Dr. Carole Myers
Welcome to HealthConnections, the show about people health and policy. I'm Dr Carole Myers. Homelessness is a persistent and worsening problem. Today, I'm joined by Erin Read, who is the Director of the Knoxville, Knox County Office on Housing Stability. Welcome, Erin.
Erin Read
Thank you.
Please give us a glimpse of homelessness in the Knoxville area.
In Knoxville and Knox County, we're seeing the same thing that communities across the United States are seeing, and that is that the number of people who are homeless is growing for us. Since 2018 the number of people who access homeless services on an average day has actually gone up by 85%, so we've got about 1800 people on an average day accessing services. What we find is that that actually reflects two different trends. One, more people becoming homeless. But two, also, people are staying homeless longer. It's harder for them to climb out of homelessness.
Can you offer a more nuanced view of homelessness, focusing on how we gain traction in addressing the problem?
So, the Office of Housing Stability has existed for about three years now, and we have had some early successes. And when I say we, I mean our community of agencies that provide homeless services. Any services I talk about are going to be services that are provided by other agencies and not my office. What we have seen is that when you take a tailored approach to addressing homelessness, homelessness is a solvable problem. It is something that as long as we are looking at the needs of the folks who are experiencing homelessness, we can make real progress in a short amount of time. A great example of that is youth homelessness. That's going to be people between the ages of 18 and 24 we currently have 172 homeless youth in our community. But that's down by 25% from a year ago, which is incredible. And there have been a lot of new programs, new ideas coming into our community about how to help homeless youth. And one of the most transformative has been diversion. Diversion is where you catch youth before they become homeless in the first place. Absolutely one of the most efficient uses of public funds when it comes to homeless services, because they might just need help with the utility bill or a deposit. And then, they are kept out of the homeless system at all for youth who are already homeless. We've had some success with transitional housing. So that's going to be a structured living environment where youth can stay for up to two years while they find employment and housing and graduate into self sufficiency. Also, we have new programs for rental assistance and case management - a little bit of case management to help someone really find their feet, little bit of rental assistance to give them an on ramp back to self sufficiency. That's been really powerful for our community. And then lastly, the fourth service type I want to talk about is supportive housing. And supportive housing is really going to be for youth with disabilities or other issues that might make it really difficult for them to be totally self sufficient. So on site, case management, manageable rent, supportive housing has been really transformative for the youth that have moved into it, and the key here is understanding the needs of each individual person and matching them with a service type that's going to get them where they need to be.
