SOUTHERN INDIANA — One thought dominated Paul Angela’s mind in the months leading up to his prison release: where he was going to live as a free man.
“Being older and being stuck in that position, I’m not going to lie to anybody, it scared me worse than prison,” said Angela, a 44-year-old Seymour native who was estranged from his ex-wife and without family support. “[Not] knowing where would I be living, where I would be eating.”
Personnel at the prison in Plainfield, where he was held for 18 months for violating probation, referred Angela to the Williams Emergency Shelter in Jeffersonville, the closest homeless shelter to Seymour, 50 miles away from his hometown.
“I had no idea where I was going to go when I got out,” he said.
Angela is just one of the 65 to 100 residents on any given night who stay at the Williams Emergency Shelter — a last stop for people who have exhausted all other housing options, said Barbara Anderson, executive director of Haven House Services Inc., which runs the shelter.
“There is absolutely no way anybody lives in a shelter because they want to,” Anderson said. “That’s a myth that should be exploded. It’s not a fun place to live.”
Yet, it’s a situation that is all too common to many residents of Clark and Floyd counties who find themselves with no other options.
While the number of homeless people locally and in Indiana has declined in the last couple of years, the few support services in Southern Indiana still are far overburdened by those in need, and the very community that has vowed for years to help its homeless population largely has failed to provide sufficient resources.
Paul Stensrud, director of Jesus Cares at Exit 0, said the consequences of not acting sometimes can be grave.
“It is real, and it does happen,” he said. “People do die on the streets.”
Stensrud has been one of the key actors pushing for a greater community effort.
“It’s easy to point the finger and say, ‘It’s your responsibility to do this, it’s your responsibility to do that,’” he said. “But in reality, what are you willing to do to help those that are reaching out?”
Anderson said the solution is much bigger than building more shelters or setting up more soup kitchens.
“We don’t need to put up bigger bread boxes,” she said. “We need to end homelessness, and we’re not going to do that if we don’t concentrate on the issues that brought them there in the first place.”
FACES OF OUR HOMELESS
Anderson said she can’t describe the average homeless person in Southern Indiana. That’s because there isn’t one.
“From a social service perspective, it’s a fishbowl, and every social issue there is lives at a shelter,” said Anderson, naming domestic or sexual abuse, illiteracy and immigration as a few common traits.
She could point toward trending demographics she sees at the Williams Emergency Shelter, such as single men who make up about half of the homeless population and who are somewhere between 25 and 35 years old.
Anderson also frequently sees single moms with one or two kids, likely with a high school diploma but who hasn’t worked much outside the home or has worked in low-end jobs.
Melissa Fry, director of the Applied Research and Education Center for Indiana University Southeast, said that many of Southern Indiana’s homeless population are “episodically homeless.” This means that a specific event caused them to lose their homes — “usually a mismatch between their income and the cost of living, but often a transition from an institutional setting to housing ... that did not go smoothly.”
“But we also have a large number of homeless individuals who’ve been homeless for longer periods of time who suffer from mental illness or other health concerns that make it very difficult for them to move back into stable housing on their own,” Fry said.
Beth Keeney, vice president of Development and Grants for LifeSpring Health Systems that treats those with mental illness or substance abuse, said that some of LifeSpring’s clients are homeless.
“We know that mental illness and substance abuse can disrupt the ability to carry out the aspects of daily living, such as taking care of your household responsibilities,” she said.
However, Keeney said to make no mistake in assuming most or all people who are homeless have a mental illness or addiction. In some cases the causation may even be reversed.
“Maybe they’re abusing substances because they’re homeless, and that’s a way that they’ve found to cope,” Keeney said.
OVER CAPACITY
The most recent data shows that Clark County had 142 homeless individuals at the beginning of 2014 while Floyd County had 59.
The Williams Emergency Shelter has room for 60 occupants, but Anderson said it’s not unheard of to house more than 100. On those nights, cots are dragged out and couches become makeshift beds.
“You never know how many people are going to be there,” she said. “It’s never at 60. We get a breather if we’re at 65.”
Some who stay at the shelter come from outside of Clark and Floyd counties because it’s the only shelter in 14 contiguous Indiana counties. And some residents have been living at the shelter for years.
Debbie Yoest, a 54-year-old former Corydon resident, is coming up on three years at the shelter. Yoest could no longer afford to live in her housing unit in Corydon when her former landlord raised rent. She has been working at Steak ‘n Shake in Clarksville for about three months as a dishwasher, riding the bus and walking to get there.
“I’m tired of staying here and I need to sleep in the mornings,” she said. “When you work five days a week, you’re tired. It starts catching up to you.”
Finding a place of her own may not be easy for Yoest. While Southern Indiana certainly does not lack public or Section 8 housing, it still does not have enough to meet the demand.
Bob Lane, executive director of the New Albany Housing Authority, said there are 1,082 public housing units and 408 Section 8 housing units in New Albany alone. The December waiting list had 192 families who needed housing.
“We had somebody that had been on the waiting list for 10 months,” Lane said.
LifeSpring has permanent housing units for disabled individuals.
Fry said that the most recent homeless count in Southern Indiana showed there were 41 individuals who qualified for disability but were not in permanent housing situations.
“So that means we know of at least 41 more units of permanent supportive housing that we probably need to have, and we only have 17 units of permanent supportive housing in our community [of Clark and Floyd counties],” Fry said.
Homeless individuals also need a place to go for basic needs, such as a shower or Internet access, with qualified staff members who can refer them to services within the community.
Stensrud has been filling this need, at least as much as he’s able. He operates on a shoestring stipend of a fluctuating $900 a month in community donations and out of a warehouse provided by a car dealership.
The Exit 0 headquarters is a makeshift day shelter where homeless individuals can thaw out in the warming station — a corner of the warehouse enclosed by hanging plastic with a kerosene heater — and find some clothes, blankets or other items. Stensrud helps direct people to other services in the community, acting as a case management worker. An ambulance he bought in an auction has Internet access, computers and printers for any online work.
Stensrud’s resourcefulness is much less than ideal, he said.
“This is not what I want at all,” Stensrud said. “But this is what God’s provided us. We don’t know why. But you know what, I’m going to roll with it.”
He relies on his wife for his own income, dedicating most of his time toward running Exit 0 for the past six years. Stensrud said the case load is too much for one person to handle.
“The number’s great,” he said. “When I have new folks coming in on a regular basis, that tells me there’s a need.”
ADDRESSING HOMELESSNESS
Alleviation to local homelessness is owed largely to the organizations, groups and individuals that have shouldered the weight for the community.
A group called the Homelessness Task Force, whose members were appointed by Jeffersonville Mayor Mike Moore in 2012, is working on a master plan that when implemented aims to come as close to eliminating homelessness as possible.
“We’re a compassionate community,” Moore said. “I think we all get involved in help wherever we can. I do support working to come up with a way to help those that are unable to help themselves.”
Fry said that a near-complete plan will be released in mid-January to allow a final opportunity for further comment and in March, the finalized plan will be released and implementation will begin.
“That’s a 10-year plan, so there’s a lot there, and it’s a living document that will change over time,” Fry said. “But it’s a place to start.”
Moore said he would support funding down the road that may be a part of implementing the task force’s plan.
“It’s costing our community dollars either on the front end or the back end,” he said.
Among the most common root causes Fry said the task force has discovered are a mismatch between wages and costs of housing, high health care costs and mental illness.
In addition to tackling some of the causes of homelessness, the task force also hopes to address a lack of coordination between “a lot of great services” in the community that mostly operate independently, Fry said.
“So a lot of the strategic plan is about just making the system work more smoothly, be more coordinated, so that some of those entities have a clearer sense of where to put that money and how that’s going to work, and we can start to see more results from that work,” Fry said.
Homelessness creates a financial burden on the community because it means social services are more heavily depended on, Fry said.
But she said that’s just one reason Southern Indiana needs to address homelessness.
“We also need to address it because we want to live in a community where people have good quality of life, and the quality of life for homeless people is obviously a concern,” she said. “We don’t want members of our community living on the street and we do want people to have opportunities.”