For homeless singles in Johnson County, aid is sorely lacking

Things had been going well for Beverly during the early part of 2011. Despite a still-slow economy, she had a steady job at a truck dispatching center. She’d been on the job six years. “I never missed a day,” she said.

It was a pretty good Johnson County life. A year later, homeless and sleeping in her car, she would look back on it.

“One morning I woke up and couldn’t get out of bed,” she said. Two weeks later, after an ambulance trip and various medical tests, doctors found the reason: An infection in her back. After surgery, doctors told her she would need to use walker for months.

Troubles rippled out from there. It wasn’t just the hospital bills, substantial though they were. It was how the health setback messed with her work schedule.

Beverly, 63, could no longer sit and work for 12-hour shifts, as she used to do. For a while, her employer put her on a regular five-day-a-week schedule, but ultimately it didn’t work out. In 2012, she lost her job. Two months later, after losing her apartment, she packed up what she could into her 1999 Saturn and began to spend her days near the library and nights in the lot of a big box store, one of the single homeless in Johnson County.

She has family, but they either live in other states or are not in a position to take her in, she said. “They help when they can, but I can’t expect them to support me,” she said.

Beverly, who did not want her real name used because she feared family members would be harassed, spent about six months without a home before Lee Rowe of Overland Part noticed her at a library last summer. Rowe took Beverly under her wing, inviting her to her home and helping her eventually find a temporary place in a neighbor’s basement while they sorted things out.

Since then, Rowe has been on a campaign to get better services for a population that is barely noticed in Johnson County: homeless people without children.

For years the emphasis of county and charitable groups in Johnson County has been on families with children. There’s Safehome for survivors of domestic violence, the Salvation Army’s Family Lodge for displaced families.

But if you’re homeless and you don’t have kids, there’s precious little help within the county’s borders.

“If you’re a single person in Johnson County, you don’t have a place to go — especially if you are a single person and male,” said Valorie Carson, community planning director of United Community Services.

Karen Wulfkuhle, executive director UCS, agreed. According to the nonprofit’s 2012 figures, 14,000 of the 33,000 people in the county below the poverty level are people without children. Many of those, she said, are women middle-aged or older.

And that population is increasing, she said.

Tracking the number of the county’s homeless is a little tricky. The federal department of Housing and Urban Development counts the homeless this way: One night a year, always in January, agencies that get federal money for the homeless go out and take a census at emergency and transitional housing shelters, or in parks and under bridges to get an idea of the need, Carson said.

That results in a low count in cold-winter places, she said, because people who have lost their housing are more likely to find someone to take them in when it’s cold outside.

It also tends to under count childless homeless people, since there are no emergency shelters for them in the county at that time.

In 2014, the census showed that 24 of the 167 “HUD homeless” in the county did not have children, Carson said.

When those people need help, the best most agencies can do is refer them to shelters elsewhere in the Kansas City area, Carson said, because the options in Johnson County are so limited.

The Interfaith Hospitality Network is one of the few groups with any emergency shelter at all for single people, but it is limited, said executive director Vicki L. Dercher.

For most of the year, Interfaith serves only families during the daytime at its Family Center. After hours, those families spend the night in a host church that has converted classroom space to bedrooms for a week. The host church duties rotate week to week.

In the summer, when families don’t need the Family Center address to keep their kids in the schools, there’s a little more wiggle room to admit people without kids. Interfaith limits those spaces to women because many women in that situation have been victimized by men and would be uncomfortable otherwise, she said.

Even at that, space is very limited, she said. Only four rooms are generally available at a time. “Clearly it’s an unmet need and at this time, we don’t have the resources to fill the void.”

Catholic Charities addresses the problem in a different way. Their “rapid re-housing” program works with landlords to find a vacant apartment for the applicant for about six months. During that time the agency offers case management, financial literacy and health and nutrition help while the person is getting back on his or her feet, said Kim Brabits, vice president of program operations for Catholic Charities.

The idea is to find secure housing so that the person can begin to address financial and other problems, Brabits said.

But rapid re-housing, like most programs, is primarily available for people with children. Most of the money Catholic Charities has to spend comes from HUD and is restricted to families with kids, Brabits said, although the smaller state grant can help a few single homeless people. And while the program is “rapid,” it isn’t instant. Applicants still have to stay somewhere while they wait for an apartment to open up, she said.

County commissioners have expressed concern over the changing demographics and the need for services for the elderly, disabled and poor. In 2014, they heard reports from United Community Services and others. But so far, they have not come up with any new strategies to address those needs.

The struggles of the county’s most vulnerable was identified as one of the county commission’s top four priorities this year, but commissioners are still in the beginning stages of deciding what that means. At a meeting Thursday, they debated some of the wording on an goal of promoting self sufficiency for the poor, specifically

whether government services should be referred to as “safety net” or “trampoline” services.

Commissioner Michael Ashcraft suggested that one of the proposed objectives — to ensure adequate safety net services — be changed to “trampoline” instead. He said recipients may become entrapped in a “safety net,” whereas a trampoline helps them bounce back.

However Commissioner Ron Shaffer objected, saying “trampoline services” is not a common phrase most people have heard.

In the end, commissioners agreed to find wording that emphasizes “self sufficiency.”

Although Johnson County has always had a reputation as a well-to-do enclave of the Kansas City area, Wulfkuhle believes that is changing. “I think people are becoming more aware of it,” she said. “It’s still not visible in the ways you see in urban communities. People go to great lengths to try to disguise their circumstances because of the stigma and shame about being in poverty in this county.”

Charitable groups also are beginning to see the need to work together, Carson said. In years past, churches might have tried to take on emergency shelter on their own. “I think churches are starting to recognize, especially with the recession and so many people losing their housing, that this isn’t going to solve the problem,” she said. “They’re realizing they need a more concerted effort to work together.”

Beverly, who had always had some type of job her adult life, did not know her way around the system. She got occasional gas money from family members, as well as from a church. Lee Rowe saw her several times at a library before eventually asking if she was homeless and in need of help. It took Beverly a few more days after that to finally accept the offer, Rowe said.

Helping Beverly navigate the system has been “eye opening,” Rowe said. Beverly spent a few nights at Rowe’s home before a neighbor offered her basement.

That was the relatively easy part. More frustrating were the hoops Beverly needed to jump through to apply for Social Security disability, help with her $53,000 in hospital bills, and food stamps, for instance.

Rowe said assistance for people in Beverly’s situation needs to be more seamless. The county provides a referral list of agencies, but those require a daunting number of follow-up calls.

United Way’s help line, for example, was meant to be a one-stop referral to help people in emergencies. But Carson of UCS said it isn’t targeted enough. People who use it end up with a list of places to call to chase down an available room.

“If you’re in crisis, living in a car and cold and you need someplace to go, that doesn’t help you get housed quickly,” Carson said.

“It’s a frustration we’re all experiencing, the feeling like we’re cobbling things together,” she said.

Beverly is still looking for a place of her own, and has her name on a waiting list for low-income apartments in Overland Park. She currently stays in a basement space in an Overland Park home and has part-time work in customer service. Although she suffered a sprained arm recently, her back problems have eased enough that she’s getting around a little better.

Finding an apartment she can afford — around $500 a month — is still hard, but Beverly knows how to be frugal. “I’m not a big spender. I shop for clothes at hand-me-down stores. I’m not one to go to Kohl’s or Macy’s and blow money on clothes,” she said.

“My parents raised us to believe in the Lord and trust in him, so that’s what I’m doing,” she said.

This story was originally published April 28, 2015 at 3:25 PM with the headline "For homeless singles in Johnson County, aid is sorely lacking."