Homeless people in Onondaga County will benefit from a $6.8 million federal grant for programs serving the homeless, say advocates for the homeless and county officials.
“This will be good for the community” said Tony Discenza, who heads the Syracuse homeless task force. The $6.85 million and a new initiative will help move people from transitional housing to permanent housing, Discenza said.
The grant, unveiled in February, could not have come at a better time, say officials who work with the homeless. As the economy unravels, they say, many state and county governments are cutting funds for human services organizations. And organizations that depend on private and corporate contributions are seeing their donation wells run dry.
But, say those who work with the homeless, the grant from the federal Housing and Urban Development Department means that some programs will continue to help the homeless improve their lives. And some will even have independent housing.
“It will be a big help,” said Carol Schaffer, who directs the Basic Needs Program at Catholic Charities. That agency will head the new housing initiative to accommodate 16 people in apartments throughout Onondaga County.
Among other homeless services agencies receiving part of the HUD grant:
•The Salvation Army will use about $300,000 to pay for new employees to serve as a central point of contact for people seeking housing help. New staff paid by the grant would also look for new housing.
•Catholic Charities will use $431,954 to house 16 homeless people in permanent apartments. Those new tenants will have access to supportive services that can help them find a job or apply for other aid, for example.
•The Spanish Action League expects to coordinate help for about 80 non-English speakers who are either homeless or in danger of losing their homes. HUD’s $33,247 help pay the salary of a bilingual worker who, aside from working with the homeless, coordinates help for more than 700 other clients who need help with other public services.
•The Chadwick Residence, a shelter for women and children, will use $188,720 to help 16 homeless women with disabilities pay for permanent housing. The shelter would help coordinate other help, mental health or addiction recovery services.
For Catholic Charities, the grant was important because its homeless shelter, The Oxford Inn, was bursting at the seams with homeless people seeking refuge in the frigid Syracuse winter. The shelter can hold 85 nightly visitors comfortably. And it seldom refuses anyone in the winter, so it was averaging 115 visitors in the cold season.
“People have to sleep in mattresses all over the building and it creates problems,” said Michael Sullivan, the shelter’s director. “People start stepping on each other.”
Officials at Catholic Charities say they hope the HUD grant will ease The Oxford Inn’s crowding by helping 16 homeless people move into independent housing for two years.
Some of those beneficiaries might be what HUD calls the chronically homeless, those who have been homeless for a year or more and who have some type of disability. Some of them have roamed without a home for so long, said Schaffer, the Catholic Charities coordinator, that they need help carrying out functions like shopping or preparing meals.
But the new program will help, she said. Some HUD funds will pay for workers to help the new tenants to receive support and carry out basic functions.
“If they’ve been homeless for a long time, they may not be used to that,” Schaffer said.
The Oxford Inn may be in good shape for a while after the 16 homeless people find permanent housing, says Sullivan, the director. He expects his numbers of people staying overnight to hold steady — even as the Syracuse unemployment rate rises amid the economic crisis.
The average person spending the night at The Oxford Inn has always been homeless and marginalized, Sullivan said. “A lot of our guys for much of their lives have been very poor, very marginalized, people who have not had much education and deal with alcoholism or drugs,” Sullivan said.
He added, “But that’s not to say that six months from now we could see a whole population that we haven’t seen before.”
(Ricardo Ramírez is a graduate student in magazine-newspaper-online journalism.)
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