by USHSAdmin | Jun 1, 2019 | Union Station in the News
The number of homeless individuals in Pasadena decreased by 20 percent this year compared to 2018, according to the 2019 Homeless Count Report released on May 20 by the city of Pasadena’s Housing Department, the Pasadena Partnership to End Homelessness and Urban Initiatives.
The annual count is a one-night snapshot of those living in unsheltered locations and temporary shelters. This year’s count was conducted on the evening of Jan. 22 into the early morning of Jan. 23, 2019, and tallied 542 people experiencing homelessness in Pasadena, compared to 677 in 2018. That makes 2019 the second lowest year since the count began in 1992, after only 2016, when 530 people were counted.
Homelessness in Pasadena has generally been on a decline since 2011, when 1,216 people were counted (except for an uptick the last two years). In 2011, the city and homeless services providers implemented a new approach: housing first, as opposed to clearing up personal issues and then being placed into a home. And city officials and homeless advocates say that approach is highly successful.
“Permanent supportive housing is the only thing that ends homelessness,” said William Huang, the city’s housing director, during a panel on homelessness at the West Pasadena Residents’ Association’s annual meeting on May 8.
Officer Donovan Jones of the Pasadena Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Psychiatric Evaluation (HOPE) team and Shawn Morrissey, Union Station Homeless Service’s director of advocacy and community engagement, also served on the panel.
The Solution
“It took us over 40 years to figure out that the solution for homelessness is an actual home, but we finally did and that’s where our effort is now: to get people into housing,” said Morrissey. “During the early periods of homeless services, all we had to offer people were shelters. We didn’t have housing solutions, just temporary solutions. We became dependent on the massive shelter system we built in LA.”
Morrissey, originally from Montreal, had been homeless himself for a long time starting in his late 30s when he “washed up in Pasadena” in 2002, as he put it. He was an opiate addict from age 12 to 40, but after he received support and housing from Union Station, he was able to turn his life around.
“I showed up with two black eyes, my head was split open, I had no underwear and I was wearing one contact and it wasn’t even mine,” said Morrissey. “You’d see me on the street, I’d be wild-eyed, wild-haired. My success is a result of these types of services and community that wrapped around me. As soon as people get into housing, they’re no longer homeless.”
He said that it’s very challenging to provide services for people while they’re living on the street, but getting a roof over their head and four walls around them has a stabilizing effect and allows them to attend to many of the issues that led to their homelessness to begin with.
“Not only is permanent supportive housing humane and the right thing to do, it has a huge cost savings and helps both the individual and the community,” Morrissey said. “It’s actually $15,000 to $20,000 cheaper to help someone get into permanent supportive housing than it is to walk by them on the street.”
The city’s strategies to address homelessness include funding and working with partners that provide basic homeless services, rapid rehousing, permanent supportive housing and targeted homeless prevention.
Rapid rehousing is short-term assistance for people who are not chronically homeless — those with a disabling condition who have been homeless for more than a year — but recently became homeless for economic reasons.
“We’re seeing people becoming homeless for the first time in their lives,” said Huang. “A lot of them are being priced out of their homes through raised rents, or low-income retired people.”
Permanent supportive housing is typically an apartment unit for those considered chronically homeless. Huang said there is a misperception among the public that the development of more permanent supportive housing in their neighborhood will cause crime rates to go up and property values to go down.
“The safety level is actually enhanced because the person who is housed and is now stable is far less likely to commit crimes,” he said. “Barbara King, a local realtor, looked at property values around the three permanent supportive housing developments we have in Pasadena and found that nobody’s property values went down because the supportive housing developments were well designed and well maintained.”
However, just because officials now know housing is the solution doesn’t mean they have enough housing available.
“There’s a real bottleneck to building more housing,” said Huang. “There’s also a disincentive for landlords even with rental vouchers, because it’s simpler and they get more money when they rent units out at market rate. We need to get more units, either by building them or through willing landlords. It’s a big ask, we realize that, so we do have financial incentives for them if they’re willing to do it.”
Huang said the good news is that the city will be receiving new homeless funding soon from the county and the state. They plan to use that money to get more rapid and supportive housing, hire more housing navigators and case managers, expand prevention efforts, enhance landlord incentives, distribute more motel vouchers and provide more job development.
Pay It Forward
In 2011, homeless advocates in Pasadena launched the inaugural “Housing First” initiative called Project House Pasadena, aimed at housing the 20 most vulnerable and severely chronically homeless individuals — those at risk of dying within a year if they stayed on the streets. One of those 20 people was Dorothy Edwards.
Edwards was born in Monrovia and grew up in Hacienda Heights. After moving from program to program trying to get off drugs, she became homeless in Pasadena, partly to escape a domestic violence situation. She lived with her dog Gunner on the embankment of the Foothill (210) Freeway behind Target in east Pasadena and on a sofa in the donations area of Goodwill on Altadena Drive and Foothill Boulevard, among other places.
Morrissey and others made several attempts to contact Edwards to give her a housing voucherbut she hid from them. Seven years ago, Morrissey caught up with her, made a connection, built trust and convinced her to give supportive housing a try. After using cocaine, meth and heroin intravenously for 24 years, she has now been sober for several years and helps others in the position she used to be in. She said housing and employment were the turning point for her.
Edwards went through an advocacy training program at the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH), a community development financial institution that empowers those with lived experiences to speak about homelessness to policymakers. She now sits on CSH’s national board of directors and works at Housing Works as an enrichment services coordinator in a 54-unit supportive services and special needs building in Eagle Rock.
“When you’re homeless for a long time you feel like you’re less than and not enough, but Bill Huang and Shawn Morrissey always made me feel welcome,” said Edwards. “I’m really a stronger person today because of all the encouragement I had. It’s important what I’m doing, my voice is important and I know in my heart that I’ve found my passion. Now I want to pay it forward and help those who are still on the street.”
Morrissey said they’ve housed hundreds of people in the past few years with a 97 percent retention rate.
Work to Do
While the 2019 Homeless Count Report found that progress has been made among key subpopulations such as youth, veterans and families with children, it also found that more people are experiencing chronic homelessness, accounting for 50 percent of the total homeless population.
Additionally, 58 percent of those counted were Pasadena residents before they became homeless and only 5 percent first became homeless outside of LA County or out of state, “largely refuting the misconception that people experiencing homelessness travel from other areas and across the nation,” reads the report.
The homeless population is also aging. The data reveal that three in 10 people experiencing homelessness in Pasadena are aged 55 years or older. There were 23 families with children experiencing homelessness in Pasadena, but there were no unsheltered families with children on the night of the count, compared to eight families in 2018.
Huang identified several things anyone can do to help homeless individuals: refer them to services through websites like LA-HOP.org; get educated by reading the Homeless Count Report; donate to the nine orange parking meters around the city that are part of the Real Change Movement designed by ArtCenter College of Design; engage landlords to consider renting units to homeless individuals; and volunteer with organizations that serve the homeless such as Union Station, Friends in Deed, Foothill Unity Center and many others.
“We’re never going to end this problem, but Pasadena is uniquely positioned to ostensibly end this problem as it exists today with the political will, the infrastructure, and the robust services that we have,” said Morrissey. “What’s really going to turn the tide is getting the appropriate information out to the community in order to tear down some of these myths and stigmas and help people see there really is a solution here: developing or making housing available for people.”
Author: Justin Chapman
Source: LA Progressive (Pasadena Weekly)
by USHSAdmin | May 16, 2019 | Union Station in the News
PASADENA, Calif. (KABC) — The rising number of homeless people is a huge issue that impacts us all here in Southern California.
But while there’s no one-size-fits all answer, there are many community organizations and non-profits with programs aimed at getting help to those able and willing to receive it.
One such organization is Union Station Homeless Services, and one of their programs, called Community Allies, pairs people up to give them the hand up they need.
Chris Lewis has faced a lot of challenges and dark moments along the way.
“For a slight moment I thought about just walking into the ocean and just ending it,” Lewis said.
It’s been a long road for the 59-year-old who said he lost his job and his girlfriend at the same time.
The L.A. resident found himself living on the streets of Santa Monica after having what he says was a nervous breakdown in 2008.
“The thing was, I always had problems but like I said I was a ‘pull yourself by the boot straps,’ so when I was not feeling well, I thought that was normal. You had to tough it out and so I never got help,” Lewis said.
He struggled on the streets for 8 months.
Having worked two jobs for years before his mental breakdown, Lewis said that living on the streets was the toughest job of all.
“Then I got diagnosed with bi-polar,” he said. “And so I was living with bi-polar all the time and didn’t know it.”
It was about the same time that Lewis was referred to Union Station Homeless Services in Pasadena.
The non-profit, created in 1973, provides transitional and permanent housing for hundreds of people every day.
Chris has been living at Union Station’s single occupancy resident building near Pasadena City Hall since 2011, getting the medicine he needs, and thriving.
“It’s just a wonderful, wonderful place,” he said.
Lewis also credits his success to his friendship with Fred Hadra.
Hadra volunteers as a “Community Ally,” which is one of the service programs offered by Union Station.
“It’s finding someone that you can live life with and be friends with,” said Hadra.
“When you got someone in your corner, that’s a great feeling to have”, Lewis added.
And now, Lewis is giving back. He’s joined the Corporation for Supportive Housing – Speak Up Advocacy program.
His goal is to complete the 8-month training classes and speak in Washington, D.C. as an advocate for the homeless. He wants to use his experience to debunk stereotypes and myths.
“It’s not the perceptions you might think: that the guy is a loser, that he’s lazy,” Lewis said. “It’s not that. It’s catastrophe that has occurred and it can occur to anybody, you know? That’s the one thing I would like to get across.”
Author: Jovana Lara
Source: ABC7 Eyewitness News
by USHSAdmin | May 10, 2019 | Union Station in the News
Those directly involved in the homeless crisis and who work boots on the ground alongside those living on Pasadena’s streets say they’ve noticed more senior citizens becoming homeless than any other population segment.
“We are seeing a lot of senior citizens that are homeless, unfortunately,” said Tony Zee, a Pasadena City firefighter and member of the Pasadena Outreach Response Team (PORT). “That group and the younger group are the big groups of people who are homeless in the city.”
PORT, a partnership between the city’s Fire and Public Health department, is a street-based approach wherein a team comprised of a social worker, nurse, firefighter, and outreach worker from Union Station Homeless Services is charged with identifying individuals suffering chronic homelessness and assists them in getting off the streets.
So, Zee is on the frontlines and knows of what he speaks. Ryan Izell of Homeless in Pasadena is also a frontliner and he is seeing the same trend.
“One of the things that we’re seeing is that, especially with older adults, folks who have fixed income just can’t keep up,” he explained. “It’s somebody either receiving social security, disability insurance, maybe receiving just north of $900 a month.”
At that rate, with rents being what they are regionally, meeting the monthly basics are difficult, he said.
“So we have a kind of structural inequality,” remarked Izell. “We have income that doesn’t provide a livable wage for folks. And then we’ve got the social safety net systems that are really meant to provide a support for folks when they’re down-and-out, when they don’t have the resources.”
Unfortunately, those safety nets are “porous,” according to Izell, permitting people to fall through the holes and onto the street.
Izell signaled his group’s approval of a City proposal to build a mixed-use development at the northeast corner of Fair Oaks Avenue and Orange Oaks Boulevard, including 70 units for former homeless seniors.
“That is definitely a step in the right direction, but more opportunities are needed,” he remarked.
Pasadena Mayor Terry Tornek is already on the record as saying homelessness is the dominant issue facing Pasadena. Out on the hustings for his reelection run, he said the feedback he is getting confirms the impression.
“It is the number one response that I get from people in terms of what their priority concerns are,” Tornek told Pasadena Now.
He said the City is approaching the problem with measures beyond PORT.
Tornek noted that the City continues to build affordable housing and in some cases, projects that resettle homeless families. The single room occupancy facility, Centennial Place, accommodates 20 homeless families. He has proposed, to no avail as of yet, a conversion of the old YWCA building across from City Hall to permanent supportive housing.
“And we continue to propose the motel conversion ordinance to try and capture some sort of ready-made units that we could get on the market quickly,” Tornek explained. “Our first effort was unsuccessful because of community opposition, but it’ll come back again. I think it’s still a useful technique and we are trying a bunch of different things.”
Author: David Cross
Source: Pasadena Now
by USHSAdmin | Apr 11, 2019 | Union Station in the News
The Masters of Taste fundraiser to benefit Union Station Homeless Services was held Sunday at the Rose Bowl.
Approximately 3,000 attendees sampled beverages and food from more than 100 restaurants, cocktail bars, California wineries, local craft breweries and hand-roasted coffee vendors. Live entertainment and cooking demonstrations were also featured.
Rob Levy and Maxine Harris co-chaired the event. Anne Miskey is USHS’ CEO; Jim Moore is the board chair.
Source: Outlook Newspapers
by USHSAdmin | Apr 9, 2019 | Union Station in the News
A majority of speakers who addressed the Pasadena City Council during public comments on Monday said they would like to see the iconic Julia Morgan-designed YWCA building be used for homeless housing.
“This is a perfect opportunity to restore this building for housing,” said Union Station Homeless Services Executive Director Anne Miskey. “That is what Julia Morgan wanted. We need housing. We need housing quickly.”
Other suggestions included using the building for youth transitioning out of foster care.
Morgan, California’s first registered female architect, built the YWCA building in 1921, six years before nearby City Hall was completed. She went on to design numerous structures throughout California, including Hearst Castle, owned by newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. She also designed other YWCA buildings on the west coast.
In 2012, the City purchased the building for $8.3 million. The building has remained unoccupied since then and continued to decay.
In 2017, the City Council voted 5-2 to suspend a Kimpton Hotel project after KHP Capital Partners sought waver on rent and parking for 99 years.
A task force was formed to devise suggestions on new construction, development, and land-use standards for the YWCA and YMCA city blocks. It concluded its work in May, 2018 with a set of general guidelines, but no specific design or construction ideas.
“Talking about maybe this or maybe that at this point is shameful,” said Councilman Steve Madison. “We spent $8 million seven years ago. We had a project I supported and we said no, let’s let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Then we appoint a 15-member task force and surprise, we got 16 opinions.”
The Council also heard from two consulting firms, OLIN Partners and the Kozman Companies, asked to study design and economic impacts of using the site in several different ways.
“It’s of supreme importance it be taken care [of,] renovated and be brought back to life. It would be a shame to lose this jewel of a building,” said Tiffany Beamer of OLIN Partners.
Beamer recommended the Robinson Memorial be preserved and any new project not infringe upon the busts of Jackie and Mack Robinson. Giving them “space to breathe.”
She also said no new building should be taller than City Hall, 60 feet.
“We do not want another massive building there,” said West Pasadena resident Nina Chomsky. “Why are we talking about 60 feet?”
Chomsky and local architectural historian Ann Scheid called for Cultural Landscape reports of the Civic Center to document its history, significance and treatment.
The consultants’ economic study examined costs for using the building variously as a hotel, private office space, office space for Pasadena Water and Power, and housing for the homeless.
In every scenario the lack of parking in the area was an issue.
“One of the reasons the building is so costly to be put in reuse is it was built for a specific purpose,” said Will Soholt of the Kosmont Companies.
“While the YWCA building is appealing and historically significant, it is expected to cost more to rehabilitate than the revenues from any of the reuse options studied will support,” according to the economic analysis.
“I have always believed this was a community space,” said Victor Gordo, who likened it to the plazas in Mexico that are destination locations.
Gordo said the reports did not include proposals that would activate the plaza space and said he was surprised they did not include mixed-use projects.
Pasadena Heritage Society Executive Director Sue Mossman called for the City to take steps to protect the building now.
“No matter what decisions you make it will be two or three years before you can go forward,” Mossman said. “It needs to be protected. It needs to be secured. It has cost the City $1 million in the seven years since we have owned it.”
According to City Manager Steve Manager, people are now living in the building and lighting fires to keep warm. Mermell showed Councilmembers pictures he took inside the building on Friday.
“I didn’t venture upstairs because I knew I was not alone,” Mermell said.
Source: Pasadena Now
by USHSAdmin | Apr 8, 2019 | Union Station in the News
About 100 Southern California food and beverage vendors tackled this weekend’s Masters of Taste on the Rose Bowl football field in Pasadena, which included a sit-down Wolfgang Puck Experience and cocktail bar at the 50-yard line.
All proceeds from the sold-out event benefit Union Station Homeless Services, a nonprofit organization committed to helping homeless men, women and children rebuild their lives by providing services like street outreach, meals, shelter, housing, case management and career development.
Chef Michael Hung from Faith and Flower was this year’s first-time Masters of Taste Host Chef in a food and drink paradise that included a massive seafood gumbo pot from Preux & Proper; pork jerky with spiced honey and jaewsauce from Santa Barbara’s hottest new spot, Tyger Tyger; and dramatic nitro artisan handmade ice cream demos from Supercool Creamery.
The VIP Wolfgang Puck Test Kitchen Experience took place in its own exclusive island on the field. Cambodian steak tartare, duck confit and spiced yogurt in a radish “pita,” monkfish mosaic with shelled beans and buttermilk caviar sauce were paired with San Simeon wines.
Here’s your free mouth-watering tour of the Masters.
Author: Michele Stueven
Source: LA Weekly
