To the Honorable Mayor Todd Alcott, and the Bowling Green City Council,
I am writing to add further comment to the opinion that I expressed in person on Tuesday July 6th. The idea of adding a homeless coordinator position to the City seems like a trivial thing to oppose. It’s just $50,000 plus benefits, and in our tit for tat world, I understand entirely Dana Beasley-Brown’s statement that her side should get this position given that your side added a position to coordinate the downtown revitalization. For the record I oppose both, what exactly are we going to hire someone to do next? Coordinate street repairs? Lost cell phone recovery? Ah – how about codes enforcement?
Wait you say – we already have folks that do those things? My point exactly. We have folks that do these things, and not just in city government – but in the private sector. We have a codes enforcement division, we have a police department, we have departments that handle roads and infrastructure. Why on earth would we add a position to coordinate efforts on behalf of the private organizations that already do this? I can only come up with one reason… one we find to often in our government. When tackling an issue, we assume everyone else involved doesn’t know what they are doing, and they need someone to tell them what to do. I say – that this is simply not the case.
Let’s take a look at the problem.
First – we have to define the issue – a homeless person is – specifically someone who does not have shelter – nothing more, nothing less.
Second – according to this definition; using the K count provided by the Kentucky Housing Corp. there are roughly 180 homeless people in Bowling Green, this is up from 140 in 2014. We could debate this count, but even if we double that number to 360 – it’s still less than ¼ of one percent of our population – or 1 in 400 people… a very small portion of the population for which to dedicate a full time employee.
Third let’s look at the causes of homelessness
According to HUD there are five principal causes of homelessness:
- lack of affordable housing
- unemployment
- poverty
- mental illness and substance abuse and the lack of needed services.
Finally let’s discuss each one in detail:
- Housing the poor is a key element in any plan for dealing with homelessness; it starts with temporary shelter, and moves to interim shelter, and then low income housing. I have already heard that local builders are very “interested” in discussing such efforts… but don’t seem to be very motivated with regard to actually bringing their efforts to bear on the issue. I am sure this is frustrating… a coordinator for the homeless is not the answer. The key here is that the city already has a lever if they desire to pull it – zoning and development can significantly impact the amount of low income housing – as can the downtown re-development effort – through land and tax grants – similar to what has been done to bring development to downtown, other blighted areas could be addressed (we have tons of empty tobacco warehouses…. Rezoning these in advance of development efforts would help that cause). The key here is that there are already departments and positions within the city that are responsible for these activities – adding another layer of bureaucracy won’t solve the problem.
- Unemployment – Jobs are not an issue in Bowling Green; there are hundreds of open positions…. There are businesses begging folks to walk in and start work. There is a component of unemployment that has to do with behavioral outcomes (Drugs, criminal history, mental health, tragedy, physical disabilities), but there are at least three non-profits who deal with folks who are not employment ready, and they don’t need the city to coordinate their efforts.
- Poverty – Poverty is an interesting challenge, and it often has more to do with negative outcomes than it does actual assets. EG – it’s not a money equation, it’s a life skills one. Having two children and being divorced creates a challenge, bankruptcy creates a challenge, children out of wedlock creates a challenge… Health issues and job loss create challenges. We can, and should build a safety net for folks in our community facing these challenges – but it needs to be a hand up; not a hand out. The path through these services in Bowling Green is fairly well documented, and as I have heard from a number of these organizations, they work hard to help people understand not just how to access the services, but how to avail themselves of the services offered by other organizations in town. There are ways the city can better communicate with these organizations, but that is through community outreach with the police department, the fire department – the folks on the ground who already interact with these folks on a daily basis… they need to be empowered through policy to deal with panhandling, and to route the mom who just lost her apartment to a homeless shelter. To make undesirable behaviors well understood, but show compassion for those in need. They don’t need yet another bureaucrat telling them how to do their jobs.
- Mental illness and substance abuse – These are one of the largest vectors for homelessness in Kentucky. Our state’s struggles with this issue are well documented, and there are two organizations locally tasked with assitsing these populations, the Barren river health department, and the Warren county health department. It is their responsibility to deal with the outcomes of mental illness and substance abuse; a single coordinator’s position isn’t going to make a dent in the challenges we have in Bowling Green with these issues (of which a very small portion are homeless). The homeless component of this population is best addressed through existing public servcies, our very capable police department, and those organizations serving the homeless. Improving communications between these three groups is important, but that communications won’t come from outside of these organizations, it will come through policy changes, open discussion, and leadership.
For every one of the issues addressed above, there are already organizations and city / county / state departments that have responsibility to address these needs, in many cases redundancy upon redundancy. A coordinator to address these issues would obviously need a great deal of authority… If it were simply a question of bringing folks together, the issue would have been solved long ago by the organizations that currently work to resolve this issue… So where would this authority reside? Who would this person report to? What policy set would they govern? Does this line of discussion start to make senes? it’s a problem that can’t be solved in this manner, a coordinator isn’t the answer, it would just be a waste of taxpayer dollars. Something we already have too much of in our state and federal governments, let’s not start it here too.
Many Thanks,
Eric A. Tuttle, CISSP