Houseless in Johnson County will have few options after shelter closes at end of March
Bob Winner has spent almost every night this winter on a plain cot inside the Lenexa church where the nonprofit Project 1020 hosts Johnson County’s only emergency shelter for single adults who find themselves without a place to stay.
The building is warm, the food is good and the volunteers are kind. Yet Winner rarely sleeps.
He is consumed with what will happen to him and hundreds of other unhoused people who have sought help from the shelter come April 1, when the winter-only facility closes its doors for the season, exposing a hole in the Kansas City area’s safety net for people experiencing homelessness.
“As an observer of humanity, I never would believe what I’ve seen over the last six months,” said Winner, now 70 years old and without a permanent place to stay since he was evicted last summer after losing several security guard jobs in pandemic-induced layoffs.
He is among the more than 2,000 people estimated to be without a home across the metro at any given time with as many as 10% living in Johnson County, experts estimate. Although experts caution that data collected each year almost certainly underestimate the true scope of homelessness in the community.
Despite years of discussions, there is no year-round emergency shelter in Johnson County for adults without children, even though a large network of government, nonprofit and religious organizations stitch together a blanket of other services across the metro.
Although political and nonprofit leaders say they agree a Johnson County shelter would be a crucial part of serving those in need where they already are, efforts to create one — including by Project 1020 — have faced a series of regulatory challenges and roadblocks from residents.
Most municipalities across the county have strict regulations regarding shelters and with limited capacity, if they’re permitted under current zoning rules at all. Even if officials could coordinate public funding to support a new shelter across several jurisdictions, they expect the proposal would face fierce opposition from neighbors near the new facility worried about the stigma of having those in need in their neighborhood.
Now elected officials say new discussions are underway this year about how the county and municipalities could seize on federal American Rescue Plan funds to finally bring a shelter to fruition as part of a larger plan to increase housing options throughout the community.
But those plans are in their early stages and leaders do not yet have specifics about when, where or how an emergency shelter might come together.
“We need to be more realistic about what the needs are, what the situation is,” Project 1020 co-founder Barb McEver said. “I feel like Johnson County wants this perfect ‘Johnson County’ type shelter.
“You’re not being realistic about the people you’re trying to serve,” she continued. “It would be wonderful if (for) everybody who was experiencing homelessness it was just a brief situational hiccup in their life, but that’s just not realistic.”
Now Winner and many of the men and women who have relied on the 30 beds offered by Project 1020 — which have reached capacity nearly every night this winter — will have to either return to living outside, in cars or find some way to cross the state line to the emergency shelters in Missouri.
It has left Winner and many other unhoused individuals in Johnson County feeling like their affluent, suburban neighbors would rather pretend their community has no need for a shelter than find a way to offer a helping hand.
“The politicians right now are in denial, they are denying this point,” Winner said. “What are the people gonna do? It’s our job to inform them that we’re in a crisis level.”
The problem
The official number of unhoused individuals in Johnson County has declined on paper over the past three years, from 189 in 2019 to 157 in 2021, and is down from more than 300 a decade ago, according to the annual “point in time count“ conducted by United Community Services of Johnson County.
But those figures are almost certainly an undercount of the true unhoused population in the state’s largest county, experts say.
The count is conducted one January night each year to survey individuals about their circumstances and needed services. To complete it, volunteers and professionals fan out across communities nationwide to different types of shelters and known locations where unsheltered people may camp outside to try to reach as many people as possible to report that information to the federal government.
That method only captures a “snapshot,” though, said Julie Brewer, executive director of United Community Services of Johnson County. The surveys are voluntary and there’s no way to ensure officials can track down every single person who may be living outside or in their car on a given night, so by default the official numbers are considered an undercount, she said.
On Jan. 25, the frigid night of this year’s count, 21 of 30 individuals staying at Project 1020 agreed to participate in the surveys, Brewer said. Although final numbers from this year’s count will not be prepared until later this spring, ongoing COVID-19 health and safety protocols mean groups have been able to help fewer people over the past two years even as need has increased amid the financial turmoil wrought by the pandemic.
David Thayer, a Johnson County native who has been without a permanent home for three years, completed a survey at Project 1020 that night. He sought shelter from the dangerously low temperatures, even though he prefers to camp outside, and said he has seen the number of campers grow during the pandemic even though they may not be reflected in the official totals.
“There’s more of us than they think. There’s more homeless people now, more than ever, than there has been,” Thayer said. “I know personally of a dozen people that are sleeping in their cars and I even know a handful that are sleeping under bridges – here in Johnson County no less.”
‘The cracks’
The need for a year-round emergency shelter specifically in Johnson County is most acute for people like Winner and Thayer, who do not have children and are not recovering from an addiction, which could have qualified them for other supportive housing options through the county’s mental health department or other local organizations.
The Salvation Army and Johnson County Interfaith Hospitality Network arrange shelter beds for families, Safehome provides shelter for domestic violence victims and Project 1020 provides an emergency shelter for single adults in need during the cold winter months.
Project 1020, founded in 2015 by McEver and Dean Askeland, originally began with 10 cots at Redemption Church in Olathe when temperatures dropped below 20 degrees, hence its name. The entirely donor-funded nonprofit has since grown and moved to the Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church in Lenexa after a heated legal battle over where the shelter would be allowed to operate and it is the only facility of its kind in Johnson County.
But from April through November, Winner and Thayer find themselves with no place to go, so they have been forced to try to seek shelter at places like City Union Mission that serve the larger unhoused population on the Missouri side of the metro.
There are on average less than 70 emergency shelter beds for single adults available at any given time in Johnson County, Brewer said.
With so few beds and those in need scattering across the metro to find services throughout most of the year, every group struggles at least some of the time simply trying to keep track of those they’re attempting to help, said McEver, the Project 1020 founder.
A full-time emergency shelter in Johnson County would not only provide those needed beds, but it could give the various service providers a central location to “wrap around” the mental health, addiction recovery, medical, employment and housing services that aim to help the unhoused, Brewer and McEver agreed.
“Maybe we have the services but they’re just falling through the cracks,” McEver said. “It’s very time consuming and it takes a lot of dedication and patience and devotion. But if we really want to help the people I’m speaking of, something has to be done.”
‘Bad luck’
Trouble first started for Winner two years ago, when he lost one job as a security guard as office shutdowns spread across the globe in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
He won another security guard job at a local manufacturer only to lose it amid another round of staff reductions last year.
“I had a stroke of bad luck,” he said.
Soon Winner was slipping financially — first his car registration lapsed and then he fell behind on rent. At the end of last June he was evicted and moved into a series of hotels, burning through cash and building a mountain of debt between previous payday loans and credit for his stays last summer.
A medical episode last fall further compounded his issues and he was hospitalized for more than two months. When he was discharged, he was left with only what he could fit in his old Toyota Corolla, locked out of the storage unit where the rest of his belongings remain because he fell behind on those payments too.
With nowhere else to go, Winner turned to Project 1020, where he has stayed nearly every night this winter.
“People do not know until they’ve been there,” Winner said. “Barb and her husband are saints and they help a lot of people here. Some will come, some will go. I’ve met a lot of good people.”
After his hospital stay last fall, doctors diagnosed Winner with the first signs of dementia and suggested he could qualify for placement in a nursing home but he stubbornly refused. The county mental health department also offered to help him re-register his car, but he’s refused that too.
“I don’t like handouts,” Winner said. “I’m old school. If I’m not working, I’m not happy.”
Winner has since started a new job at a local temp agency that has taken him to Harvesters, where he made $13 per hour lugging food donations around the group’s warehouse and to area Walgreens locations. But even with steady work and $1,200 per month in Social Security benefits, he’s struggling to make a dent in the more than $35,000 in debt he’s racked up over the past year and to secure a new apartment with an eviction on his record.
“It’s like you’re in the circus,” he said last month, pretending to juggle with a frown.
Moving forward
Many political leaders and homelessness experts agree Johnson County needs a year-round emergency shelter for single adults, but the question remains how and where to create one.
Last year’s Johnson County Community Housing Study, released by United Community Services, emphasized the need to increase housing stock and diversity across the county to provide more affordable living options as the area continues to grow.
A new community housing task force borne out of that study, which includes representatives from area social services and elected officials across the county, is crafting plans to change local housing policies in response to the findings. They expect to apply for federal American Rescue Act Plan funding to support housing services and potentially even fund housing construction, officials said.
As part of that process, county and municipal leaders will consider whether it may be possible to secure funding that could become seed money for either the construction or conversion of a building to become the new emergency shelter currently missing in Johnson County.
“Shelter needs are a stop-gap,” Brewer said. “You need to look at this as a continuum. If I’m experiencing homelessness today, telling me you’re working on attainable housing that will be built in several years doesn’t help me with my problem today. I need a today response, and that can look like an emergency shelter.”
Officials have said it is too early in the discussions to say what organization would ultimately establish and run the shelter or where such a facility could be, but suggested it could be set up so that each community across the county could contribute to it as a joint effort.
The facility itself also would need to be centrally located, near public transportation options, and with enough room that each agency and organization providing services for the unhoused could be in one location for those in need.
“I’m used to being in the private sector and just getting things done, it’s a whole other thing when you’re in government,” said county Commissioner Shirley Allenbrand, who has worked on the county board’s housing subcommittee on the new plans. “I feel like we’ve made some good accomplishments, but we still have a way to go.”
‘The basics’
In the meantime, McEver is preparing to close the Project 1020 operation inside the Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church again.
The nonprofit now employs a year-round social worker to help as many clients who visited the shelter as possible connect with services they need, but McEver worries constantly about where they will go without the shelter to fall back on.
Because those in need often do not have consistent access to phone and internet services, simply keeping in touch with them is one of the most difficult tasks for groups like McEver’s working to help the unhoused.
“I feel like we complicate things so much — and it is complicated, that’s the thing — but if you start small and with the basics, you learn so much about what needs to come after that,” McEver said. “Johnson county has lots of services (and) … they have nowhere to go, but let’s get all these services together and try to find them all the time.”
Winner does not know where he’ll go next when the shelter closes. Perhaps a shelter on the Missouri side of the city or maybe the backseat of his car.
Dozens of other Johnson County residents will find themselves in the same situation over the coming weeks, left with virtually nowhere to turn within their own community, McEver said.
“They’ve been let down. I don’t care what they’ve done in their life, they may not be a model citizen, but they’re still people and they still matter and they want to be a part of things and they want to be treated with dignity and respect,” McEver said. “ They may not always behave in a way we think doesn’t warrant that, but they’re in desperation.
“Think about losing everything you have,” she continued. “ Whether you have an addiction problem, whether it’s a divorce, you’re mentally unstable – you’ve lost everything in your life. What the hell would you do?”
