County discusses aid to homeless

Charities look for ways to help

Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2008

"Unfortunately, we're seeing an increasing number of what we call ‘chronically homeless' persons. This is a hard-to-serve population," Hoffman said. "These are people we're all familiar with. We know a lot of them throughout the county. Unfortunately, they are also known to law enforcement throughout the county. They are sometimes sweet, sometimes aggressive, sometime enlightening, sometimes aggravating."

The recession and accompanying budget cuts are likely to make things worse, she said.

"It's just beginning, and we're going to be dealing with less money and more demand," Hoffman said.

Anna Ueno, with the Calvert County Health Department's "Shelter Plus" program, advocated her program's approach, which provides housing to the indigent.

"I've taken some people off the streets that are doing well in housing," Ueno said. "Are they challenging? Yes. But they're doing better than some people thought they would." Released prisoners from the Calvert County Detention Center get first priority for this help, though violent offenders are screened out.

Hoffman, and others, bemoaned lack of shelters and low-cost housing in the county.

"The discharge plan for someone getting out of jail can't be to go to Project ECHO. At least, that can't be the written discharge plan," she said.

Patty Vincent of the Calvert County Department of Social Services discussed the challenges of finding solutions for clients' homelessness. The leading causes of homelessness here are eviction by landlords and eviction by family members; in the latter situation, social services workers try to mediate between the evictee and his family so that he can return home, she said.

Wayne Boyle, director of the Calvert County Housing Authority, bemoaned the lack of federal help for housing. The current waiting list for "Section 8" subsidized housing is about 900 people long, so the wait is between four-and-a-half and five years, "which is extraordinary," he said.

But "things are going to get better for us. We haven't seen any Section 8 vouchers since 2001. What happened just before then that could have caused that to happen, I won't say," he said, an apparent reference to the election of President George W. Bush.

Even so, the county faces a huge task, he said.

"It is possible to try to provide housing to every person who needs housing, but it's going to be very expensive and very difficult. I don't know that anyone here has the answers to that. Money is an obstacle," he said.

Lt. Dave McDowell of the Calvert County Sheriff's Office said law enforcement's interaction with the homeless population is "reactive by design, but we try to temper that with a proactive mindset."

"Some people do something to get a warm place to stay, and we're facilitating that — that's the Calvert County Detention Center," he said. But deputies try to find placements for those who have not broken the law, as well, he said: "We have people in our lobby. We're not going to turn them out when it's cold."

Willetta Love, a member of Emmanuel Church in Huntingtown, asked about causes of homelessness and what her congregation could do to help. John Bennett, executive director of the Southern Maryland Community Network, suggested churches teach about mental illness.

"Mental illness is so stigmatized in this society that people don't seek treatment, don't seek assistance, for fear of being stigmatized," he said. "Particularly, young males resist treatment and medications, and then might lose jobs or self-medicate with alcohol and often end up involved with the police and in the street. I wish the school system could take on education that mental illness is treated like any other somatic illness."

The Rev. Peter Daly of St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Prince Frederick said a problem for the county is the lack of shelters and estimated that "there are 10 to 20 hardcore, chronic homeless who on any given night have no place to go. … That's what we need, some place for these people, so they don't freeze to death in the street."

Mary Ann Zaversnik, of the Safe Nights program spearheaded in Calvert County by Daly's church, said she counts on "15 stable people" to use the shelter, which is hosted in various churches, a week at a time by rotation, for 20 weeks of the year. The program aims to help anyone in need get out of the cold, but screens out violent and sex offenders.

"We have to have rules, too, even though our goal is to get people off the street and give them a warm place to sleep," she said.

The Rev. Gregory Gaertner, whose Huntingtown church, St. Nicholas Lutheran, opened its doors for Safe Nights in the week before Thanksgiving, said the experience had been inspiring for his congregation.

"[An organizer] stood up in front of the congregation and said, ‘I expect you all to have a role in this one way or another. And we darn well near did," Gaertner said. "Now the homeless people had names, had faces, had stories."