I blogged yesterday about how long homeless people are allowed to stay in places like tiny homes (or “Community Cabins,” in the official nomenclature) and Roomkey/Homekey apartments. I complained about a lack of clarity to us taxpayers, who have a right to know if there are any limits whatsoever being placed on residents.
Now, I hear from Lara Tannenbaum, who is manager of Community Homelessness Services for the City of Oakland. Ms. Tannenbaum responded to me at the request of Nikki Bas, who sent me a cover memo. For this quick response, I have to thank Ms. Tannenbaum and Council Member Bas.
I’ll start with Bas’s cover memo, which contains this key statement: “I am most familiar with the new [tiny home] program in my district, Lakeview Village where there is not an explicit time limit; there is a focus on providing case management to support the services needed to get individuals on a path to housing and other needed supports.”
So there it is. “There is not an explicit time limit.” Instead, “case management” will last as long as it takes “to get individuals on a path…”. Do you see my unease with such a vague, open-ended goal? Case management is not a quick-and-easy process. According to the Commission for Case Management Certification, “The practice of case management is a professional and collaborative process that assesses, plans, implements, coordinates, monitors, and evaluates the options and services required to meet an individual’s health needs. It uses communication and available resources to promote health, quality, and cost-effective outcomes in support of the ‘Triple Aim,’ of improving the experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing per capita costs of health care.” Yes, that’s a mouthful. If you’re thinking it could take years of “management,” you’re right. That’s what I think, too—and keep in mind that, as a certain former POTUS said, “The closest thing to eternal life on earth is a government program.”
However, consider Ms. Tannenbaum’s response. Her memo included a bar graph, “FY 20-21 Average Length of Stay – Months,” for Cabins, RV Safe Parking lots, Shelter for Singles, Family Shelters, TH [temporary housing? Not clear] for Singles and TH for families. The number of months residents remained, in the order listed above, was 6, 11, 3, 5, 9, 9.
This is good news, inasmuch as it suggests that stay times are not infinite and are, in fact, shorter than I might have thought. This is why, in fact, Ms. Tannenbaum refers to these six types on housing as “interim (non-permanent) programs.”
The devil is, as usual, in the details. A bar graph, or any kind of graph, can be depicted in any number of ways, and besides, what the graph ends up looking like depends on the raw data upon which it is based. I’m not suggesting any monkey business here, but when I was a reporter for the old Oakland Tribune and East Bay Express back in the 1990s, I covered a story on city-funded anti-violence programs that shocked me. It turned out that the self-reported data from these programs was highly suspect; no one was guarding the chicken coop. The managers of these programs were allowed to make unsubstantiated claims about their effectiveness without any external corroboration.
Now, times are different in this year 2022, and perhaps these social services programs are cleaner than they used to be. I will take Ms. Tannenbaum at her word. She does point out, in her cover memo, that “For Community Cabins sites the goal is to have people stay around 6 months but that can be extended when people are working with a case manager on a housing plan and need more time.” One does not wish to evict a client from a Community Cabin if that person “needs more time” to get her life together. At the same time, it would be reassuring to the public to have more data along these lines. Keep in mind, this Community Cabins program is still young, but aren’t we entitled to know how many clients “need more time” and how that time is usefully utilized so as not to be unnecessarily costly?
As for Project Roomkey, remember that was designed for emergency COVID shelter. Ms. Tannenbaum writers, “There are no explicit lengths of stay in those programs.” We can debate whether or not those at-risk of COVID among the homeless population were entitled to government-funded shelter; I, myself, am neutral on that. But once again, Roomkey appears open-ended in time. Since we’re now looking at an end to the pandemic [knock on wood!], I would hope Ms. Tannenbaum and other homelessness experts have a Plan B for ending that program. (I do wish Ms. Tannenbaum had had more to say about Project Homekey, upon which she was silent.)
In the end, my concerns are not alleviated. There are plenty of government bureaucrats and housing activists who believe that homeless people deserve permanent supportive housing, and the taxpayers be damned. We know that some of these activists are powerful within city government, and we suspect they are not above manipulating data (and sacrificing transparency) in order to further their goals. This is why I keep an eye on these sorts of things, and why I’ll continue to do my best to keep you informed.
Steve Heimoff