How much do you know about the San Antonio homeless mega-complex?
How did it get started? Hultquist concedes it cost $90 million to get off the ground, where did that money come from?
How does Haven for Hope's success rate compare with that of the PSH model being utilized here?
The answers to these questions are easily available via the literature available online.
A strong argument can be made that a 60 percent success rate is not much bang for the $90,000,000 start-up buck -- much of which was raised by Bill Greehey, an oil gabillionaire philanthropist.
This is a typical half-baked Hultquist junket offshoot masquerading as a plan.

But first, as I mentioned already to you here [ http://www.knoxviews.com/node/12409#comment-85532 ]:

Your extrapolation of cost via an analysis of Minvilla's and Flenniken's projected costs might be valid if we were committed to developing PSH only in the context of rehabilitating blighted buildings of historic and/or architectural significance. That is not the case, and average development costs should be quite a bit lower than you infer.

I'll mention a couple of other things here just in case you are interested in learning more about some of the stuff you are questioning here and elsewhere.

Try googling "scattered site housing" or "scattered housing" and do a little reading about it. There is not anything new about it. It's been practiced at least since the sixties. It's being practiced right here in Knoxville with great success, and has been for almost two decades, maybe longer.

You might also want to learn about a movement called "deinstitutionalization." That was the movement that effectively began the end of the big state mental institutions, and its beginnings run roughly parallel to the civil rights movement in the US. When you talk about reopening Lakeshore, if you mean bringing it back to its former status as a 2500 bed institution for people with mental illness, you're talking about something that can't happen. You need to know why. Bonus? It's all terribly fascinating. It really is.

Now, if you're just saying, "Lakeshore would be a good site for some of our community's permanent supportive housing," then I'd agree with you completely.

And as you mentioned in your first post above:

Why shouldn't Hultquist's concept be considered?

It has been considered.

Haven For Hope in San Antonio consolidates services to make them more accessible, less redundant, and more efficient. We're doing that essential work here, and will continue to improve coordination of service delivery, better define roles of service providers, and reduce redundancy in service delivery among service providers. I think we can legitimately question whether or not that sort of coordination has to be carried out in one central location, a kind of mega-mission district. I can imagine some downside to that besides the very high cost and lack of permanent housing.

As Ms. Bean has mentioned, HFH has cost upwards of ninety million dollars so far. HFH does not contain permanent housing with support, nor does its plan appear to call for such.

I spoke with a staff member at HFH today, and learned some significant things about the project and its context.

Although part of the campus is designated for "supportive housing," and they actually refer to it as “permanent,” when you really start to dig into what that means, that housing seems functionally transitional in nature. Much of this housing is dormitory style housing, and is not meant for longterm residence. Leases for SROs on-campus are written in such a way as to encourage residents to move on within two years. “Permanent,” to us, really means permanent: available as long as a resident wants/needs it, can pay for it, and can abide by the terms of the lease. Permanent housing ends homelessness. Transitional housing all by itself does not.

In July 2010 or thereabouts, HFH will begin construction of a two-phase development that will eventually offer 300 housing units on an 8-acre portion of the HFH campus. That housing, like the SROs that are already onsite at HFH, will be termed “permanent” but will also have lease terms that will make it functionally transitional. HFH's intention is to “move them on through and out into housing in the community.” People clearly are not meant to stay on this campus indefinitely.

San Antonio has a waiting list of 25,000 for affordable housing, and 4,100 people are homeless there on any given night. They need to increase their stock of affordable housing, including permanent supportive housing. Affordable housing in San Antonio is concentrated on one side of town, and the State of Texas is pushing the city to develop affordable housing options in other, more affluent parts of the community. They face the same neighborhood resistance challenges we face here in that regard, but they are committed to developing affordable housing, including permanent supportive housing, using a scattered site approach.

There's more, and it's interesting but pretty arcane. Let me know if you want to know more.

I don’t want to seem like I’m indicting HFH. I’m not. There are things about HFH that are very good in addition to what appears to be a potentially efficient delivery of services. For example, those services they’ll finish consolidating on their campus in February, 2010 will be available not only to people who are homeless, but also to working people in San Antonio who are dealing with the kind of poverty that often expresses itself in very marginal housing. This group includes police recruits and teachers, incidentally. HFH’s belief is that if you can help some of these folks deal with medical issues, for example, in such a way as to allow them to conserve as much of their money as possible, they have a much better chance of finding more appropriate, decent housing. That’s very noble and decent. Who would argue with it?

But permanent housing, including permanent supportive housing, will still need to be developed in San Antonio, and that development will happen way outside the ninety million dollar budget envelope for the development of HFH.

This is playing out in Phoenix, another big city that went the "campus" route a few years before San Antonio embarked on the development of HFH. Phoenix built the Downtown Phoenix Homeless Center. How much truly permanent housing is at DPHC? None. So where to the people at the admittedly much-improved and size-enhanced shelter-and-service complex go to live once they’ve successfully addressed the issues that led them to homelessness in the first place? Oops. The United Way in Phoenix is now leading an initiative to help fund the development of permanent supportive housing in Phoenix using a scattered site model.

Is there anything inherently wrong with a physical consolidation and expansion of service offerings in one central location? If you consider that question all by itself, the answer probably is, "Not necessarily." At least not necessarily in a city the size of San Antonio, which is huge compared to Knoxville.

The question to ask, however, is "Does it really end homelessness?"

For those who fall into homelessness but have the inner resources and social networks they need to get their lives back together, the answer would be affirmative, just as it would be if you asked the same question of our present system.

But what about those who face disabilities that preclude that sort of recovery? Where do they go? You might improve some aspects of service delivery by consolidating all of your city's services in one big place, but these folks will still need to have access to permanent housing with case management support if they're to leave the streets for good. We'll still need to build more housing for them, whether or not we build a bigger, more comprehensive mission district in Knoxville.

Robert Finley
Ten-Year Plan
215-3071
http://tenyearplan.org

There is a real need for better access to social services in rural Knox co.

You could do this by locating more services in places like Halls or Powell. You could also do this by providing better transit in rural parts of Knox County so that the homeless and impoverished who are there can access social services in the more densely settled parts of the city and county.

You could extend bus lines or just have special purpose cars or mini-vans come out to these areas on an as needed basis to give people a lift.

Much like Permanent Supportive Housing, these kinds of services generally save taxpayers money when you do the math.

-Sugarfatpie (AKA Alex Pulsipher)

"X-Rays are a hoax."-Lord Kelvin

Stop asking for giant warehouses to store human beings out of sight and mind.

Indeed.

The scattered approach is a group home concept that is designed to give people the support system needed to fully integrate with their community.

Where are the studies that prove this new concept is safe and actually works? For hundreds of years the centralized approach has worked to treat mentally ill patients.

A large component of this is drug addiction and alcohol addiction. Hutchison is correct that this scattered approach puts the patients, and that is what they are, too far from services. He is 100% right.

As to your comment of out of sight and out of mind, how is a building at Lakeshore any different than a building on Debusk Lane. They couldn't have been more invisible than on Debusk Lane could they?

After all the jabber on Global Warming it is really dumb to think taxpayers will approve spreading these patients all over the county so the taxpayers have to pay for ridiculous transportation costs.

Neither you or Betty or anyone in Knox County has come forward and gone door to door in their community to lobby for the next facility to be next to their house. This is a government intrusion and there will be a fight each and every time Lawler tries to place one. The Lakeshore idea is a way to help these patients and solve the problem.

Until you volunteer your neighborhood your argument doesn't hold much water.

I am one of them. I live with a family member who allows me a room out of the goodness of her heart. She doesn't have to, but she did it anyway. I can't afford anywhere else, and haven't been able to work for years. If I didn't have family, I would be one of the permanently homeless people that some (read Nine) on this board seem to think are outrageously dangerous to children and small pets and liquor stores...

And I have an associate's degree in applied science...go figure. Life sometimes throws you a bunch of crap and one person alone cannot handle it sometimes; hell, even with family to help, people fall through the cracks all the time.

Basically what I am saying is that Nine is a know-nothing, do-even-less, blind, foolish ass. Ignoring him is a true blessing, Randy. Thank you profoundly.

Now I will get back to studying my schoolwork so I can go back to work after I get a degree in a totally different field of study since I can't do the physical work of my degree that I already hold now. Once my cancer treatments are over I hope I'll feel much more energetic, maybe even enough to take Nine off ignore and listen to his selfishness and blather once again and be able to smile at his inanity.

_________________________________________________
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