Despite an attempt to get the most vulnerable among Portland’s homeless population into housing, some highly qualified people are being left out in the cold.
The problem lies with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s lack of investment in – and what housing providers say is a nonsensical requirement for – federally funded permanent supportive housing. This is housing that’s available only to people who are chronically homeless and who also have a mental or physical disability.
Organizations that connect people with this subsidy in Portland, as well as other cities across the U.S., are struggling to meet HUD’s requirement that they provide proof of their clients’ chronic homelessness before moving them off the street and into housing.
This requirement is especially challenging for cities on the West Coast, where many people sleep outdoors and off the grid, as opposed to cities where most homeless people sleep in shelters and resident lists are maintained.
“For folks who have been disconnected from services or who have been living unsheltered, finding folks who can verify that is difficult,” said Ian Slingerland, director of homeless initiatives at Home Forward, Multnomah County’s housing authority.
Additionally, it’s often the people whose whereabouts are most difficult to prove that are also the most vulnerable and have the greatest need for permanent supportive housing, which comes linked with services such as mental health or addictions counseling.
HUD requires that service providers compile third-party documentation for at least nine of the past 12 months of their client’s homelessness to meet its chronic homelessness criteria.
Slingerland said this means that for each of those nine months, providers must find someone who will attest to seeing the person experiencing homelessness and sleeping in a shelter, outdoors or somewhere else not meant for human habitation.
Over the past year, Slingerland said, Home Forward has seen delays in spending portions of its federal rent-assistance grant because it’s taking longer for members of the region’s coordinated housing program to get this documentation together for each client.
Several of those members told Street Roots the process is an unnecessary waste of valuable staff hours. They also say that in some cases, it’s keeping vulnerable people outdoors longer as they wait for verification of their homelessness, which typically takes a month or longer.
A federal audit of Home Forward in April and recent audits of other area housing providers have resulted in an increased demand from HUD that local organizations provide more rigorous documentation of their clients’ chronic homelessness, compounding an already challenging requirement.
But before a mentally or physically disabled person with no home gets to this point in the housing process, they must score high enough on a vulnerability assessment to get placed on the list for housing. This HUD requirement also has its pitfalls.
Finding a home for Cesil
Flaws with the vulnerability assessment process are glaring in the case of a homeless senior citizen named Cesil George.
For nearly two decades – maybe longer – George has spent most of his days in the park in front of the Multnomah County Courthouse in downtown Portland.
He used to wear a skirt and, at times, flashy costume jewelry. Over the years, he became recognizable to many people working in the surrounding government buildings. These days, he wears more conventional clothing and carries all his belongings in canvas bags tied with rope to the end of a long stick, in the traditional bindle fashion.
He sleeps in doorways along downtown sidewalks where he knows he won’t be hassled and spends his winters under bridges. He never seeks out cooling centers in hot weather, nor does he sleep in shelters when it’s cold. He doesn’t seek help from any social service provider or passerby but instead has survived off what little money the people who frequent his favorite park give him, unsolicited.
The park where he lingers, Lownsdale Square and Chapman Square, bustles with law enforcement officers, attorneys and other county and city workers.
For George, it’s a place that feels safer than Old Town, which he ardently avoids, even though it’s where many resources he could be accessing are located. He’s said he won’t go there because he is afraid of other homeless people who have assaulted him in the past.
With his advanced age and easy-going demeanor, George is an easy target.
While he has a difficult time keeping his memories straight, there are a few details of his life that remain constant. He was born in Salem, raised in Woodburn and lived all his life in Oregon. He was married at one time and held a janitorial position at the Pendleton shirt manufacturing facility in Milwaukie before it shuttered in 1997. He has also been a patient at the Oregon State Hospital, a residential facility for people with mental illness.
Throughout the past 16 years, Tammie Jones has seen George hanging out in the park most mornings on her way to work at the Multnomah County Justice Center.
When she heads home around 6 p.m., he’s usually still there, often sitting quietly on a bench.
Some days, Jones buys him a coffee from Starbucks or gives him some cash for lunch.
“He doesn’t use drugs or alcohol, so I always felt comfortable knowing he was using the money for food,” she said. “He also is humble. If he doesn’t need money, he won’t take it.”
Through the years, Jones noticed George was getting older and “starting to go downhill.”
He’ll be 70 in November.
As the county court domestic violence coordinator, Jones is familiar with available resources and how to connect people to them. So, about 10 months ago, she decided to make it her mission to help George in her free time.
She walked him through applying for food stamps and Social Security benefits, and she took him to Loaves & Fishes, explaining to him that he could get free meals there in peace.
George didn’t have identification or any other documents he needed, so Jones used her clout as a government employee to vouch for him, which luckily worked when it mattered.
Every step was a challenge. George didn’t always remember to meet Jones in the park, and she would have to track him down. Appointments went missed and rescheduled. It was difficult to get him to enter office buildings; he suspected at times that it was a coordinated effort to take him back to the psychiatric hospital or to jail.
It took four visits to the Oregon Driver and Motor Vehicles office to get him state-issued identification.
“Getting him food stamps took an act of God,” Jones said.
Six months after he received his food stamps card, a man who frequently targets him stole it.
It took two months and several attempts to get a replacement card. When asked, George said he had fewer meals during that time.
It was clear, watching Jones escort George to appointments and assist him with paperwork and communications, that even some of the simplest tasks would have been insurmountable for George to complete on his own.
About eight years ago, when he began biking past the park on his way to work, Chuck Sparks, a deputy chief at the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, also noticed George was an area fixture who might need help.
Eventually, he began to greet George each morning.
“He’s a quiet guy,” Sparks said. “He’s not a homeless person that asks you for money. He just stands there and kind of watches the world go by.”
Sparks, too, became concerned with George’s predicament.
“He’s pretty unguarded. If he has a little something to his name, he gets targeted,” he said. “I believe he’s just getting increasingly vulnerable, and I’m afraid he’s going to be one of those people who falls asleep during a snowstorm, and then they find him the next morning.”
It would seem someone like George, a mentally disabled senior citizen who’s been homeless for at least 16 years, would be a slam dunk for permanent supportive housing.
Jones wanted to get George run through the vulnerability assessment so he could get placed on the list. He wouldn’t go into Old Town, so she lured him to a downtown café with the promise of breakfast, where Roberto Rios ran him through the assessment.
Rios, a Coordinated Access case manager at Transitions Projects, said George had difficulty answering the questions. He couldn’t remember dates and things that had happened in his life.
“The first thing he asked me was, ‘Are you going to send me back to the state hospital?’” said Rios.
Questions he couldn’t answer received no points, and a person needs a high score to be considered for permanent supportive housing.
The bulk of the questions rely on the answers supplied by the person being assessed. Questions answered by the assessor, such as whether the person is showing signs of poor hygiene or living skills, are subjective.
The way the housing list works, those with higher scores will always be prioritized over those with lower scores. People can languish on the list without ever making it to the top, where housing becomes available.
George scored so low he didn’t make the cut for temporary housing assistance, let alone the permanent supportive housing he needs.
Rios said typically people he assesses are able to answer the questions. When they can’t, it’s usually due to mental illness, he said.
While each jurisdiction is free to use the assessment tool of its choice, the assessment used in Multnomah County, the VI-SPDAT (Vulnerability Index-Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool), is the nation’s most popular. However, cities are learning it has shortfalls and are adjusting their practices.
In Denver, an appeal process has been established, and in King County, three mechanisms have been created to flag assessments that are inaccurately scored.
“I don’t think any community would say they’ve nailed it,” said Hedda McLendon, a housing manager at King County Department of Human Services in Seattle.
Portland and Multnomah County’s coordinated team of housing providers, Coordinated Access, adopted an appeal process similar to Denver’s earlier this year.
Rios, upset when George received such a low score, filed for an appeal. George’s case was one of four appeals that have been reviewed by a panel of seven Coordinated Access members.
The panelists applied additional points to George’s score based on information Rios provided.
George’s new score was almost double his initial score, but it still wasn’t high enough to qualify him for permanent supportive housing.
Those at the top of the list have scores of 18 to 20. He scored 15.
The bump in score, however, qualified George for Rapid Rehousing, temporary housing assistance lasting two years that does not come with support services.
“Although, there are fewer Rapid Rehousing resources,” said Stacy Borke, programs director at Transitions Projects.
Borke said that ideally, George would get housing through Rapid Rehousing and then get reassessed in the future with the hope that he would qualify for permanent supportive housing with case managers using different strategies to better understand his needs.
“There are some folks who are absolutely deserving, who may not have a chance to get housing. We have a zero-sum system right now because of the lack of federal investment that we see,” said Denis Theriault, communications coordinator for the Joint Office of Homeless Services, under which Coordinated Access is housed.
“As vulnerable as someone who’s on the list is, who has a score that maybe isn’t as high as others,” he said, “that just means that there are that many more people who are even more vulnerable.”
Jones and Sparks regularly discuss George’s situation with each other, and have become disillusioned with the difficulty in getting George indoors. “If we can’t find a home for Cesil George, whom are we going to find a home for?” asked Sparks.
Baring the soul
The vulnerability assessment, or VI-SPDAT, is a series of personal questions about medical and criminal history, drug and alcohol dependency, living situations, daily activities and risky behaviors such as sex work and sharing needles.
In addition to its shortfalls in capturing the vulnerability of some people struggling with mental illness, those who use the VI-SPDAT say it’s inadequate in assessing people of color, who face unique challenges when it comes to self-reporting intimate details of their life to a stranger with a clipboard.
“A lot of the questions on the VI-SPDAT are written in such a way that they are kind of blamey,” said Julia Delgado, program director at Urban League of Portland. The way it’s designed, she said, “a lot of people would be reluctant to answer honestly and accurately because there is a lot of shame and stigma associated with a lot of the questions.”
Her organization primarily uses the assessment with African-American Portlanders. She said it presents a host of challenges for people of color, given their deep mistrust of the system following horrific events in recent history, such as the Tuskegee experiments and forced sterilization.
Quinn Colling, an outreach coordinator at JOIN, said he’s also heard from co-workers and other community partners who conduct the assessment that it may not accurately assess the vulnerability of communities of color.
While locally, a couple of questions have been added to try to address this discrepancy, such as asking if a person has ever experienced racial discrimination in housing, “there’s still gaps,” he said.
Portland is one of five U.S. communities that’s partnered with the Center for Social Innovation in Massachusetts to study whether the tool reinforces racial inequities in housing and homelessness, despite being designed in “an ostensibly race-blind manner,” said Caty Wilky, deputy director of research and evaluation at the center.
HUD awards about $25 million annually to Portland and Multnomah County that helps pay for, among other programs, 900 units of permanent supportive housing reserved for chronically homeless people who also have a disability.
Locally, 2,051 adults without children in their households have been run through the vulnerability assessment. Due to the low level of federal investment in permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless people, just 189 have been referred to housing, and of those, 121 have been housed.
Portland and Multnomah County lawmakers have announced a goal of establishing 2,000 new units of supportive housing by 2028. An undetermined number of those units would be permanent supportive housing.
Today, about two-thirds of Multnomah County’s existing 3,582 units of permanent supportive housing is federally funded. The goal is to tip the scales moving forward. Of the 2,000 new units, about two-thirds are expected to be locally funded, meaning the assistance would come with more flexibility and freedom from federal requirements. This would also mean additional units would be available to chronically homeless people with disabilities, and most units would not require third-party verification, should they materialize.
There are 517 units of both permanent and temporary supportive housing units that are either new or in development in Multnomah County since the 2,000-unit goal was set, and just 20 will incorporate HUD funding, triggering the agency’s requirements.
HUD’s shifting policies
In the wake of deep and ongoing budget cuts starting in the late 1970s, HUD has instituted stricter requirements to ensure its remaining housing resources go to the people who need it the most.
In 2009, HUD consolidated its grants for homeless services and revamped the way it wanted housing organizations to award its vouchers for permanent supportive housing. In 2012, it implemented those changes.
Whereas before, each social-service agency that helped get people into supportive housing had its own list of applicants it would funnel into its own HUD-funded programs, HUD now wanted providers to work together, put every applicant on the same list, and pull from that list whenever any member organization has an opening.
“You can get a voucher through any organization, not just the one you have a relationship with, and that, to me, is one of the major benefits of Coordinated Access,” Borke said. Under the new model, she said, providers are reaching some extremely vulnerable people who they might not otherwise have brought into the system.
In December 2015, however, HUD added new requirements that included running all homeless people who were being considered for federal housing vouchers through a uniform assessment before placing them on the list, and then providing proof of chronic homelessness should their names come up for housing.
According to Norm Suchar, who runs the homeless assistance program at HUD, this was because the assistance was going to the wrong people.
“In the past, what we saw in a lot of our programs was that permanent supportive housing projects were serving people who – to put it very bluntly – were easier to serve, who hadn’t been homeless that long, whose disability was not that severe,” Suchar said. “Not to say that those individuals don’t also deserve help, but we knew we needed to use permanent supportive housing for those people who really had the highest level of vulnerability, who’d been homeless the longest, who had the most severe disabilities.”
He said that while he is aware of complaints about the new requirements, they are working, with assistance now going to the right people.
“I don’t want to claim it’s super easy,” said Suchar. “We are trying to look at this to see if there are better ways to do this.”
When asked if the assessment process would be enough to pinpoint the most vulnerable on its own, without third-party documentation, Suchar said that’s true for some communities, but it’s not true for others.
Home Forward’s Slingerland said HUD made the changes because it wasn’t seeing the drop in chronic homelessness it expected to see after initiating the program.
Suchar said, “That is certainly one of the reasons.” He also said, however, that although assistance is being better prioritized, the country is continuing to see a rise in chronic homelessness.
Slingerland said the reason HUD isn’t seeing a drop in chronic homelessness is not because housing assistance is being misappropriated; it’s because there isn’t enough housing assistance to go around.
“These documentation requirements are trying to solve a problem and creating others that get in the way of housing the folks that HUD is actually trying to house,” said Michael Buonocore, executive director at Home Forward. “And there’s an unintended cruelty to it, in asking for the kinds of efforts that are needed to verify someone’s traumatic experience of being chronically homeless.”
Still looking
On Aug. 1, Jones took George to meet with a housing case manager from Northwest Pilot Project in the cafeteria inside the Standard Building downtown. They’ve found an apartment in an affordable senior housing complex that he could apply for. It would cost him a percentage of his Social Security benefits and was located in the Hollywood District, close to the Max and near the Dollar Tree store where he likes to shop. It seemed perfect.
“That’s quite a bit of money though,” George told the case manager.
He said if he paid rent, he’d have no money left for food. They tried to explain to him that he qualifies for food stamps and Social Security benefits and that he can afford to move inside. He just didn’t seem to understand how it could work.
They told him they could get him a bed and other furniture and help him make the place a home.
“All I need is a rug to sleep on,” he said.
After about a half-hour, George tells the two women he’ll think about it.
When Street Roots caught up with George again about a month later, he was sitting on a bench in the park in front of the courthouse. We asked if he had decided to take the apartment.
“No, too expensive,” he said. “I think I’m going to stay outside again this winter.”
Jones said it’s a matter of finding something that’s he’s comfortable with. She intends to keep trying.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
Getting someone assessed
If you see someone who is chronically homeless and mentally or physically disabled, you can contact the CHAT team at Transitions Projects, and it will send someone out to give the person an assessment. Include in your message a description of the person, the location where they hang out, and, if you can obtain it, their name and a way to contact them.
Email caa@trprojects.org, or leave a message at 844-765-9384.
Street Roots is an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. Our newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Learn more about Street Roots