Q&A with Nadia Swanson on capacity and wait list bottleneck
A council member asks Swanson to elaborate on capacity issues. She details 2,000 youth served annually, 212 beds, 400 on the wait list today versus under 100 when vouchers existed, and explains the bottleneck: youth can't move out because there's nowhere to go, while bed rates are too low for providers to expand.
Not it.
You mentioned...
Sorry, capacity?
In your testimony, can you just speak a little bit more about the issues around that?
Yeah, absolutely.
So we serve over 2,000 youth a year.
That's between our 24-hour drop-in center and our housing.
We have 212 beds that are a mix of emergency and transitional.
We currently, as of today, have 400 youth on a wait list for that crisis bed.
When youth had access to vouchers, there was a period of about four years where youth had access, whether it be the FEPS pilots or through EHV, where we got below 100.
We're in this bottleneck.
Youth can't get in because youth aren't moving out.
And sorry, you said, can you just repeat the numbers again?
2,000 youth a year, 400 on a wait list today, 300 on our wait list last year, and 100 when we had access to vouchers.
On that same note, I was writing a lot of notes during their questioning.
During Councilmember Nurse's question, I think it was an important note that, and I'm glad she said the years.
So over 10 years ago, we were fighting with Lou Fiddler to raise the age that DYCD would fund beds for 21 to 24-year-olds.
It didn't pass until 2018, so that also leads to what that question was with Councilmember Nurse.
We had 40 open beds, 60 kind of, up until last year when we got that extra 100.
AFC took on 45 of those new beds.
20 were of the ones that Alex spoke about.
Other RHY programs have been hesitant and didn't take on the beds that we know we need because the bed rate is so low we can't afford to take them on.
And so this is like the biggest sort of crux of it all.
And there's been this push to fund housing navigators and all of this, which is wonderful.
We need that, but there's nowhere to navigate them to.
And so we need more resources of people to have a crisis bed in that moment, right?
Because they're only going to decompensate sitting on that wait list and in that drop-in center.
And then also being able to move people on to something that's stable and supportive.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you, folks.
We'll now move on to the next round.
We appreciate your testimony.
I'd like to
Call up, I have ex-Pamela Farkour, Henry Love, Timothy Pena, David Miranda, and Mateo Guerrero.
Anyone can begin when ready.
You can begin.