1 Day, 2 Homeless Initiatives

Homeless 18 – 24-year-olds will get new homes and other local homeless people will get temporary jobs beautifying the city thanks to two separate initiatives announced in New Haven Thursday.

The initiatives represent efforts to tackle homelessness in ways beyond simply establishing general overnight homeless shelters.

One of the initiatives, announced at a morning City Hall press conference, focuses on giving homeless people skills so they can land jobs and be able to pay rent for permanent homes.

Alexion Pharmaceuticals, which has moved into a new 13-story office tower at 100 College St., donated $100,000 to Liberty Community Services to run the initiative, called the ​“RESPECT Work Program.” Liberty, which runs a supportive-housing complex on State Street, will use the money to pay homeless people to work temporarily on beautification projects near Union Station and as-yet undetermined other spots around town.

The 16-month program is a pilot to test whether it can help people acquire needed skills to acquire longer-term work. The City of New Haven is donating a van to transport people to jobs.

City Community Services Administrator Martha Okafor called it the ​“2.0” approach to dealing with homelessness by helping people acquire the ability to support themselves. (“1.0” involved getting people temporary overnight shelter.)

“We’re all in the United States today thinking about how government can and can’t work. We know this will work,” said John Bradley, who runs Liberty Community Services.

He knows it will work in part because Liberty ran a similar program in 2014 and 2015, Bradley said. About half of the 40 people who participated were able to move into longer-term jobs, he said. He noted that homeless people often have to overcome barriers like a lack of education or a prison record or simply the effects of chronic unemployment before they succeed in the workforce. This program gets them started.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy visited the Youth Continuum drop-in center on Grand Avenue Thursday afternoon to announce the other initiative: The state’s Department of Housing (DOH) will give out $12 million in grants to local agencies to create supportive housing for 18 – 24 year-olds.

An estimated 3,000 people in that age group are homeless in Connecticut. This initiative reflects an effort to concentrate specifically on this group, which falls in between ​“youth” and ​“adult” categories, Malloy noted. The current system treats them as adults. Sometimes they need extra help, the governor said, because ​“there’s a difference between people who are under 25 and over 25,” especially males, in terms of brain development.

State bonding will pay for the $12 million in competitive grants. DOH is also setting aside $3 million over ten years to help those centers with operating money. The Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS) is working on the initiative too, providing some of the services that make this ​“supportive” housing. ​“Supportive housing” refers to places that rent to people who need mental health or drug counseling or other help on the premises to avoid plunging back into the more precarious — and, to society, sometimes more expensive — world of homelessness.

Youth Continuum plans to apply for some of that money to build supportive housing. The agency already has clusters of shelter beds for young people scattered around the city.

Malloy said the plan dovetails with a state commitment to eliminate chronic youth homelessness by 2020. The state — the government along with private not-for-profit agencies — declared victory in its quest to eliminate chronic homelessness among veterans last year.