'The problem has gotten to a point where you cannot ignore it anymore.' Mental health issues driving homelessness in Brown County

Using a blue tarp as his roof, 49-year-old Madee did his best to protect himself from the elements.

Until recently, the college graduate called a bush near the railroad tracks in downtown Green Bay “home.”

Scouring the area for a place to “live” is nothing new for Madee, because he’s spent the better part of the past three years on the streets.

The drop in temperatures prompted Madee to seek shelter at St. John’s Homeless Shelter, and he’s been staying there on and off since it opened at the beginning of November.

He joins dozens, if not hundreds, of other individuals in Brown County who are or have experienced homelessness.

For many, homelessness may seem like a foreign concept – something that could never happen to them.

It can be easy to pretend not to see the guy sleeping in the park, or to ignore the woman standing at an intersection holding a handwritten plea for help.

Terri Refsguard, New Community Shelter chief executive officer, said there is no “typical” homeless person.

She said the reasons someone is homeless vary drastically – but something all those experiencing homelessness have in common is, it doesn’t define who they are.

Refsguard said she uses the phrases “people finding themselves homeless” or “experiencing homelessness, because it’s not a permanent situation.”

“It’s a temporary situation,” Refsguard said, “and I think that is what our community needs to understand, too. There is not ‘the homeless’ – this big group of people. It’s individuals experiencing homelessness for one reason or another.”

An on-going struggle dealt with in shadows

Paul VanHandel, Homeless Outreach Team (HOT) member, former Green Bay Police officer and longtime advocate for the homeless, said the issue is nothing new, but rather an ongoing, years-long struggle, often dealt with in the shadows.

“I think the problem has gotten to a point where you cannot ignore it anymore,” VanHandel said. “What we were doing before was kind of ignoring that there was a problem to begin with, or we were just not seeing enough of the problems.”

Though homelessness has been prevalent in the area long before 2020, he said the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the problem, and made it more visible.

“I think it’s a combination of it’s gotten a little bit worse, but the pandemic has also gotten it out on the street where it’s visible,” VanHandel said. “In the past during the day, homeless individuals would be at the library or keeping warm in stores or gas stations. The pandemic took that away, so more and more we see them on the streets and in parks.”

And when things are visible, VanHandel said, people really start paying more attention.

“They can’t ignore it anymore,” he said.

For years, the brunt of the responsibility seems to have fallen on the shoulders of the City of Green Bay, because a large majority of the homeless-related resources and services are centrally-located in the city’s downtown.

In 2020, mostly because of the pandemic, the city saw an uptick in homeless individuals gathering in St. John’s Park in the heart of downtown Green Bay, generating more than 100 police calls from April to October, including disturbances, public drug use and sexual assaults.

This led City Council to approve an outreach program in the park, facilitated by St. John Homeless Shelter, in hopes of preventing similar issues in the future.

“This is not a solution, this whole thing is not planned to be a solution,” Council Vice President Barbara Dorff said at a March 2021 meeting. “This is an intervention in a problem… It wasn’t intended to be a solution, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

Though the program received strong support from the majority of the council, and was even extended until November, some alderpersons expressed frustration that the “cleanup” fell solely on the City of Green Bay – stressing the need for county involvement in tackling area homelessness long-term.

“It is not enough, in my opinion, to just say the county is at the table,” District 9 Alderperson Brian Johnson said at the same meeting. “We heard multiple people say that. And that is wonderful that they are at the table. It is not enough. We need investment. This is a Brown County problem and the City of Green Bay is bearing the expense. We need county investment.”

That investment came in the form of a community homelessness initiative, a collective effort between the Green Bay Community Foundation, the Brown County Homeless and Housing Coalition, Brown County United Way, the City of Green Bay, Brown County and the Corporation for Supportive Housing.

Rashad Cobb, community engagement program officer with the Community Foundation and member of the initiative, said the group gathered data both at a service level and from lived experiences to develop a blueprint aimed at preventing and ending homelessness in the Greater Green Bay region.

Decade ago, drug and alcohol abuse larger factors

VanHandel, who first started working on the issue in 2010 as a community police officer, said drug and alcohol abuse was often an underlying issue. He said much of his early work focused on increasing detoxification services.

“People could actually go into treatment and eventually not detox in an emergency room (ER),” he said, “not constantly have police calls, and rescue calls taking them to an ER and then discharged – it was medication stabilization, discharge and then back to the street. We were like, ‘This is not helping the situation.’”

VanHandel said at that time, shelters weren’t appropriately equipped to help individuals dealing with addiction.

In 2016, with the help of the Brown County Homeless and Housing Coalition’s Basic Needs committee, detoxification services were restored at Bellin Psychiatric.

“We got some of our chronic homeless people at the time into the program,” VanHandel said.

At that same time, shelters, like St. John’s, were evolving, too, and started to provide sobriety rooms, which allows guests to be more closely monitored.

“That being said, our threshold is that they need to be able to provide complete self-care…,” St. John’s Homeless Shelter Executive Director Lexie Wood said. “They need to be able to take care of themselves, they need to be able to make their bed, or use the bathroom facilities or get their own meal. We are looking at the health and safety of that individual as well as all of the other guests in the shelter.”

Mental health issues drive many of today's cases

VanHandel, Refsguard and Wood agree – the needs of the homeless population have changed.

“I’d say 98% of the people we serve have some type of mental health issue,” Refsguard said.

VanHandel said needs have evolved into “this mental health aspect where it’s much less about alcohol or AODA – certainly you’re never going to take that away.”

“But, now what we’re finding is that it’s transcended to mental health,” he said. “If we could solve mental health, we could probably solve a lot of their homeless circumstances, as well.”

When she started in her role in 2012, Wood said while mental health was an issue, the major underlying cause of homelessness was job loss.

“We had an individual in the shelter my very first season who was unmedicated and battling some pretty significant paranoid schizophrenia,” she said. “It was known, and the shelter took care of him. The staff, other guests and volunteers – everyone kind of looked out for him, because everyone knew this particular guest was struggling with some pervasive mental health.”

Now if you walk into St. John’s Shelter, Wood said, “it’s not just one guest that people are looking out for and taking care of.”

“It’s the majority of our population,” she said. “Many times it feels like we’re an extension of inpatient mental health services, or certainly an extension of outpatient services. So, I would say mental health has become the overarching symptom we see as to why someone is experiencing homelessness, especially at St. John’s.”

Green Bay is home to six homeless shelters – St. John’s, New Community, House of Hope, Golden House, Freedom House and Safe Shelter, which opened this past fall.

Wood said space isn’t the issue – there are beds.

“We as shelter executive directors have met pretty routinely and we’ve agreed and have shared with the community that (in) Green Bay it’s not a capacity issue,” she said. “We have (six) shelters who are serving singles and families and the whole demographic, and yet there are people falling through the cracks.”

Unfortunately, she said, sometimes mental health issues prevent individuals from being able to use them.

“It’s a very delicate line,” she said. “St. John’s is the shelter of last resort. We recognize that if somebody is in need of our services, if for any reason we need to turn them away, there is not an alternative option that we’re turning them to, and that is a really, really challenging piece to our mission.”

Refsguard said recent discussions amongst shelter directors and other community stakeholders have centered around looking at how “might we address this differently?”

“As a community, or as a provider of services, we need to figure out how we are going to help those individuals who have fallen through the cracks – the chronically homeless, the severely-meantally ill and those with great medical challenges,” she said. “We have to figure out what we are going to do to help those people. It sounds like an assisted-living setting. If it is, then let’s do it, because what an accomplishment that would be for Green Bay, to bring our homeless population on the streets down to next to nothing. How awesome would that be? And how awesome would that be for those people.”

Refsguard said discussions on so-called non-traditional shelter have started.

“We have come together, and we have recognized the gap,” she said. “Now what?”

About this story

Heather Graves is the editor of The Press Times. This story was produced for the NEW News Lab, a local news collaboration in northeast Wisconsin made up of six news organizations, including FoxValley365, The Green Bay Press-Gazette, The Post-Crescent, The Press Times, Wisconsin Public Radio and Wisconsin Watch. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s Journalism Department is an educational partner. Microsoft is providing financial support to the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation and Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region to fund the initiative. The mission of the lab is to “collaborate to identify and fill information gaps to help residents explore ways to improve their communities and lives — and strengthen democracy.”

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This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Green Bay homelessness is a complex problem, evoking community action