Rowland Backs More Supportive Housing
By Josh Kovner, Courant Staff Writer, April 8 2004
Alan Morrill told his story of redemption, of how, homeless and mentally ill, he found the help and comfort he needed in supportive housing.
Now he's got a job and pays taxes. His audience - housing advocates who gathered Wednesday at Hudson View Commons apartment house on Hudson Street in Hartford - nodded knowingly.
Since 1993, they've developed 1,700 units of supportive housing - rental apartments with built-in social services for low-income people with disabilities - in 25 communities in Connecticut. All without a point person or agency at the state level.
That will change, however, with the announcement by Gov. John G. Rowland that a multi-agency state council will oversee supportive housing. He charged it with producing a plan by Sept. 1 for 1,000 more supportive apartments all over the state. Funding for such units typically comes from a mix of public money, private investment and inducements for developers.
"We know it works. The state clearly sees the benefit. This commitment is going to enable nonprofit developers to create more housing, on a small and large scale, more quickly. That's what we've lacked," said Diane Randall, executive director of The Partnership for Strong Communities in Hartford.
The new council will look for ways to increase public and private funding for supportive housing. It will look to serve the people who need the housing the most - homeless veterans, homeless women with children, former foster-care kids out on their own and adrift, ex-inmates, and people with mental illnesses and physical disabilities.
Almost anywhere else these people would land - crowded emergency shelters, psychiatric centers, halfway houses, live-in drug programs, hospital emergency rooms, prison - are far more expensive than the $36 a day it costs for a tenant in supportive housing.
Middletown Mayor Domenique Thornton, who came to listen to Rowland Wednesday, has seen the renovated, (The Connection's) 40-unit Liberty Commons - formerly the drug-plagued Arriwani Hotel - raise property values in the city's North End and help people who were once homeless find jobs. Of the 40 tenants, 13 are working and two are in school.
Rowland said he understands this. He said many of the 33,000 homeless people in Connecticut, including 13,000 children, could completely change their lot in life if they got into places like Liberty Commons or Hudson View, a well-kept, 28-unit apartment complex near Hartford Hospital.
"Solving these problems saves lives," Rowland said.
He said he wanted to make Connecticut a national model for cooperation and responsiveness.
The new council includes the state Departments of Children and Families, Corrections, Social Services, Mental Health and Addiction Services, Veterans Affairs, Public Health, Economic and Community Development, and the Governor's Office on Workforce Competitiveness.
"No turf battles," Rowland told the assembled commissioners. "Bureaucracy will kill this initiative."
President George W. Bush's point person on homelessness, Philip Mangano, told the gathering that Connecticut has joined a national movement toward cooperative approaches to the problem of homelessness.
Mangano, director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, said frontline housing advocates have waited years for supportive housing to get this kind of attention.
One of them is Janice Elliott, New Haven-based regional director of the Corporation for Supportive Housing. The group was a backer of the first wave of housing complexes in Connecticut in the early 1990s. She said the initiative announced Wednesday would help the housing movement reach its goal - 10,000 units across the state by 2010.
"You'll see the chronically homeless finally getting out of the shelters and into permanent housing," she said.
Morrill said supportive housing saved him.
"Finding the help I needed in one place, plus having shelter, gave me the ability to focus on getting better," said Morrill, 61, who was battling crippling depression and anger.
"That was five years ago. I've had my job for nearly three years now. [He drives a livery van, taking people to medical appointments and on personal errands.] I'm able to see the good in people. I seriously appreciate this whole thing."
Copyright
2004, Hartford Courant
