Nora Grace-Flood photos
Oscar Britt: Getting out of the cold at Columbus House Friday night.
Jim Pettinelli with Sen. Blumenthal, Gov. Lamont, and Sen. Murphy at Friday's funding presser.
Oscar Britt has a plan to survive subfreezing temperatures this weekend thanks to a connection he made with outreach workers who found him a hard-to-secure shelter bed at Columbus House.
The state is hoping to hire many more such workers who can connect with many more Oscars in New Haven and beyond — thanks to a newly announced federal infusion of $18 million to pay for a variety of homelessness services.
Gov. Ned Lamont and U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy arrived in New Haven to welcome that financial award from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Friday morning at the start of a cold weather crackdown that has people without homes scrambling for shelter and shelters stretching to provide it.
“The weather is bone-chilling, frigid and deeply dangerous. We’re at a point of maximum danger in terms of public health right now,” Blumenthal told reporters packed into the housing nonprofit Liberty Safe Haven at 210 State St. during Friday’s press conference.
“The solution to homelessness has to involve jobs and mental health and all the kinds of services that will enable people to get back on their feet,” he said, to avoid weather emergencies like this weekend that place people’s lives at risk.
An $18 million grant from the federal government, Blumenthal said, could mark a new movement towards lowering rates of homelessness around New Haven and the state.
That money, part of a broader $315 million in homelessness aid distributed to states by HUD, will go through to two state agencies — the Connecticut Department of Housing and the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services — and be divided into three buckets meant to help people living on the streets get “back on their feet,” as Blumenthal put it.
Over the next six years, $2 million will be granted annually to the following services (the “three buckets”) in Connecticut:
• The designation and development of walk-in “hubs” designed to connect individuals experiencing homelessness directly with needed services, a step towards providing physical entry points to the coordinated access networks that users typically access by calling “211” on the phone.
• Hiring outreach workers who will go out into communities to identify individuals and families experiencing homelessness and connect them with services.
• Investing in roughly 40 rental assistance vouchers paired with wraparound services to subsidize housing opportunities for those without.
Lamont: Chuckles the groundhog may have predicted spring, but he wasn't talking about Feb. 3, 4 or 5.
As HUD Senior Advisor for Housing and Services Richard Cho put it on Friday, the money will go towards “improved outreach, data collection on those sleeping in unsheltered settings, increased permanent housing options for them and more landlords recruited to rent to unhoused persons.”
He said Connecticut was selected in a competitive process to receive this funding because of its “comprehensive approach” to combating homelessness “designed with the input of people with lived experience who know the solutions to solving their own homelessness.”
Murphy added on Friday that the “funding recognizes that everybody has a different story when they end up on the street.”
He said that upping outreach programming will meet individuals without housing where they are and connect them with tailored services to assist their unique circumstances: That could mean a rental subsidy, substance abuse support, or mental health services.
“That’s what this grant is all about: Outreach,” he stated.
With homelessness surging since the onset of the pandemic due to jobs lost, rents raised, shelter capacity minimized and mental health issues exacerbated, Lamont said that he has learned over the past few years “that not only are appropriate housing and public health, vaccinations, important for that poor person who needs that helping hand, it’s important for the whole community… That’s how you bring a community back to life.”
Margaret Middleton: State needs to invest further.
While national leaders touted the importance of this sweeping financial intervention, local leaders on the issue continued to press the importance of systemic overhauls and consistent state funding when it comes to confronting homelessness post-presser.
“This is a gamechanger,” Columbus House CEO Margaret Middleton acknowledged of the funding during an interview with the Independent. However, she said, “This is entirely new programming. It doesn’t help us pay for what we already do. We’re structurally underfunded.”
Columbus House is working with the five warming shelters across New Haven and Hamden to remain open 24/7 this weekend as the temperature drops. That requires scrounging up more staff, who Middleton said are paid at just minimum wage while expected to work with individuals facing serious substance abuse and mental health disorders, to keep those spaces running.
Middleton, along with others, are specifically pressing for the passage of House Bill 6554 at the State Capitol this year, which would set aside $50 million for Connecticut’s homeless response service and fund cold weather services and increase service providers’ pay, among other provisions. Read more in the Connecticut Mirror here.
Middleton did say that Columbus House will receive $3 million through this state grant to subsidize rent for 40 individuals and hire more outreach workers. Additional outreach workers, she noted, are uniquely important when it comes to cold weather like this weekend.
One of the most important services a place like Columbus House can provide, she said, is case workers who provide direct support and care for individuals in need. “A connection to someone they can trust” is the reason most individuals return to shelters seeking help, Middleton posited.
Another key intervention, Middleton echoed of other speakers, is indeed outreach. With the cold weather emergency, “outreach workers go out and make sure every person we can find knows the weather will be really cold and knows where they can go.”
Finding "Someone To Vent To, A Support System”
Mary Lepak: “You wonder why people take shots,” she said. “It’s because it makes you warmer.”
Oscar Britt, 31, is one New Havener who does know where to go this weekend as the temperature approaches zero degrees.
Britt — who spent his Friday afternoon at the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen at 266 State St. “getting some food, chilling out, and politicking with a couple people” — said that he nearly missed an opportunity to stay in a warm bed this weekend. Fortunately, he found one thanks to an outgoing Columbus House worker and a close friend who followed up when he himself was hard to find.
Britt has been without housing for just over a year following a falling out with a flatmate that left him unable to afford a new studio apartment amid spiking rents.
After staying in a tent for the past year, feeling frostbite each time rain seeped through the tarped-in shelter, Britt called Columbus House workers this past summer and got on the list for a shelter bed.
Then, he said, his “phone exploded” and he struggled to stay in contact with the servicer without a cell on hand, any regular income, or a stable place to stay.
Later, he discovered a friend had gotten a room at Columbus House. That friend told an outreach worker about Britt’s circumstances and let Britt borrow her phone. That worker called Britt soon after and immediately paired him with a bed and a case manager who helped him get a diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Now, Britt, who said he has felt alone and without family since his mother died of breast cancer in his mid twenties, has “someone to vent to, a support system.”
Access to a person who helps him deal with a traumatic past and regulate his emotions, he told the Independent, has proved just as essential to his survival as finding a bed to sleep in for the past few months.
With the assistance of a case manager, he said he’s working to get identification, a second job and a subsidized apartment so he can live independently.
Mary Lepak, 42, on the other hand, is one of many still searching for a place to keep away from the cold tonight.
The previous night, she said, “it was so freezing my hands were numb. I’ve never had my hands feel like that.” She said that when out of the hospital, where she’s receiving treatment for cirrhosis of the liver, she sleeps outside of Union Station, where dozens without housing have been congregating this winter, in lieu of a place to stay. “I don’t even have a tent,” she said. “I don’t even have a jacket.”
“You wonder why people take shots,” she said. “It’s because it makes you warmer.”
When the weather gets as cold as it is this weekend, Lepak hangs out around DESK, where she was Friday afternoon, or rides the free buses back and forth to stay warm or stops in at Rite Aid to “let my hands thaw.”
Lepak, who hails from California, said she pursued her degree in social work after escaping a violent marriage ten years ago. But a barrage of mental health disorders from that trauma has made it hard to maintain stable work and housing, she shared. Lepak said she left the West Coast just this year to follow her son, of whom she has recently lost custody, to New Haven.
It was in New Haven, Lepak said, that she has experienced homelessness for the first time.
“I’ve never seen anything so horrific here,” she stated, beginning to weep.
“There’s Yale and then this homelessness epidemic. Where’s the middle ground? We’re a rich state.”
Asked where she would spend Friday and Saturday with dangerously low temperatures, Lepak said she doesn’t know where to go. Until this reporter mentioned Columbus House’s open hours, she said she was unaware that was an option.
However, she said, shelters themselves are triggering for her.
Lepak said she was raped this year while staying in a shelter. “I really don’t like anyone being that close to me,” she said, out of fear that she could be sexually assaulted again.
In New Haven, she said, “it’s my first winter in years.”
Though Lepak said safe and independent housing feels far away, the most crucial service she does receive is support from a case manager from BHcare, a behavioral health clinic in North Haven. “She always answers my phone call,” she said of her case worker. “There’s no judgement, no bullshit.”
“BHcare is fucking amazing. They don’t have enough people. But when they do, they really help.”
If you are a survivor of sexual violence and would like to connect with a trained listener, the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in both English and Spanish. You can call here at 800 – 656-HOPE(4673).
The following warming centers are open 24 hours a day through Sunday, Feb. 5:
Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) 266 State Street, New Haven, CT
The 180 Center 438 East Street, New Haven, CT
Upon This Rock Ministries 882 Grand Avenue, New Haven, CT
Varick Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church 242 Dixwell Avenue, New Haven, CT
See below for more recent Independent articles about homelessness, activism, and attempts to find shelter this winter.
• Tent Citizen By Choice Builds Community
• Shelter Sought From Cold-Weather Emergency
• Homelessness Advocates Brace For“Tidal Wave”
• Breakfast Delivery Warms Up“Tent City”
• Warming Centers Open, While City Looks To Long-Term Homeless Fixes
• “Human Rights Zone” Grows In Hill Backyard
• Homeless Hotel Plan Scrapped. What’s Next?
• Election Day Rally Casts Ballot For Housing