WORLD-HERALD EXCLUSIVE
Being homeless can kill you.
Living on the street can shave 25 years off a person's life. And death can come within seven years when being homeless is paired with one of eight risk factors, like age, disease and multiple emergency room visits.
So says a New York City group in a campaign being embraced by Omaha and Council Bluffs. Called “100,000 Homes,” this campaign launched by Common Ground, a New York nonprofit, will kick off in Omaha next week.
The city's consortium of homeless service providers, Metro Area Continuum of Care for the Homeless, is seeking volunteers who will train Monday and spend the following three days canvassing emergency shelters and outdoor locations for a blitz-type census of the homeless. A name-and-photo list will be compiled, and homeless individuals will be ranked in order of vulnerability and need.
The neediest 100 people will be offered fast-track permanent housing in apartments (not emergency shelters) and will receive social services. The goal of 100,000 Homes is to get the people on the list into housing by July 2013.
Erin Porterfield, the executive director of the Metro Area Continuum of Care, said she will have a handful of housing options ready as soon as Friday and hopes to get all 100 housed well before the 2013 date.
Omaha and Council Bluffs are among 53 communities that have signed up for the campaign, launched in July. Of those, 26 are reporting results and, to date, 5,841 homeless people around the country have moved from the street into homes.
Common Ground started the national effort after seeing success in moving chronically homeless people — defined by the federal government as homeless for at least a year with a disabling condition — from Times Square into stable housing. Common Ground started its street-to-home effort in 2003.
Kara Mergl, research director for the organization, said too often the attitude among those serving the homeless was that they were never going to change.
Yet Common Ground found housing and folded in social services. The New York Times reported 55 people living on Times Square streets in 2005. By March, the newspaper said, that number was one. He was called the “Homeless Holdout.”
Mergl said that “holdout” recently has gone into housing.
“It's an incredibly encouraging story,” she said.
Beyond the humanitarian motivation is a financial one. The most fragile homeless people rack up the highest medical bills because of debilitating conditions and frequent emergency-room visits.
Mergl said communities can spend $15,000 annually on case management and services for newly housed homeless or face tabs up to $400,000 (year-long hospitalization), $30,000 to $60,000 (incarceration) or $30,000 (for intermittent emergency room visits).
A July estimate of the metro area's medically needy homeless counted 320 people. There were about 1,500 known homeless people during the area's last official count. Last year, 36 homeless people in the metro area died.
Ideally, the neediest will spend Oct. 15 indoors at what Porterfield called “a place where someone can live for the rest of their life with the kind of support that would meet their need.”
Contact the writer:
444-1136, erin.grace@owh.com
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