After Steve Tarquino (left) moved from a shelter to his own apartment, buddies like Benny the Bum (top photo) moved in with him. Tarquino gave the public a tour of his apartment as part of an announcement about the next step in New Haven’s ambitious quest to end homelessness.
United Way of Greater New Haven made the announcement Thursday at Fellowship Place, a community on Elm Street near Dwight Street for people with mental illness. United Way is giving $100,000 to two new efforts to help people with special needs and disabilities to obtain long-term permanent housing. United Way’s working with four agencies — ALSO-Cornerstone, Community Mediation, Fellowship Place and Columbus House — on the new project. It fits in with the city’s 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness.
That plan relies not so much on emergency shelters, as on “supportive housing” — apartments, for instance, where people get ongoing help from social workers so they won’t end up back on the street when they encounter crises or relapses.
As part of the new United Way grant, Fellowship and Columbus House will launch a program to move some people from long-term apartments to owning homes — with ongoing financial and social service support. “Some people say [trying to end homelessness in New Haven] is too ambitious,” Columbus House chief Alison Cunningham (at left in photo beside Fellowship’s Fred Morrison) said Thursday. “It is. That’s our mission.” On a typical night 1,200 New Haveners sleep under bridges, in the woods, in shelters, under bridges, in abandoned buildings, Cunningham said. ““We’ll never open another emergency shelter. The real solution to homeless” lies in ongoing support for people in permanent homes. Like the new program, which she and Fellowship are calling SHOP (Supportive Home Ownesrhip Program). It aims at people like Steve Tarquino.
Tarquino is bipolar and manic depressive. He’s also an awesome artist. He makes sculptures out of materials he finds around town. His stuff is all over Fellowship. Tarquino once owned a house and was married. Then he hit bottom, became homeless. He stayed at the Columbus House shelter. Then he moved into one of the 23 subsidized apartment on the Fellowship campus, where he attends day programs. The apartment gave him room to work and to store, and live among, his human-scale metallic friends.
“That’s ‘Pops,’” Tarquino said as he parted a doorway of beads to enter one of his apartment’s crowded rooms. “He’s going to be a gangster. I’m going to put a rifle in his hand.”
“Bradshaw,” who’s made of steel and aluminum, was among the characters guarding the bedroom.
“It’s small, but it’s home. It means everything,” Tarquino said. Fellowship’s Morrison said he hopes Tarquino can be one of the people who own a home again thanks to SHOP. Tarquino said he’d like that. Presumably Rody the Rocker would, too.