City hopeful grants will put 30 in housing
CITY HALL — Officials here have received more than $700,000 from the federal government to help pay the rents of Santa Monica’s most chronic homeless residents.
The catch? They must be alcoholics who are ready to get help.
Individuals who have been on the streets of Santa Monica the longest and have chemical dependency problems qualify for the rent subsidies. They also can’t have used government-funded transitional or permanent housing in the past five years.
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) granted the city of Santa Monica $717,000 earlier this month as part of a $10 million nationwide program aimed at getting chronic homeless alcoholics off the streets.
Santa Monica is the only city in Los Angeles County that is part of the two-year pilot program which includes 11 cities. The program, dubbed “Housing for People Who Are Homeless and Addicted To Alcohol,” includes such cities as Chattanooga, Tenn., which received the largest grant of $999,936, and New York, NY., which received $637,560, the low-est grant amount.
A recent survey that encompassed 88 cities in the Los Angeles region found that nearly 90,000 people are homeless in LA County, 42 percent whom are chronic — meaning they’ve been on the streets for more than a year, or have had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years. They also suffer from one or more disability, mental illness, or from a form of substance abuse.
Although city officials requested $1 million, they still anticipate that they can place 30 people in market-rate housing with the HUD grant. Ninety percent of the money will go directly to rent, with the other 10 percent going towards administrative costs and housing searches, said Santa Monica Human Services Administrator Stacy Rowe.
“We’ll make the money we have stretch as far as we can,” she said.
City officials, who applied for the grant in May, expect to receive the money in the next four to six weeks.
“I know HUD is anxious and their seriousness is shown by how quickly they gave us the grant,” Rowe said.
The HUD grant will complement, as well as help fund and expand the city’s already-established chronically homeless program that was created last year.
Rowe said City Hall has $178,560 in local taxpayer dollars budgeted for the upcoming year to assist 12 people in finding one-bedroom apartments in Santa Monica. The local government is helping them pay the rent, either through a subsidy or in full — if the individual has no income such as Social Security, welfare or government disability.
Since the program was established last summer, 25 people have participated — 12 female and 13 male, said Mona Miyasato, City Hall’s human services manager. The average time those individuals have been homeless is 12 years, she added.
Ten of them are in permanent housing; three are in temporary housing with permanent placements pending; eight are still homeless and in the process of accepting the terms of the program; one is living on the street, but looking for an apartment; two are either in jail or in the hospital; and one has since died, Miyasato said.
The HUD grant will most likely go to help those individuals pay the rent.
Local outreach workers and police who are regularly in contact with Santa Monica’s homeless population identify who is chronic and addicted to alcohol. The goal is to engage them and convince them to get help, official said.
People who accept the subsidy have to agree to be involved in intense supportive services that include mental health counseling, treatment for their addictions and a host of other case management work by a team of local social service providers.
“The real key is wherever they are put, they are tied to the services,” Rowe said. “The goal always is to move people to self-sufficiency.”
But Rowe admits that some people might always need help, particularly if they are disabled or are mentally ill.
“Some of these folks will probably never be able to transition out of the program,” she said.
Santa Monica’s chronic homeless program was born out of City Hall’s “continuum of care,” which involves a host of local services and outreach help. City Hall spends more than $2 million a year on homeless services through its “continuum of care.”
“The chronically homeless program is more focused, more intense, on a difficult segment of the population,” Rowe said, adding many of the chronically homeless are high users of police, fire and paramedic resources. “We are deliberately going after the tougher programs because our other programs have been so successful.”
City officials hope the HUD grant program will become a permanent funding source, with City Hall reapplying annually. “(The pilot program’s success) will depend on how successful cities are,”
Rowe said. “We’re all probably going to go at this in different ways.
“If one of us hits upon something successful, HUD may add new units, that’s what pilot programs are all about.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on August 20, 2005. Read the original PDF.