Homelessness isn’t just a KCMO problem. Johnson County and others have to step up
John Lacy once offered to phone someone the homeless man said was his cousin. It turned out to be the man’s mother, unexpectedly reconnected with the son she thought she’d lost to mental illness.
“I remember her crying, ‘I thought he was dead. I really thought he was dead,’” he recalls.
Lacy, then a patrolman for Overland Park Police Department and now the department’s public information officer, has never forgotten that moment. Or the homeless man who might have lost his feet to frostbite had Lacy not taken him to the hospital.
Yes, homelessness happens in Johnson County, and in every other county and city in the Kansas City metro area. But to a large extent, the solutions have been left to Kansas City government and charitable organizations.
In Johnson County, the most populous in Kansas, there is no 24-hour or year-round shelter for men. Besides a family shelter and one for women and children, one solitary shoestring night shelter, Project 1020, is open from December to March at Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church in Lenexa. And that’s only after the church fought for the right in court.
“There’s nowhere for men to go, and there’s really hardly anywhere for women to go,” says Barb McEver, who cofounded Project 1020 in 2015 with little more than 10 cots.
McEver is actually thrilled with the Lenexa’s support of her all-volunteer shelter since the lawsuit, and since the city — following the city of Shawnee — rewrote its ordinances to allow for a homeless shelter. But again, it’s a nighttime-only, wintertime-only solution.
Why isn’t there more? McEver guesses powerful opposition to a homeless shelter, or perhaps just disconnected groups needing to get connected. What’s stopping them?
Such a regional effort to help the homeless has only begun in earnest recently, thanks in large part to Kansas City Councilwoman Ryana Parks-Shaw, who is leading the city’s task force on homelessness. The Mid-America Regional Council, which promotes cooperation among nine metro counties, held a virtual meeting over the summer, most prominently involving the “Core 4” entities of Kansas City and Jackson County on the Missouri side and Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas.
“There are unhoused people in many different municipalities in our area,” says Kansas City communications director Chris Hernandez, “but the majority of the services for those folks are in Kansas City, Missouri. For there to be sort of this acknowledgment regionally that this is a problem we all need to work together on across city lines, across county lines, is a great step.”
Many more steps need to be taken, and much more quickly. Overland Park, Kansas’ second-biggest city, has no homeless shelter. In early 2020 there were an estimated 180 unhoused people in Johnson County. The pandemic has only made it worse.
“Right now it’s a problem that I think we’re just kind of ignoring,” says Overland Park Councilman Paul Lyons. “I think it’s kind of like ‘out of sight, out of mind’ right now. And I think we’re going to have to do something.”
County Commissioner Janee’ Hanzlick has a commission subcommittee working on housing insecurity and homelessness, including collaborating with cities to perhaps use American Rescue Plan Act funds on it.
The urgency could hardly be greater, especially considering the fact that Project 1020 is rushing, and spending $100,000, to add showers and firewalls before its scheduled Dec. 1 opening to comply with new Lenexa regulations. And even then, the 30-bed shelter will undoubtedly be full and turning away people this winter.