FAYETTEVILLE -- The city will for the first time accept federal grants to help homeless residents find and keep housing after one of the area's most prominent shelters bowed out of the program.
The City Council this month voted to use about $414,000 in three Housing and Urban Development grants to hire two case workers next year in the Community Resources Division. The city stepped forward because Seven Hills Homeless Center decided not to, Yolanda Fields, community services director, said last week.
Fayetteville Community Resources Division
This division includes code compliance, community development and animal services and is charged with improving the safety, social and economic conditions in the city and making it a better place to live. Its duties include:
• Administrating the Community Development Block Grant, including the Housing Rehabilitation and Transportation programs
• Operating the Fayetteville Animal Shelter
• Resolving safety code violations.
Source: City of Fayetteville
"The city of Fayetteville has never done this before," Fields said. "We're always eager to help the community to do well, so we're not scared to try new stuff."
About 2,500 adults and children in Benton and Washington counties at any given time don't have permanent homes, according to the University of Arkansas' Community and Family Institute's homeless survey released earlier this year. About half of them are in the Fayetteville area.
The housing program aims first to help people get off the streets and out of shelters or relatives' homes, then help them put together a self-sustaining life by getting a job, grocery shopping and getting used to other mundane demands, Fields said. Some people covered by the program might not have written a resume in 20 years, she said.
"You're helping the individual, you're guiding them through a process -- these individuals will be living in normal apartments, homes, whoever we can work with as far as landlords," she said. "Eventually the goal is for these individuals to be making their own money, and they'll be paying their rent at some point. We're kind of a kick-start."
The university survey found Northwest Arkansas' homeless get in their situation through a variety of circumstances, such as loss of a major relationship or a job. Most have a high school diploma and some are college-educated, and about a third are working. About half are children, and many have some kind of disability.
The grant money would cover housing costs at the beginning of each person or family's time with the program. The city must match a portion of the grant and plans to use about $80,000 from its Community Development Block Grant, also from HUD. Fields plans to use that contribution to pay the case workers.
Seven Hills, which runs a day center, a residential center and other services for homeless people, provided the case work for five or six years with the same grants, said Kevin Fitzpatrick, a former president of the center's board and a sociology professor at the University of Arkansas.
The center didn't apply for the grants this year because it can't afford the matching needed, Charity Stillings, chief operating officer, said Tuesday. She said the organization grew too fast and overextended itself and is "stabilizing as an organization" this year.
"We're kind of going back to the basics, and we're rebuilding a really strong foundation," Stillings said.
Last year the center drew down a $247,000 city endowment dedicated to the center's work, mostly to pay almost $180,000 in overdue payroll taxes in 2013 and 2014. Jon Woodward, then-CEO, told city officials a center employee decided to neglect those taxes without the board's approval or awareness. The employee involved was fired.
Board members at the time also said they regretted buying 2.3 acres on South School Avenue in 2013 for $400,000, which the center hoped to use to build a lease-free home. That project has been delayed indefinitely.
The center this year also brought in a new CEO, Billy Rader.
Stillings said most of the thousands of people going through the center's doors will receive services even without the grant programs.
Stillings said Seven Hills would be willing to take on the grants again when the organization has the ability to handle them.
The grants program falls along the lines of a growing "housing first" movement in the country, with homeless advocates saying people need a bed and a roof before they can focus on building a productive life, not the other way around.
Groups taking this approach have found it costs the same, if not less, as leaving people on the streets and picking up their tab for emergency room visits or jail time, while more effectively solving the problem, according to reports in news outlets.
Fitzpatrick, who organizes the region's census every two years to research who's homeless and why, has long supported this approach, saying the region must provide more affordable housing and a continuum of services from the streets to a real home. But he said the city's lack of experience in this particular program concerns him. He said he didn't know of any other Northwest Arkansas city that takes it on.
Seven Hills spent years getting it right and building relationships with landlords, he said, and changing oversight of these programs could disrupt a fragile network of organizations and services tackling the homeless problem.
"It's a good thing that somebody picked it up, because that would be a gap for sure," Fitzpatrick said. "I know cities that run their own homeless shelters and do their own programming, but this city has no history of that. It requires a certain degree of expertise to understand and evaluate whether someone's delivering the services."
He called the Seven Hills downsize "disconcerting." The center, The Salvation Army and other groups continue to do good work, but a proposal discussed by city and Seven Hills officials to build a "village" of small, temporary and spartan emergency shelters in Fayetteville for people with nowhere to go has stalled for want of a suitable piece of land to put it on and because of other concerns.
"I think there's some critical issues that we're not addressing right now," Fitzpatrick said. "We've got to consider where we're going to be in three or five years."
Fields said her city department could pull off the job, noting its overall community development goals. Interviews for the caseworker positions should start this month.
"We have administered other grants; not this specific one, but I think we have the foundation to administer this one," Fields said. The program can make the community better, she added, "so we're going to do it."
NW News on 11/30/2015