Homeless in CT: Emergency shelter system a ‘logjam’ after fallout from pandemic

Calvin Byrd no longer lives on the streets of Hartford.

After Byrd was featured in a Courant article three weeks ago, the right people heard his story and got him into a shelter run by the Cornerstone Foundation in Vernon.

The apartment hallway Byrd once slept in is a far cry from the warm shelter bed the 65-year-old has now, but Byrd still feels embittered by the system that failed him for so long.

“It is better than being in the cold and in the hallway [but] this is not for me,” Byrd said. “My biggest nightmare is my mother [in Georgia] dies and I don’t see her again. … I want to have an apartment again. I want to be on my own again. I really want [to get] some Section 8 and move away. … I want to see my mother again.”

After overcoming the first hurdle in the homelessness system, Byrd is looking toward the next challenge — finding a place to call home.

Advocates for the homeless say Connecticut’s shelters are stuck in a “logjam” where people wait months, or even years, before moving into affordable housing.

The close of pandemic-era hotel shelters has only amplified the crisis as Connecticut enters the winter with fewer beds, and more people in need.

Eighty-nine shelter programs operate in the state today, representing a total of 2,537 beds.

After shelter space peaked in 2010, the number of emergency beds and transitional housing units for Connecticut’s homeless has decreased by more than 34%, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual Housing Inventory Count Report.

Over the past decade, the decline in shelters has largely kept pace with the decline of the state’s homeless population. But, in the economic fallout of the pandemic, the number of people experiencing homelessness is back on the rise in 2022, and the resources are simply not there to sustain the increase.

Stuck in the system longer

Byrd pulled his sweatshirt and parka hood up onto his head to brace the December winds as he waited for the bus to Hartford. Byrd makes the ride every day now to go to doctors appointments and meetings with friends and case managers.

The drive from Vernon to Hartford takes only 20 minutes by car, but the bus route can last more than an hour.

For Byrd, who has rods in his left leg from a hit-and-run and spinal injuries which require surgery, every bump on the ride means pain.

“My back and my neck, they have been taking a beating on that bus,” Byrd said. “But I’m willing to take that ride because I got to be able to go on with my life.”

Byrd’s situation is not unique. People experiencing homelessness do not get a choice in which shelter has space for them, and many end up miles from their former home.

In 2021, only 30 of Connecticut’s 170 towns and cities had an emergency shelter or transitional housing program for the homeless.

Sharon Redfern, the executive director of the Cornerstone Foundation said distance can be a blessing for some, who might need to get away from old environments to break the cycle of substance abuse, but it can also act as a detriment to others.

“We get a lot of people that are from the Vernon area, or the east of the [Connecticut] river. Because east of the river there’s not a lot of shelters,” Redfern said. “It is hard if people come here from Hartford. All of their medical people, all of their supports, good or bad, are in Hartford. So when they come here, it can be a blessing or a curse.”

Redfern said that the main problem facing Cornerstone, and the rest of the shelter system, is the lack of affordable housing for people to cycle into.

“The lack of places for people to go is really putting the shelters in a terrible position because they just can’t get people out. It’s really put a logjam on the whole process,” Redfern said. “We have people here who we can’t even find a place to move to. They’re read, they’ve got the voucher, they’ve got everything, [and they] can’t find [anywhere]. We had a guy who was here for a fairly significant amount of time. He got turned down by five landlords because he had no credit history — not a bad one.”

Redfern said that the current longest-staying resident has been at Cornerstone for more than a year.

Across the state, people are remaining in the shelter system for longer. According to the Homeless Management Information System, the average time spent on the states By Name List of people currently experiencing homelessness is 288 days. One person has been active on the list since January of 2015.

“For the most part, if there was housing out there, the system works … The answer is low-income, accessible housing. That’s the only thing that’s gonna solve homelessness,” Redfern said.

One of her many solutions is to build tiny home communities — that way people can build equity in a home they can afford instead of paying rent to a landlord. But Redfern said towns aren’t zoned for that type of housing.

“We as a country have to be a little more creative about [housing] — not everybody wants to live in a 2,000-square-foot home with a big lawn,” she said.

Affordable housing needed

As Redfern walked through the Cornerstone “Lodge,” staff and volunteers broke down privacy dividers and put up bunk beds to increase the occupancy in the single-adult congregate shelter before winter.

Between the foundation’s two family shelters and the Lodge, Cornerstone can fit 40 people — much less than what they could accommodate during the pandemic.

“Last year, in addition to doing long-term warming on site, we housed 150 people in hotel rooms,” Redfern said. “If we had somebody come in and we were full, we could ship them right to a hotel room so they were housed for the night. A lot of that was COVID money, which is gone now. So they’re not doing that this year. And that’s gonna be a huge problem.”

During the pandemic, at least 67 homeless shelters operated secondary locations in motels and hotels across Connecticut.

On Dec. 28 of this year, when Gov. Ned Lamont’s emergency orders expire, the last of the COVID-era hotels-turned shelters will have to shut down, or get local approval to remain open.

In September, the Courant reported that after the Stewart B. McKinney Men’s Emergency Shelter moved to the Best Western Hartford Hotel & Suites on Brainard Road, Hartford’s Community Renewal Team decided to purchase a Days Inn next door for $3.4 million to establish a permanent hotel-style shelter.

Efforts for permanency have not been as successful elsewhere.

New Haven planned to purchase the Long Wharf’s Village Suites and develop 72 units of affordable housing and 80 shelter beds for the homeless, but the deal fell through. Instead, the property will become apartments, with just 5% priced below market rate.

Rafael Pagan, executive director of the Stamford-based shelter Pacific House, is in a zoning battle to keep the foundation’s satellite shelter at a former Super 8 Motel in Danbury open.

Pacific House purchased the motel for $4.63 million in 2021, but this fall they had to stop accepting new clients when the local zoning board voted against a change in regulation that would have allowed the city’s only shelter to continue operations after Lamont’s orders expire.

Pagan is hopeful that a new plan to convert the shelter into 66 units of affordable housing will pass, but the future remains uncertain.

“In Danbury, this can go two ways,” Pagan said. “We can have a major problem on our hands with 40 or more people out on the street totally homeless, which is a catastrophe in the making. Or there could be a reasonable solution, at least in the interim until the more long-term solution could be [figured] out where people could be in a safe environment during these winter months.”

Pagan said that Pacific House is looking to purchase an an additional property to serve as an emergency shelter, but turning the Motel 8 into affordable housing will be the long-term key to addressing homelessness in Danbury.

“That leads you more to solutions rather than just caretaking,” Pagan said.

After a year at Cornerstone, Richard Pelletier found a spot at a rooming house down the street. He described the change in his life as “night and day” since moving into the room he rents for $550 a month.

“To be on my own again is great,” Pelletier said. He plans on staying “Probably till the day I die.”

For Pelletier, getting rehoused was a difficult road. He said it took him months to send in paperwork and get approved for rent assistance. But once he finally found something in his price range, Pelletier said the landlord would not accept the government money.

“The state was willing to help me pay my first month’s rent and security, which was all good and well, but the landlord didn’t want to go for it, he wanted to have nothing to do with it. So I had to scrimp and save to afford this,” Pelletier said.

Oftentimes, the housing that is actually financially accessible to low-income individuals will not accept government funds to avoid inspections and other legal requirements.

Debi Keller, a current resident of Cornerstone, saw her affordable living situation turn into a nightmare when she realized the tenants she was renting a room from stopped paying the property’s landlord.

Keller was not on the lease and she said she had been paying months of rent to the tenants, who instead used the money for other things.

“It was a beautiful home, it worked out really well. But then this happened,” Keller said. “When we found out that we were being evicted, when we got served, the girl that lives there and the boyfriend, they still wanted me to give them my rent money. [My answer was] ‘Too bad, you squandered it all.’ They threw me down a flight of stairs. And the police didn’t believe me because it was my word against theirs.”

Keller, 72, in the hospital with broken bones, found herself facing homelessness for the first time in her life.

“[The Cornerstone] foundation is trying to help me find housing and hopefully, with God’s help, it’ll work. You know, it’ll work. There’s so many people homeless and this is such a small community. I think it’s very bad that it happens in the most wealthy country in the world,” Keller said. “I consider myself very lucky. I don’t go to bed hungry. I don’t go to bed cold. I don’t go to bed in a situation where I have to continuously look over my shoulder and make sure I’m not going to get murdered.”

Evonne Klein, the executive director of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, projects that the state will need 84,000 new units of housing that is affordable to people of low incomes in order to bridge the current gap.

She said that shelters are the “band aid,” not the solution. The solution will take funding and more housing.

“Homelessness is not insurmountable,” Klein said. “This is an achievable goal for the state of Connecticut because we’ve seen success before and we can do it again. It’s going to take working together and strategic investment of appropriate resources, so that we can prevent people from falling into homelessness, and should someone fall into homelessness, we can quickly exit them from homelessness.

“This legislative session is critical in preventing and ending homelessness in Connecticut. Together we can create a Connecticut where everyone can have a place to call home.”

Alison Cross can be reached at across@courant.com.