Santa Rosa homeless summit seeks solutions

Iain De Jong, an internationally recognized expert on homelessness, has a novel approach to solving the homeless crisis many major North American cities have grappled with for decades: Take what communities have been doing for years, but do it in reverse.

“What works is trying to get people into housing as quickly as possible and wrapping supportive services around them, not trying to heal or fix people to get them ready for housing,” said De Jong, president of OrgCode Consulting, a Canadian consulting firm that focuses on housing and homeless issues.

As easy as it sounds, the approach requires fundamentally changing the way homelessness and homeless people are viewed. Among other things, it means recognizing each community is uniquely responsible for it own homeless problem, and that the face of the homeless is not a transient outsider but actually a longtime resident, he said.

De Jong, whose firm has worked in several North American communities, is the featured speaker at a conference on homeless solutions scheduled for Jan. 30 and 31 at Spring Hills Community Church in Santa Rosa. Billed as a “Summit on Homeless Solutions,” the conference brings together homeless services providers, local government officials and grant funders to have a “meaningful conversation about ending homelessness.”

The event is sponsored by Sonoma County, the city of Santa Rosa, Sutter Health, St. Joseph Health, St. Vincent de Paul Sonoma County, California State Sen. Mike McGuire’s office, Burbank Housing and Catholic Charities of Santa Rosa. It is organized by the Santa Rosa Homeless Collective, a consortium that includes the event’s sponsors, and other groups and individuals working toward solutions to local homelessness.

De Jong has worked with both local communities in Canada and the United States, including in Rhode Island and Michigan. In particular, he cites his work with Medicine Hat, a city in southeast Alberta that has dramatically reduced its homeless population with the ultimate goal of eliminating homelessness it altogether.

Jennielynn Holmes, director of shelter and housing for Catholic Charities, said De Jong, one of North America’s leading experts on homeless issues, has visited numerous communities across the United States, helping them create more efficient and coordinated services for dealing with homelessness.

Holmes said De Jong created an assessment tool knowns as the “vulnerability index,” which helps homeless services groups identify those most at risk of dying in the street and move them quickly into services.

It’s a triage tool that takes into account mental health, physical health, social support systems and interactions with police, among other things. It replaces the old “first-come, first-served” model of providing services, she said.

De Jong said the current focus on “housing first” followed decades of misdirected approaches toward the homeless. Ignored at first by the government, the homeless were once the sole responsibility of local churches and gospel missions, he said.

In the 1980s, services focused on getting homeless people clean and sober and into mental health treatment. Then in the 1990s and 2000s, homeless service providers focused on getting people into transitional housing aimed at teaching life skills, budgeting and being a good tenant.

“We finally realized that people are people and they need housing,” De Jong said.

De Jong said in an interview that most people in society who have the same issues as homeless people such as poverty, addiction, mental illness and chronic health issues “are more likely to never be homeless than they are to be homeless.” Homelessness is a rare event that occurs when there is a breakdown in family and community support, he said.

“Homelessness is almost never caused by one thing, but the confluence of several,” he said. “When people have a life issue and they are not supported, there’s a greater likelihood of a snowball effect; one bad thing leads to another and another.”

Of all the people who experience homelessness, 70 to 80 percent do so as a “once-in-a-lifetime event,” lasting less than two weeks, he said.

“But if you were to look at the public perception of homelessness, it is that 20 percent who are there longer that people see and are overwhelmed by,” De Jong said. “That 20 percent frames most of the public perception of homelessness.”

He said homelessness is a product of the failings in social policy such as not enough affordable housing, lack of a livable income or lack of access to health care. Those are causes that many communities are “loath to embrace, that what they’re seeing is a result of what they’ve done or not done.”

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.