Moving People from Crisis to Stability: Our Unhoused Neighbors
How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? – Pope Francis
There are a thousand and one scenarios for how someone’s life can unravel, perhaps over months or seemingly overnight, and discard them onto the streets. Homelessness is rarely a choice. Most often, it is a wrenching space of vulnerability.
The “guests” and visitors who seek out Ashland’s recently christened emergency shelter and resource center, rising from the former Super 8 at the end of town, are as different from each other as you and me.
Just shy of his nineteenth birthday, Jason (the names here are aliases) has aged out of foster care. Anxiety, depression, and drug use stalk his days, while a furtive search for a place to sleep occupies his nights.
Veronica, 68, has lived with her daughter and her family the past five years, but when failed rent payments led to eviction, Veronica, who is wheelchair bound, found impromptu shelter wherever she could.
Garrett, a single dad and disabled veteran, struggles to raise his two children alone, cycling through temporary housing and unreliable employment. What worries him most, he says, is not being able to provide the stability his children need and deserve.
In the course of one week this fall, Jason, Veronica, and Garrett were among the 128 people who turned up at Options for Helping Residents of Ashland (now The OHRA Center), both hopeful and wary about seeking assistance.
“Building trust is our starting point,” OHRA’s director Cass Sinclair, a former community outreach coordinator for Jackson County Public Health, emphasizes. Indeed, trust and dignity grace this re-envisioned space, which once housed passing travelers along Interstate 5.
A new approach
Started in 2012 by volunteers concerned about homelessness in Ashland, OHRA began with a laundry-shower trailer, then a small resource center with a staff of one, and finally the management of the Ashland Winter Shelter, which for many years rotated from one church to another over the course of the winter.
In 2021, all of this changed when the Oregon Community Foundation awarded OHRA the first Project Turnkey capital grant of $4.2 million in state funds, promising to address the depth and breadth of homelessness in the community. With these funds, OHRA purchased an underutilized Ashland motel and transformed it into The OHRA Center: a year-round low-barrier shelter with 52 rooms for guests; a resource center with a professional staff of six to help anyone seeking help with rent, jobs, utilities, benefits and more; and a permanent home for the Shower Trailer.
“We were blown out of the water in the best way,” Sinclair says, “going from 5 mph to 50 in a few short months, from a staff of 5 to 36, from managing a budget of $225,000 to $2.6 million.”
Setting OHRA apart from the 19 new shelters started statewide with Turnkey funds is the open door policy of its resource center. The Center serves not only shelter guests but also people not housed at the shelter but who simply show up, folks who have housing but are at risk of losing it.
Staffed by six case workers aptly named “Navigators,” the Center’s services are vast: from preventing eviction, getting a job, accessing health care to securing an ID, picking up mail, SNAP food benefits, and much more. The starting place is not what staff believe is in the best interest of the client, but the needs the client identifies.
“We don’t get out in front of them, we work alongside of them” Sinclair stresses.
The importance of “Navigators” exploded in the first year of COVID when many public facilities and supports across the valley closed down, removing lifelines those experiencing homelessness relied upon, from public bathrooms and transportation to accessing official records.
“We’d have 80 or 90 people a day showing up in our small office next to Safeway, desperate for help,” says Sinclair.
OHRA’s catchment area has also grown. It is now an access point for the Jackson County Continuum of Care (ACCESS), which means that OHRA may shelter people in crisis from elsewhere in the county, based on their score on a common intake tool. OHRA can also refer its guests to service providers countywide through relationships and referrals.
This teamwork is essential. The experience of homelessness crosses zip codes.
A half century in the making
We tend to think of homelessness as a 21st century phenomenon, but the roots of “modern” homelessness in America stretch back half a century.
In the 1970s, when government policy closed inpatient mental health facilities nationwide, patients with severe and persistent mental illness were left without care or housing, often ending up on the streets.
In the 1980s, when the federal government cut its annual housing budget, the largest source of affordable housing, from $80B to $20B a year, new construction halted and the public housing infrastructure crumbled. Homelessness skyrocketed.
In the 90s, when homelessness spilled to urban sidewalks and parks making the invisible visible, a patchwork of emergency shelters, clinics, and street outreach programs emerged, as unprepared to meet the crisis then as they are now.
The Oregon equation
Oregon, you may or may not know, has the second highest percentage of unhoused in the nation, with 14,655 experiencing homelessness on any given day (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2021) and the highest rate of unsheltered families with children, numbering 23,765 public school students in 2018-2019 (U.S. Department of Education).
The challenges of an inadequate housing supply and rising rents that leave tens of thousands of children and families at risk of becoming homeless (the cost of living in Oregon is the fifth highest in the country) is a national story. So too is the persistence of a smaller population of chronically homeless people in need of intensive social services.
Still, statistics in Oregon are staggering. Oregon ranks worst in the nation for prevalence of mental illness, according to a new study by Mental Health America, and at the bottom for mental health spending. It ranks third in the nation for mental illness among youth and has consistently claimed the top spot for addiction rates (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2021). In 2020, the homeless represented 3 precent of the state population while representing 52 percent of arrests (World Population Review), an expensive solution when the arrest leads to jail.
We can
Against this backdrop, The OHRA Center’s accomplishments in just one year stack up remarkably: secured new housing for 147 families, protected housing for another 242 individuals, provided 19045 instances of support services, sheltered 267, and showered 1812. Through much of this period, the Center was only just gearing up (as it continues to do).
“Over and over again, I’ve seen OHRA step up with creative solutions for challenges we’ve never faced before,” State Representative Pam Marsh said at the June 2022 kick-off to the organization’s capital campaign, aimed at raising $2.5 million in additional funding, including critical funds for capacity building and sustainability not included in the Project Turnkey grant. “I have seen first-hand how OHRA helps people move from crisis to stability.”
Cass Sinclair will tell you how she looks at the crisis of homelessness from three vantage points.
There’s the view from 30,000 feet, where national advocates and experts underscore that conquering homelessness is a deep and long-term campaign, with policies and practices that stretch from increasing affordable housing, integrating health care, and building career pathways to strengthening crisis response systems and reducing criminal justice involvement. It’s a daunting list.
At 15,000 feet, we see how these pivotal policies and practices run up against state budget priorities, planning capabilities, interagency cooperation, leadership, and economic realities—even long-held attitudes about personal responsibility.
On the ground, homelessness presents as a crisis, as invisible as it is visible, a nuisance for some and a heartbreak for others.
A measure of society is how it treats its most vulnerable, Mahatma Gandhi reminds us. When it comes to rebuilding lives harmed by homelessness, OHRA deserves all the support we can muster. If nothing else, we owe it to the rising generations for whom the trauma of living between shelters and the street can last a lifetime.
I can’t shake the feeling that we have come dangerously close to accepting the homeless situation as a problem that we just can’t solve. We can.
A message for those who live in Ashland: Due to COVID-19, OHRA has been without volunteers for almost two years. It is finally ready to welcome back volunteers to all its programs. If you think you might be interested or have questions, email volunteer@helpingashland.org.
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