Mike Wolanin | The Republic Cheryl Baldwin straightens up the men’s portion of the shelter at Brighter Days Housing in Columbus, Ind., Friday, April 14, 2023.
Mike Wolanin | The Republic Brighter Day volunteer Cheryl Baldwin straightens up the men’s portion of the shelter at Brighter Days Housing in Columbus, Ind., Friday, April 14, 2023.
Local officials say Bartholomew County has seen an increase in homelessness over the past year, including a higher prevalence of severe mental illness among people living on the streets, as the community emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.
At the same time, officials say the community lacks the one resource they “desperately need” to get the most vulnerable chronically homeless people off the streets — permanent supportive housing.
“This winter was pretty rough” at Brighter Days Housing, a homeless shelter at 421 S. Mapleton St., said Columbus Township Trustee Ben Jackson, whose office owns the shelter’s building and pays for utilities as part of a joint venture with Love Chapel.
“We had a lot of people coming through,” he said.
From December to February, an average of 30 people each night turned to the shelter to keep a roof over their heads, according to figures provided by Kelly Daugherty, Love Chapel executive director, which operates Brighter Days.
By comparison, the shelter housed an average of about 26 people per night during the same period the year before.
Daugherty said the increase in overall demand led to the second-busiest winter at the shelter since it was founded in 2016.
Demand was particularly high for men, with the 28-bed men’s dorm at full capacity the entire winter, Daugherty said. In a couple of instances, the shelter had to use a spill-over area to house additional homeless men.
“It was the busiest we’ve ever been for men,” Daugherty said. “Our men’s dorm was full the entire winter.”
While the combined efforts of Love Chapel, Centerstone and the Columbus Township Trustee’s office helped 49 homeless people in the community find housing over the past year, demand at the shelter still increased.
That means that more than 49 people in Bartholomew County became homeless last year, Daugherty said.
Demand at the shelter generally increases during the colder months of the year, officials said. Overall, the shelter housed an average of 19 people each night in 2022.
Permanent supportive housing
Local officials said the community does not have a key tool that they believe would help keep many homeless in Columbus off the streets — permanent supportive housing.
Permanent supportive housing is a program that seeks to provide housing and supportive services on a more long-term basis to people who are experiencing chronic homelessness, according to the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. The services can include, among other things, connecting people with community-based health care and treatment services.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness says permanent supportive housing is a “proven solution” for the most vulnerable chronically homeless people and “has been shown to lower public costs associated with the use of crisis services such as shelters, hospitals, jails and prisons.”
Currently, local officials largely rely on what is called “rapid rehousing,” which is an intervention model that seeks to help homeless people with more moderate needs find a home as quickly as possible.
Most of the time, the recipients of rapid rehousing rent an apartment and are provided temporary community support services that might include case management and temporary financial assistance.
However, that intervention model does not work for everybody who is experiencing homelessness, officials said.
“We’ve had some spectacular failures” at rehousing people because rapid rehousing wasn’t meant for those with more severe cases of substance use or mental health disorders or other barriers, Jackson said. “We use (rapid rehousing) because it’s the only tool we have,” he said. “We know what tool we should be using — permanent supportive housing — but we don’t have that tool.”
The end result, Jackson said, is that some people who are being rehoused in Columbus are winding up homeless again, sometimes bouncing in and out of homelessness more than once.
At the same time, Jackson and others have said that they have noticed an increase in the prevalence of severe mental illness among the local homeless population since the pandemic struck, suggesting that there could be an increased need for more intensive interventions that officials say are not readily available in the community.
“We don’t have (permanent supportive housing) here, and that seems to be a real problem because some of the people that have more barriers tend to become homeless again,” Jackson said. “We desperately need it in Bartholomew County.”
Mark Lindenlaub, Thrive Alliance executive director, said there “definitely is a need in the community” for permanent supportive housing, adding that he is aware of only six beds in the county that would meet that criteria — five times lower than the average nightly headcount at Brighter Days this past winter.
“The concept of permanent supportive housing really is based on the notion of if you don’t have stable housing, it’s extremely difficult to deal with other challenges in your life,” Lindenlaub said. “…The idea of permanent supportive housing is that housing needs to be a first step that a community provides for somebody to successfully navigate these challenges.”
Previous attempt
Local officials have attempted to establish a permanent supportive housing complex in Columbus in the past but were met with opposition from local residents who expressed concerns about public safety and its potential impact on property values in the area.
The last major push was in 2017, when plans were unveiled to set up the first permanent supportive housing complex in the city with 20 to 25 apartment units inside the former Faith Victory Church building, 1703 Home Ave., near Donner Park.
The complex, which would have been called the Victory Apartments and served homeless people in Bartholomew County and the surrounding area, was part of a partnership between Thrive Alliance, Centerstone Behavioral Health and the city of Columbus, The Republic reported at the time.
The complex also would have had a case-management staff members assigned to each tenant who would provide life skills, medications, therapy and link-ups with volunteer physicians.
However, neighbors quickly voiced concerns that “possible felons will be moving in” and said property values in the area would plummet. By mid-2018, the plans had been abandoned, in part, due to the opposition from neighbors, as well as insufficient funding to make the project viable, officials said.
“Everyone wants the homeless off the streets, but no one wants them in their neighborhood,” Jackson said.
Since then, there has not been much movement on the issue in Columbus, Jackson said, adding that it is “daunting” to secure funding, an agency to operate the facility and find a location “where you can make it safe enough that the neighborhood won’t object.”
But without such housing, officials fear that some people in Columbus will continue to bounce in and out of homelessness.
“Many of the people you see on the streets … we may have housed them a couple times — once or twice since they first became homeless — and they are homeless again because we weren’t able to support them enough, and they weren’t able to make it successful,” Jackson said.
