Surge in Delware Homelessness Alarming
50 percent increase blamed on high cost of living, lack of jobs
By MIKE BILLINGTON
The News Journal
01/29/2006
Lynwood L. McMillian was an easygoing guy. He had a ready smile for most folks, and friends said he could be generous to a fault.
"If he had, you had," said Anticious Peterson Jr. "Didn't matter if it was food or cigarettes."
On the night of Jan. 3, Wilmington police found the 47-year-old former Marine unconscious near the train station. Paramedics tried to revive McMillian as they rushed him to an emergency room, but he was pronounced dead about an hour later.
Cause of death: wet weather, cool temperatures, poor nutrition and poor health.
"It was living on the streets that killed him," said Peterson, who is himself homeless.
So far this winter, nine homeless men have died of natural causes on Wilmington's streets. That's an alarming increase, according to advocates, who say normally between eight and 10 die during the entire winter.
The deaths are only the most stark indicator amid a dismal trend noted by advocates for the homeless, who report a 50 percent increase in the number of people this year seeking food and shelter from local programs.
No one offers a comprehensive reason, although some advocates point to rising rental costs, which they say is increasing the number of working homeless -- including more women and families.
"This was not an incremental increase," said the Rev. Tom Laymon, chief executive officer of Wilmington's Sunday Breakfast Mission. "It was a sudden jump. It's really baffling to me."
Estimates of the state's homeless population vary from a little more than 1,000 to more than 5,000, depending on who is doing the counting and which definition for homelessness is being used.
But this much is for certain, advocates say: There are not enough shelter beds, not enough Delaware programs to help and not enough money to pay for more.
Steady work hard to find
What is most puzzling, Laymon said, is that many of the people using Delaware's homeless programs today don't fit the traditional stereotype. They don't abuse drugs or alcohol, a major cause for homelessness.
"Something has changed. We've reached some kind of tipping point," said Bill Perkins, executive director of Friendship House, a Wilmington-based homeless program.
Perkins thinks the outsourcing of jobs to temp agencies is contributing to the increased number of homeless people in Delaware.
"Seems like [temp agencies] are the only ones hiring these days," Duane Tirado, who is homeless, said one morning as he sat drinking coffee in the Friendship House building on Walnut Street. "Used to be that if you wanted to work, you could find a steady job, but that's not always the way it is these days."
Many landlords won't rent to people who don't have a steady job -- and income, Perkins said.
Duane Butler, a homeless man in Wilmington, sees that firsthand. He works most days, but he can't find a place to live.
But, Perkins concedes, job outsourcing does not explain the increase in the number of people Friendship House serves daily. It does not explain why the 140-bed Sunday Breakfast Mission has had another 20 to 25 men sleeping in hallways and the chapel because there are not enough beds.
Many men, like Jose Nunez, often can't even find space on the floor.
Less affordable housing
Ken Smith, executive director of the Delaware Housing Coalition, said it's harder to find a permanent home in Delaware because of high rent.
"The housing market has tightened. In the 1980s, people could use federal programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children in combination with lower rents to defray their living expenses and remain in an apartment," he said.
But over time, he said, housing costs outstripped incomes at the same time assistance programs were being scaled back.
An economic fear factor also plays a part, Smith said. Homeowners worried about property values do not want low-income housing in their neighborhoods.
The result: Fewer and fewer affordable-housing projects are being built in New Castle County and Wilmington.
Marlena Gibson of the Delaware Housing Coalition noted, for example, that the organization's compilation of the state's Housing Development Fund expenditures shows that in 1991, it was used to help pay for 296 new rental units in Delaware. The numbers have fallen, climbed and fallen again. In 2003, the fund helped finance 142 new rental units, in 2004 it financed 133, and last year 120.
An analysis of the fund's impact on low-income rental housing shows that from 1995-1999, the fund financed 1,120 units, while from 2000-2004 it financed 653.
Rural homelessness in Kent and Sussex counties, Smith said, is harder to track because it often takes the form of "doubling up." That, Smith explained, is when families move from house to house, staying as long as they can before they move on.
Families that do double up put themselves at risk. If they live in government-sponsored low-income housing, for example, they can be evicted under the Section 8 regulations if they allow another family -- even relatives -- to move in.
"So what you have are people in rural areas living in utility sheds behind someone's home and people living illegally in overcrowded housing," he said. "Georgetown, where you often have two families sharing a one-family house or apartment, is the most overcrowded place in Delaware."
It's no better in Dover and other Kent County communities, said Lakena Hammond, director of The Shepherd Place.
"We have long waiting lists and we have to turn people away. That's hard because that's not why we're here."
She sees a direct link between low wages and high rents when it comes to homelessness.
"It's not that people aren't working because they are, but at $6.50 or $6.75 an hour, you can't pay $800 a month to rent a 2-bedroom apartment," she said. "The rents are incredible and people just can't afford them."
That's especially true, she said, for single parents or families where only one parent is working while the other stays home to care for the children.
"If you've got only one income, you're really hurting. You can't pay rent, pay your utilities and feed your kids," she said.
Carl Mazza, the director of Meeting Ground, a Cecil County, Md., program for the homeless, has seen the same thing. He said the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development's most recent "fair market value" statistics show that in the Delaware region, which includes Cecil County, rents for a two-bedroom apartment have increased 43 percent in the past two years.
"When you see statistics like that, you realize that people making minimum wage have not seen their paychecks increase that much so they just can't afford to live in an apartment," Mazza said.
To afford a two-bedroom apartment in Delaware or Cecil County, Mazza said, a family must now earn at least $18.21 an hour. That means a mother and father who are each working minimum wage jobs will fall about $4 an hour short of being able to afford an apartment.
More families, not just individuals
Advocates say they are seeing more families living in shelters, on the streets and in doubled-up housing.
Joanne Miro, the coordinator of Delaware's Education for Homeless Children and Youth program, said it is difficult to say it's a trend, however, because definitions of homeless are inconsistent.
For example, in 2002, the U.S. Department of Education broadened its definition of homelessness to include children living with relatives or friends because their parents don't have a home. HUD, however, does not include those families in its definition, because they have a roof over their heads, even if it is not their own.
"This is a serious issue because it's hard to formulate policies when you have different definitions for the homeless. Right now, we're in a situation in which we consider a child homeless but HUD doesn't consider his or her parents homeless," Miro said.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors and many advocates for the homeless have urged the federal government to adopt the Education Department's definition.
Using that definition, it is possible to see a hard-and-fast increase in the number of homeless children in Delaware, Miro said. In 2004, for example, her program counted 888 homeless children in Delaware. In 2005, that number jumped to 1,342. This year's figures are about the same as last year's, she said.
Meanwhile, HUD's figures show that there are only 1,108 homeless people in Delaware.
Delaware school districts are reporting varying causes for homelessness.
That's not surprising, Miro said, because "it doesn't take much to be homeless. Back when I was a young teacher, if I'd lost my job and I was the sole support of my family, I could easily have been homeless."
For example, she said, she has worked with a mother and her three children who were homeless despite the fact the woman worked in a bank.
"She'd left her home with her three small children because of an abusive situation," Miro said. "She was trying to support herself and the kids and couldn't make it so she was living in a shelter. From the outside, it looked like she had a good job, but because her choices were limited, she and her kids were actually homeless."
Miro said school districts also are reporting other causes ranging from health issues that have forced a parent to stop working, to the death of a wage earner in a two-income family.
There are so many new homeless children that the state is trying to keep them in the same schools as they move, even if that means busing them from other districts.
"Our goal is to give them the best chance at an education that we can," Miro said.
Federal programs lose support
The rise in homelessness in Delaware and elsewhere is difficult to explain, advocates said, given that more people are working, according to the federal government. The Institute for Supply Management said earlier this month that its index of service-sector jobs increased to 59.8 in December from 58.5 in November.
When the index hits 50 or above, the institute said, that means the service sector is growing. December was the 33rd straight month of service-sector expansion, the institute said.
Those figures corresponded with official U.S. government figures that said first-time jobless claims nationwide fell by 35,000 in early January to 291,000, the lowest level in more than five years.
But there are pressures that play into the homelessness equation, advocates said.
The first is the decay of federal support for programs such as food stamps, Medicaid and emergency food and shelter.
"We've been seeing this kind of thing for the past few years," Mazza said.
"Federal funding for emergency food and shelter programs, which was a significant portion of our budget for about 20 years, dropped about 60 percent two years ago," he said.
Another example: HUD used to give Cecil County about $80,000 a year to help pay for its shelters. Now it gives about $3,000, Mazza said.
That is significant in terms of Delaware's homeless population because there are not enough shelter beds in the state. As a result, Mazza said, between an average of 10 percent to 20 percent of Meeting Ground's residents are from Delaware.
And that number has been as high as 35 percent, he said.
"If we do have space available, we will accept the person or family only if there is no option in Delaware available at the time," Mazza said.
Often, he said, "we get calls for larger families -- eight children or more -- who can't find accommodation in another shelter."
When Meeting Ground does not have space available, "we ask if the family has a car. If they do, we consider them very fortunate because at least they can live in it," Mazza said. "That's pretty sad."
The fact that the numbers of homeless are increasing while the money to shelter them is not means some people are reverting to pioneer survival skills.
"We have a big increase in the number of people who are living in the woods because they can't find any place else to live," Mazza said.
That is also occurring in Sussex and Kent counties, which have large tracts of undeveloped land. Smith said there is a small colony of men living in the woods near Georgetown. Advocates take them food and clothing periodically.
"And those are the ones we know about," Smith said. "There may be others."
Contact Mike Billington at 324-2761 or mbillington@delawareonline.com.