Touched by Poverty: The highs and lows of housing

from The Ithaca Journal

Demand on shelters nearly doubles in 7 years
By Krisy Gashler and Topher Sanders
Journal Staff

Jamie Clemens' bouts with homelessness over the years have found him sleeping under Ithaca's State Street bridge and in a farmer's barn in Alabama for three nights.

In the barn Clemens slept in a stall and cuddled with a calf to keep warm.

“The blanket was stretched over both of us,” said Clemens, 28.
Clemens, who said he battled substance addiction between 2000 and 2003, admitted that many, if not all, of his housing problems are due to decisions he made throughout his life.

“Nobody wants to face up to the fact that they had a nice warm house and all of a sudden they have to decide where they're going to sleep tonight,” Clemens said. “Am I going to camp under this bridge, or am I going to break into this abandoned house?”

A 2007 snapshot of homeless people in Tompkins County showed there were 160 people like Clemens dependent on social service programs and shelters to stay off the streets.

With help from the Tompkins County Department of Social Services, in January Clemens, originally from Elmira, found a single-room apartment off Route 79 in Enfield.

Clemens said he considers himself to be one of the lucky ones.

Despite a twofold increase in government spending on housing programs between 2000 and 2007, the number of bednights needed in local homeless shelters nearly doubled in the last decade, to more than 11,000 bednights in 2007, according to statistics compiled by the Tompkins County Human Services Coalition.

Tompkins County received more than $9 million in state and federal money in 2007 for public and Section 8 housing.

In 2000, the county received $5.4 million — the funding for just the two biggest programs has almost doubled in seven years.

In 2007, that money supported the 323 households in the county living in the Ithaca Housing Authority's public housing and all 1,465 of the Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers in the county, which subsidize low-income renters living in private apartments.

The figure does not include any other federal, state or local money used toward housing programs such as the not-for-profit Ithaca Neighborhood Housing Services or the county's program to help low-income people cover security deposits.

With so many different programs administered by so many different agencies, funded by so many different federal, state and local sources, no one interviewed for this story could even guess how much money is spent in Tompkins County to help those in poverty pay for housing.

There are two obvious reasons why state and federal funding has almost doubled in the past decade: one is the number of Section 8 vouchers allotted to the county through the two agencies and the other is the way the vouchers are administered.

Between 2000 and 2007, vouchers administered by Tompkins Community Action and the Ithaca Housing Authority increased by 495.

The housing boom increased rental prices for everyone, and Section 8 vouchers are paid to landlords based on local fair-market rent.

HUD economists use existing rental prices to determine fair-market rents for virtually every urban area in the country and update the data each year.

So if a housing boom causes sharp increases in housing prices, it also causes sharp increases in the amount HUD has to pay landlords to meet fair-market rent.

Fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Ithaca in 2000 was $642 a month.

In 2008, it's $893.

For those who struggle to make ends meet, Ithaca's regionally inflated housing market doesn't help either.

In Elmira in 2008, fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $739. In Binghamton it's $674.

“If you look at the situation in Tompkins County, we have really high rents as compared to adjoining counties. Some would cite the high cost of renting as a big factor in homelessness,” said Joe Laquatra, a professor of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell.

Some progress in 2007
According to the Human Services Coalition, homeless shelter demand increased steadily in Tompkins County between 1997 and 2006, then fell sharply in 2007.

In 1997, fewer than 6,000 total bednights were needed. By 2006, demand had risen to almost 16,000. In 2007 it dipped back down to about 11,000.

John Ward, director of homeless services for the American Red Cross Tompkins County Chapter, believes the number of people needing shelter in Tompkins County in 2007 was about the same as 2006 but that their length of stay has declined, which would affect bednight figures.

The recent improvement in bednight figures is thanks to better case management or the effort by officials to find housing for people. The improved case management has helped decrease individuals' stay in shelters by more than a week and has kept individuals in stable housing once they leave the shelter, Ward said.

The American Red Cross Tompkins County Chapter conducted its biannual 24-hour point-in-time homeless count in January 2007.

The most recent figures available found 96 cases of homelessness, representing 160 people. That's up from 106 people identified in the 2006 count.

The Point-in-Time count is only a snapshot of homelessness in the county and is often less than the actual number of people who are homeless in Tompkins County, Ward said.

The 2007 Independent Living Survey Project conducted by the Tompkins County Continuum of Care Committee and the Human Services Coalition of Tompkins County found 204 homeless young people between the ages of 15 and 25.

Ward doesn't see the homeless situation in Tompkins County getting any better in the near future.

“The way the economy is headed, I think we're going to see an explosion,” Ward said.

The American Red Cross Tompkins County Chapter has a 13-bed emergency shelter in the 700 block of West Court Street that can provide more than 4,700 bednights per year for people struggling with housing. When the Red Cross' shelter is full, the organization will put people up in local hotels. The Red Cross provides shelter for as many as 40 people some nights.

Transportation and jobs
Mike Sigler, chairman of the Tompkins County Republican party, said that while local municipalities need state and federal money to fight poverty, the municipalities should be the ones determining how best to allocate those funds, whether that be programs to help people cover security deposits, more public transportation or municipal infrastructure growth to make low-income housing development more affordable.

The best way to address poverty, he said, is to make sure people have stable jobs.

“I think that's the key to everything: If you can get people working and they have a stable home, a stable job, then they have a future,” Sigler said. “Whereas if people are living with this unknown, ‘Can I afford the rent this month or how stable is my job?' You're gonna have real problems.”

Laquatra said for those in poverty, it's about more than simply finding a place to live.

“Students of housing policy would point out that housing is not so much a product as it is a process: employment, transportation,” Laquatra said. “So do you attack the problem through job training programs and give people the skills to increase their access to resources? You can't look at housing in isolation.”

Transportation is one of the key issues to keeping some people off the streets and out of shelters, Ward said.

People can find affordable housing in the county's outlying areas of Groton, Freeville, Danby or Dryden, but without reliable transportation for late and early work shifts, getting back and forth to a job in the city becomes difficult.

“We can get them an apartment in Groton, we can get them to work, but we can't get them home,” Ward said.

It is a struggle that Sandra Carpenter knows all too well.

“I'm dealing with that right now,” said Carpenter, who was living in the Red Cross' emergency shelter in early January. “In the outskirts you do not get early bus services to commute to work on time. I reassured my boss right now that I was going to stay in the City of Ithaca so that I could get back and forth to work. Between the housing cost and bus lines that run outside the city, it's ridiculous. You can't live outside the city if you want to work inside the city.”

Carpenter works as a housekeeper for the Holiday Inn, earning $7.25 an hour.

Her shift starts at 8 a.m., but the buses don't run from Dryden and Freeville early enough for her to get to work, she said.

Carpenter hoped to be out of the shelter in a week or so. She was waiting for a single-room living space to open up.

Repeatedly being late for shifts or not showing up for shifts at all because people can't secure a way home nearly always results in someone being fired from work, that person not being able to pay rent and eventually an eviction, Ward said.

“And then you end up here,” Carpenter said, referring to the shelter. “I'm grateful for the shelter. It's keeping me off the street and keeping a roof over my head.”

A step up
In spite of the troubling numbers showing sharp increases in both homelessness and federal money to fight homelessness, there are success stories.

The Ithaca Housing Authority is highly rated and by all accounts provides well-run, safe, decent and affordable places for people in need to live.

For individuals with the desire to learn financial management or work toward home ownership, the authority provides classes and informs residents about the variety of agencies that can help them achieve their dream.

Valerie Wilson moved into public housing 12 years ago as a single mother with three boys.

“I love it. I still live there, same apartment,” Wilson said of her three-bedroom apartment in Southview.

Since moving in, Wilson has continuously worked at least full time, gone back to school, became a registered nurse and raised her boys by herself.

Her oldest, Tyrone, graduated from Colgate University and is working toward a master's degree in sociology. The second, David, is studying at Tompkins Cortland Community College, and the youngest, Reggie, plays JV basketball at Ithaca High.

“I'm proud of all of them,” she said.

Wilson landed a job as a nurse's aide at Cayuga Medical Center eight years ago, where co-workers encouraged her to go back to school and become a registered nurse.

“You know you get in a routine when you're a single mother with your kids. School is ... crazy, the schedule is crazy. But I did it, I went,” she said. “And the hardest part was just going to sign up. Once I did that I just had to keep going.”

It took four years of working and going to school at TC3 and a year to pass the boards, but Wilson is now a registered nurse, working with short-stay surgical recovery patients.

“Hips, knees, abdominal surgeries, you know all kinds of surgeries,” she said. “I love it. I never thought I would love it, but I love it.”

Wilson said she couldn't have done it without the help of the Ithaca Housing Authority, her Elks Lodge on Green Street, the hospital, which awarded her a scholarship, and her co-workers and kids.

Wilson said her ultimate goal is to buy her own home.