director of the New England Program for the Corporation for Supportive Housing, an early supporter of the program. “Housing is the foundation for recovery.”
Recovery has not been easy for Victoria, 58.
“I tried to keep it together and stay positive,” he says, “but I thought I would be homeless forever.”
His first apartment burned down after someone left a lit cigarette on a couch. No one was hurt, and Housing First helped Victoria move into a two-room apartment at Huntington Tower, a housing complex in Providence. He took drugs, overdosed and ended up in a detox center.
Christian Hutchins was living in his car when he was helped by Housing First. He plays his guitar for donations in Waterplace Park in Providence.
The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo
But he’s been clean for a year, says Housing First Director Don Boucher. Victoria now has a bank account and a cell phone. “Bill’s a hard case,” Boucher says, “but he’s light years from where he was before.”
In his apartment near Route 10, Victoria sleeps on a sofa with a history of bed bugs. A photograph of his mother hangs on the refrigerator. His coffee mug has a broken handle.
Boucher remembers the first time Victoria got his own place, after years of homelessness.
At first, Victoria was quiet. Then he spoke.
“I wish my mom was still alive,” he said.
The program, used in Denver, Columbus, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere, is based in part on the findings of Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania professor.
After studying shelters in Philadelphia and New York City in the 1990s, Culhane found it costs no more to offer permanent housing — along with other services — than to care for the chronically homeless in shelters, hospitals and jails.
The Corporation for Supportive Housing introduced the idea to Rhode Islanders in 2004. According to the advocacy group, 80 percent of those facing a life crisis stayed in a homeless shelter or in transitional housing and then moved on.
But the rest faced long-term mental health problems, physical disabilities, a lack of health care, addiction, criminal records and other barriers to housing.
“The old programs weren’t addressing the chronic homeless, who were living in our shelters for seven or eight years,” Brophy says. “They were falling through the cracks.”
The state and United Way of Rhode Island helped launch the program in 2005. A year later, Riverwood Mental Health Services won a contract to run the program.
Some were skeptical.
“People said, ‘You’re going to give homes to drug addicts and alcoholics?’ ” remembers Monica Rogers, Housing First’s property manager.
Even Boucher worried that the program lacked teeth.
Under older models, the homeless got housing only after they kicked their addictions. Once in, they had to stay sober. “Otherwise, we could evict them — immediately — even in January. I know. I did,” says the former shelter director.
Housing First has no such rules.
As a result, clients are more honest about substance abuse, Boucher says. They are more willing to ask for help, knowing they won’t lose their housing.
“I want to be nice to people while they are struggling with addiction,” says Boucher, a methadone counselor and a pastor with the Gates of Praise Ministries. “I don’t want to throw them out in January.”
Since 2005, Housing First has helped about 150 single men and women find apartments in Providence, East Providence, North Providence and Central Falls.
With $2.2 million from the state and federal government, the program employs 12 workers, 3 nurses, 2 psychiatrists and a property manager. It spends $8,600 a year per client. (It spends far less on Victoria, who qualifies for Medicaid and other help because of his past addiction.)
Housing First pays two-thirds of the rent and the client pays the rest, usually with a Social Security check or from other income. About a fifth have jobs, but many cannot work because of mental health issues and physical disabilities.
Clients are offered a number of voluntary services, from support groups to psychiatric help
The program is working, says Eric Hirsch, a sociology professor at Providence College.
He and Irene Glasser, an anthropology professor at Roger Williams University, studied the program in 2007, and discovered it sharply reduced the number of overnight visits to hospitals, emergency rooms, detox centers, prisons and shelters.
Those living on the streets incurred nearly $32,000 a year in government costs for overnight visits to shelters, jails and emergency care centers. Housing First clients incurred costs of less than $23,000.
“It’s definitely cost-effective, especially for people who have been homeless for a long time,” Hirsch says. “This is how you end homelessness.”
Boucher remembers working with a woman in a Providence homeless shelter. Crossroads Rhode Island had done a good job keeping her safe, he says. But the woman, who suffered from hallucinations, “was curled up like a cat, licking herself.”
“We engaged her slowly. We got her on meds, and placed her in an apartment. When she got better, she was reunited with her two sons, and moved to North Carolina.”
Another client, Christian Hutchins, drank and lived in his car for three months before getting an apartment through Housing First.
“I wasn’t supposed to live,” says Hutchins, who was struck by a car as a boy.
Hutchins now attends sobriety meetings, works out, has a steady girlfriend and plays the guitar in a band called Starks and Hutch. He’s recorded two homemade CDs and recently played a 40-minute song set for a public access cable TV show.
His songs include “Roll On,” “The Positive Side of Life” and “Sobriety Blues.”
About 90 percent of Housing First’s clients stay in their apartments, says Boucher.
The need is great, he adds. Another 650 Rhode Islanders are chronically homeless. Other experts place that number at 1,000.
On a spring day, case worker Emilio Reales takes Bill Victoria grocery shopping.
Reales, who juggles 14 clients in the Housing First program, drives Victoria to the bank so he can cash a check. At Stop & Shop, Reales helps Victoria buy groceries — shrimp, Cheerios, green grapes and Red Bull — with a food stamp card.
Victoria can’t remember the last time he shopped for food. That was another life, one that he doesn’t dwell on.
On the ride back, Reales chats with Victoria.
“Billy, Billy, you seem happy today.”
“I don’t know if I’m happy,” Victoria says, “but I’m surviving.”
BY THE NUMBERS: Home at last
In a little more than two years, the Housing First program found homes for 48 formerly homeless people. A study four months later found these costs savings.
$31,617: Total cost per homeless person before enrolling in program, including overnight stays in hospitals, jails and treatment centers for mental health and alcohol/drug problems, plus emergency room visits and homeless shelters
$22,778: Cost per client after getting a residence through Housing First.
These costs include:
$7,635: Overnight stays and emergency room visits
$9,500: Support services, such as counseling
$5,643: Housing subsidy
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