Helen Strom testifies on moving people from shelter to permanent housing
Strom, Urban Justice Center, says the city must prioritize moving people out of shelter using vacant 9G units, HPD apartments, and 6,000 supportive housing units. She says people languish for years while shelters cost more than vouchers.
Hi, my name is Helen Strom.
I'm testifying from the Safety Net Project at the Urban Justice Center.
And we work with shelter residents around the city and also organize with current and former shelter residents through the Safety Net Activists.
I think I would agree with a lot of what has been said here today.
One thing I want to emphasize is the importance of
We need to be doing everything we can to get people out of shelter as quickly as possible.
And there is a lot more that we can do as a city beyond what we're currently doing.
We know we have thousands of vacant 9G units.
We have thousands of vacant HPD apartments.
We have 6,000 vacant supportive housing units specifically for people who are homeless.
It needs to be like an all hands on deck effort.
Like that needs to be a top priority to get people into vacant units, to have housing specialists at all these shelters, to be doing trainings on city thefts, on all the housing programs at these shelters.
There's the right to shelter is incredibly important.
However, we have not done nearly enough to get people out of shelters and into permanent housing.
So many people.
In our group who come to us have been in shelters for years and years and years and years.
And you should not have to be in a shelter for five years or six years or seven years.
It's also not a good use of city resources.
We're spending, you know, sometimes $10,000 a month for someone to be in a shelter, like when a voucher could be $2,000 a month.
To continue to allow people to languish in
for this amount of time when we do have concrete housing resources in this city is...
It's a choice.
Yeah, it's a choice.
And it's a choice that we're making and we need to be putting all of our resources towards getting people out as quickly as possible.
And if you do that and then you have like a smaller number of shelters and people are moving out quickly, then I think that you can have...
A different conversation about like, well, you could actually start closing shelters.
You could be closing these bad congregate shelters and moving towards just having single rooms.
You could be doing very different things.
And I think like that's a really important piece that we hope we can work with the council and get the city to take more action on.
Absolutely.
Thank you.