51 Homes wants to house the 51 most medically vulnerable homeless | Business

The first two homeless people have homes now in a new local campaign to find homes for 51 of the most medically vulnerable homeless living on the streets, arroyos and parks of Tucson – many of them Downtown.

51 Homes, in fact, is the name of a workgroup of the Tucson Pima Collaboration to End Homelessness that has affiliated itself with a national campaign called 100,000 Homes, started in New York City by Common Ground, an international leader in finding solutions for homelessness.

This first stage in Tucson seeks to house 51 medically-vulnerable homeless identified in surveys of 402 homeless done the week of April 11-15. A Vulnerability Index identified 186 subjects as medically vulnerable and 51 Homes prioritized the 51 most vulnerable for the first 51 homes.

Not surprisingly, the vast number of these medically vulnerable homeless were found in the greater Downtown area along the Broadway/Congress corridor bounded by the El Rio Health Centers and between Speedway and 22nd St. This is where the largest concentration of medical and social services for the homeless are located.

“We believe this program will have a positive impact to supply these folks with some place to live that will provide them stability and medical services so they will have less reasons to go Downtown,” said Mark Clark, co-chair of 51 Homes and chief executive of CODAC Behavioral Health Services.

“My hope for Downtown is that people are Downtown because they want to be Downtown, not because it’s the only alternative they have,” Clark said.

Dozens of local social services agencies are involved with 51 Homes. Compass Behavioral Health Care and La Frontera Arizona’s Readily Accessible People Program are closest to the ground in finding and processing the homeless into homes.

The Downtown Tucson Partnership welcomes this first, modest step to find homes for the homeless.

“We have an increasing population of homeless people in the central business district,” said Michael Keith, DTP’s chief executive. “I think they are the first organization to clearly see the relationship between housing, extreme medical needs and the homeless. I think it’s huge for Downtown. It the first real solution to provide decent housing for people curled up in business doorways, on the street furniture and under trees.”

Why 51 homes? Phoenix last year started a Project H3: Home, Health Hope to get the 50 most medically vulnerable homeless of the street.

The 51 Homes collaborative quickly assembled 51 housing units with the City of Tucson providing 27 federal Section 8 Housing Choice vouchers, 12 units provided by the Community Partnership of Southern Arizona and 12 from Veterans Affairs.

“If we got all 51 housed in a year, I’d be really excited,” Clark said. “Our goal is to have those 51 still housed one year later.”

That one sentence encapsulates the challenge of housing these homeless.

During the April survey, 20 teams with more than 100 volunteers interviewed 402 homeless people and asked them each 40 questions from the basic age, gender, years homeless, income source, whether they were veterans to emergency room visits, violence, history of foster care, in-patient hospitalizations and specific health questions.

These answers were documented with a name, photograph and location of each subject.

The answers were crunched to assign a Vulnerability Index, which was created by Common Ground.

51 Homes discovered the inpatient and emergency care on just these 402 homeless amounted to $2.8 million.

“We work them through the eligibility process. They have to apply like everyone else. You want to engage them. The question is what does it take to engage them.”

Or even find them again. And once you find one of the indentified homeless, it can be a challenge to convince them to enter the bureaucratic tangle.

“First thing you to do is engage them,” Clark said again “Find out what they’re interested in. Take them to the mountains, if they want. We want to get them off the street and into temporary housing first. We refer them to agencies for treatment for substance abuse. We try to find out if the have a GP and try to get them so stop using the emergency room. We try to find out where they want to live. Sometimes we have to help them get a Social Security card or identification card.”

Tucson is one of 84 communities around the country affiliated with the 100,000 Homes campaign, which so far has housed 8,370 people since starting last year with a goal to reach 100,000 by July 2013.

100,000 Homes evolved out of Common Ground’s “Street to Home” approach that helped reduce street homelessness in Times Square from an average of 55 people sleeping outside in the cold winter to one single person.

Common Ground goes on to report that “Street to Home” went on to reduce street homelessness by 87 percent in the 20-block Times Square neighborhood, and by 43 percent in the surrounding 230 blocks of West Midtown.

“The lethality of street homelessness is on par with some forms of cancer, cutting an average of 25 years off the lifespan,” Common Ground says on its Web site. “Meanwhile, the health costs alone of leaving people on the streets far exceed the cost of supportive housing.”