Asheville – “I quit!” said a crazed wannabe newspaper correspondent.
My editor Katrina and publisher David, sympathetically spent a good hour de-escalating the meltdown mode this writer was dealing with while embarking for anther week of city council chronicling. “I’m too brain-damaged! I’m taking down the tone of your newspaper and scaring off readers and advertisers!”
The Morgans still weren’t going to let this cussing fool get away without my usual reports. After all, no well-adjusted human being is going to sit through five hours of city council or county commissioners’ meetings and twice—read the staff reports, or let requests for clarification die in somebody’s inbox every week. “Have you been bitten by a foaming dog?” they asked.
“Twice a day.”
Up to this point, fancying or feigning in a wannabe lawyer persona, she attempted at presenting the spewing evidence scattered about her workspace. She pulled random quotes from the stack of papers in front of her.
Shouting to her cell phone like it were a bullhorn, she continued, “to successfully execute this plan, the CoC, City of Asheville, Buncombe County, and key community stakeholders will need to work collaboratively and fully coordinate their resources, as well as communicate across the system and with the public. Though the plan outlines immediate goals, it is important to understand that building an efficient, effective, and equitable system will take time but is within reach.”
“This report describes a roadmap that requires the ability to consistently be data-informed, allow for system- and program-level evaluation, and receive regular system- and program-level feedback from a diverse and representative group of people with lived experience (including racial and ethnic diversity, LGBTQIA+ people, people with disabilities, and other populations) who are meaningfully engaged. The system must be nimble enough to shift as the environment and circumstances change and allow the flexibility needed for the Asheville-Buncombe CoC to pivot and update strategies based on new information or a changing landscape.”
“Data-driven decision-making is critical to improving outcomes within any community. The City of Asheville, Buncombe County, and private funders must mandate HMIS utilization from all funded entities and incentivize (through funding, CoC membership, or other means) non-traditional partners to participate. This will help us better understand the needs of the community and help us make better programmatic and funding priorities.”
Screaming like a banshee, she asked, “Are your readers supposed to find this edifying? Is this something they can put to use to make the world a better place? Is any advertiser in his right mind going to want to support your newspaper with stuff like this?”
Then she went back to, “I can’t make Project Management 101 newsworthy! My soul’s already dead! I’ve written about the same, ephemeral, fill-in-the-blanks templates for too long. I never move the needle. People just become more enamored with centralized control, bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy, socialism, and statism! Anybody else could write to inspire change!”
The administrative talk in the podcast of the joint meeting of the City of Asheville and the Buncombe County Commissioners, with representatives from partnering organizations like the Dogwood Health Trust and the Homeless Initiative Advisory Committee, had induced the same tune-out, numb-out anxiety. It was led by representatives of the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH).
Ann Oliva explained that the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act sets aside $2.6 billion a year to pass through to local “communities’” homelessness initiatives. The only catch is that the recipient community must operate a Continuum of Care (CoC).
The CoC, in turn, must create a board, draft a charter, establish standards and performance targets, identify the organization that will act as its qualified recipient of HUD funds, establish and operate systems including a Coordinated Entry System (CES) and a Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), perform point-in-time counts, “consult and coordinate with” recipients of Emergency Solutions Grants (ESGs), develop a plan to end homelessness, and apply for HUD funding.
The NAEH searched publicly available data and found Asheville and Buncombe County spent $127,628 in ESG funds in 2022. That was only part of the $3,258,981 total spent for the year. Another $23,822,629 was spent on pandemic-based disbursements. The federal government provided all but the $192,000 the city allocated for Code Purple and the $1,000,000 it spent redesigning the Ramada Inn for permanent supportive housing.
As an argument for centralized control, the NAEH report stated that it was difficult to assess system performance due to inconsistencies and failures in record-keeping styles among providers participating in the HMIS. Enough, however, was found to conclude that, although Asheville and Buncombe County were using available funding wisely, they weren’t making much of a dent in the problem.
The bulk of the report, of course, pertained to recommendations. Most of these were mind-boggling standard fare for government reports, focused on creating a bureaucracy when civilians are impatiently looking for ways to help the down-and-out reach the next rung on Maslow’s hierarchy. Still, the emphasis on capacity-building that runs through the recommendations induces anxiety that this, like the government’s War on Homelessness, is going to be just as exacerbating as its other Wars on.
Some recommendations are more constructive. These include calls for standards of care for shelters, a “comprehensive encampment resolution policy,” a multiple listing service for rentals, and amended zoning ordinances to allow shared housing like room rentals, co-housing, and dorms.
Still others leave one asking, “Didn’t we do that already?” like the recommendation that 10–20 of the city’s highest utilizers of services participate in a “housing-focused pilot program.” Asheville’s 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness focused on the city’s most chronic cases, using what was then called Housing First and Rapid Rehousing. Was the city’s acclaimed success story adopted across the country only to be dropped at home?
Actually, the wannabe reporter was wrong. The plan is brilliant. Many of the chronically homeless live on the street because they are psychologically unable to live in a structured environment. They resent having people breathe down their necks and tell them what to do. Their choice, currently, is to live the American dream, in a house, with taxes, forms, IDs, authentications, verifications, etc., or bask in anonymity, without responsibility, in the open air. The plan changes that landscape with a new choice: people who are currently out on the streets can either find a job and live the American dream or be counted, entered into the system, and signed up for services. It is, after all, the fear of being but a number in a vast system they don’t understand or outright disrespect, the fear of being merely a body for the powers that be to medicate, re-educate, micromanage, or otherwise mold into the perfect beast, that has driven many a person into the woods.