Viewpoint: We can solve homelessness in Michiana. It starts with safe housing.
As a volunteer at Our Lady of the Road for the past seven years, I’ve seen the difficulties our guests face in moving forward with their lives while living in tents. For the women and men we serve at Our Lady, street homelessness requires a laser-like focus on survival. When our guests have no fixed residence, they by necessity spend their time and energy on the basics: food, hygiene, maintaining their limited possessions and respite from the elements. From this position, making progress on goals like mental health and addiction recovery requires a level of heroic dedication that most of us who are comfortably housed would frankly not be able to accomplish.
Motels4Now has been a game changer for those of us who work closely with our unhoused neighbors. Two years in, the program has housed over 500 individuals, over half of whom have voluntarily entered addiction recovery programs and/or begun mental health treatment. More than 250 people have moved on from the motel to better, safer and more permanent housing, and another 25% of the participants have found long-term stability and remain housed at the motel to this day. That approximately 75% success rate is incredible.
A woman we know well through Our Lady of the Road, a lifelong resident of St. Joseph County with a lengthy history of arrests for disorderly conduct and obstruction of traffic, achieved stability through participation in the Motels4Now program. The last time I saw this woman before she was housed, she screamed paranoid obscenities in my face when I offered her a cup of coffee. Today, she makes appointments, cares for her health and hygiene, and greets acquaintances politely when she runs into them in public. Housing restored this woman to herself and brought peace to her relationships in our community.
The needs in St. Joseph County are great; over a thousand people have signed up for a shared room at the motel in the past two years, and that list grows by 10 to 12 people each week. While those figures might appear daunting, we can take comfort in the fact that homelessness is a solvable problem. The city of South Bend has identified a low-barrier intake center as a critical gap in our community since the 2017 Working Groups Report on Homelessness. Motels4Now has been filling this gap for two years using a model proven effective in communities all over the country. However, it’s time to move forward. The current space the motel program rents is dilapidated and expensive. The staff of Motels4Now and community partners like Oaklawn and Burton’s Laundry have accomplished incredible things in contingent and temporary facilities. The next step in ending homelessness and building stability and resilience in our community is a permanent intake center in a safe, secure and accessible location.
The staff and residents at Motels4Now want to steward community resources effectively, and continuing to rent space at a motel is not a cost-effective, long-term solution. Our Lady of the Road board members have worked with an architect to design a new facility which will be purpose-built, low-maintenance and flexible enough to meet changing needs in the community. This will enable the motel program staff to more effectively help program participants to move to better housing options, treatment and recovery as quickly as possible.
We have a chance to solve homelessness in Michiana. We have a chance to be a community that guards and protects our most vulnerable neighbors and that bravely confronts the opioid epidemic. It all starts with safe housing. Right now, the volunteers and staff at Our Lady of the Road are calling on county and city officials to work alongside us and choose a location for a new permanent intake center. We have a building design and a program that has already proved effective. If county officials approve a site next month, we could begin construction in June of 2023 and begin housing people by the following summer. Our community is excited, motivated and committed to ending homelessness − we can do this together!
Casey Mullaney is a volunteer at Our Lady of the Road.
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Let's move on permanent intake center for homeless in St. Joe County.
