City Seeks Homeless Overflow Shelter For Winter

City officials are considering three alternative spaces for homeless people looking to get out of the cold this winter — since the basement used for years is no longer available.

Former Alder Ed Mattison (pictured) sounded the alarm about the need to find a new overflow shelter space during a recent meeting of the Board of Alders’ Human Services Committee, warning that getting a variance from the zoning board could make the process difficult.

City officials have known for years that using the basement of the Cornell Scott-Hill Health South Central Rehabilitation Center at 232 Cedar St. to house additional people during the winter was never going to be a permanent solution, said Mattison, a director at mental health services not-for-profit Continuum of Care Inc. Cornell Scott-Hill has plans to repurpose the basement space to further its own services.

The city typically opens the overflow shelter on Thanksgiving Day.

“What is happening in New Haven is happening in many, many places,” Mattison said. ​“It is extremely difficult to figure out how to house people in the winter who are homeless.”

He said that’s because of the temporary nature of the need. The city typically rents such space and it’s often hard to find a place that is both large enough to accommodate a big group of people, and willing to rent for just four or five months a year.

And the city would need a variance from the zoning board once it did find a place that met those criteria, said Mattison, who also heads the City Plan Commission.

“There is no zone in the city, zoned for emergency shelter. All of them got in place through some kind of variance that the zoning board gave the shelter,” he said. Getting that variance is ​“not easy, especially if the shelter is going to be in an area with lots of people living there who may not be thrilled to have a large homeless shelter in their midst.”

Martha Okafor (pictured), city community services administrator, said that the city, working with homeless services nonprofit Columbus House, is close to finding an overflow solution for the winter. She said three possible locations have been identified but declined to specify.

Alison Cunningham, Columbus House executive director, called this year a ​“band-aid year.”

“We’re in transition,” she said. In addition to the zoning challenges, Cunningham said funding for the overflow shelter also is a challenge because it is awarded by the city on a yearly basis, which makes investing in a more permanent solution for winter shelter harder. Columbus House has held the contract for the overflow shelter for 20 years

“It’s a challenge for anybody who gets a government contract,” she said. ​“Nothing is ever permanent. We live with that precarious landscape. It’s just the nature of our business.”

Cunningham said in most instances there are multiple funding streams for programs so that if one dries up another absorbs it. But in the case of the overflow winter shelter, the city provides the funds. She said she believes that the Harp administration is committed to programs for people who are homeless and that a solution can be found.

“Hopefully we will get through the process of finding a new location and be able to provide shelter this winter,” she said.

Mattison said he would like to see the city avoid what happened to Hartford about a decade ago when that city found itself suddenly without a winter overflow shelter. The city put out a request for proposals, received no bids back and ultimately had to spend a lot of money to renovate a closed school.

“We don’t want to get in that position,” he said.

Kellyann Day (pictured at right), CEO of New Reach, a not-for-profit that runs three emergency shelters for women and children, said the need for more family shelters has ​“been building all summer long.” Unlike with single individuals who might have spent the summer sleeping on the Green, women and their children are more likely to be living in a dangerous housing situation, or doubling up with other families, which Day said can become a dangerous situation.

“We’ve seen an increase in demand capacity for shelters in this region,” she said specifically for families in need of shelter. ​“We’re just not able to meet that demand and we’re trying to figure out the best way to respond whether it’s getting people into shelter, or getting them diverted from the shelter into housing as quickly as possible.

“It takes resources,” Day said, to educate staff and help with emergencies that keep families from signing a lease.

She said the city is getting better at tracking the number of chronically homeless people and figuring out how quickly that number can be reduced to ​“a functional zero” by getting people into housing. But Day also said she is concerned that New Haven’s continued low vacancy rate for rental housing will make it hard to move the needle on reducing homelessness. She said it is especially troubling as the groundwork is laid to find new homes for the nearly 300 families who currently reside at Church Street South, the large apartment complex across from the train station, which will likely be torn down.

Federal and city officials have not yet clearly explained to those families where they will be living in the next year.

“It’s a competitive rental market,” Day said. ​“With a dearth of rental units available, introducing 300 new households into the market makes me scared.” Factoring in the need for shelter that is accessible to public transportation as the weather turns cold, Day said ​“we may be approaching a perfect storm here that we need to figure out.”

And that’s Mattison’s concern, too.

“Maybe they will go to the zoning board and the zoning board will say OK,” he said of the buildings being considered for the overflow shelter. ​“But what if they say no?”