Homeless-Housing Pioneer Heads To Poughkeepsie

John Bradley is leaving a city where ideas about how to tackle homelessness have changed dramatically since he began tackling the issue a decade ago.

Bradley helped make those changes happen as executive director of Liberty Community Services, which houses chronically homeless people in 33 apartments and works with others during the day in a renovated former cigar factory on lower State Street.

Now Bradley is leaving for Poughkeepsie, N.Y. His wife, Yale public health professor Elizabeth Bradley, has been named the new president of Vassar College there. John will run Vassar’s Urban Education Initiative, which tutors city kids and guide them to college.

Bradley, who grew up in East Rock, took the Liberty Community Services job after 25 years in the health care finance field, most recently negotiating managed care contracts for Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Liberty — originally known as the Connecticut AIDS Residence Program (CARP) — was opening up its State Street facility at the time at the edge of the Ninth Square, which had seen millions of dollars in new development. The building is a half block from the old New Haven Coliseum, where the city hopes an upscale new-urbanist village will sprout.

Back in the mid-aughts, New Haven was defying conventional urban development practices by including a facility for homeless people wrestling with HIV/AIDS, mental illness, and addiction in the midst of an upscaling downtown. City officials argued that it could be done, that well-run social services and low-income housing could co-exist with a reviving urban core.

By 2017, that notion has been vindicated.

“We’ve proved that we can create a mix. The challenge for cities is to create that mix,” Bradley reflected during an interview on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

Other ideas were changing too. Like how best to invest in housing the homeless. Policy makers have now embraced the idea that ​“supportive housing” like Liberty — long-term apartments with drug or mental health or job-placement help right on site — is a better investment than shelters. Costs less. Stabilizes homeless people’s lives. Often helps them get the help the need to move toward stable employment and independent housing.

Under Bradley’s direction, Liberty has also played a part in preparing people for those jobs. In conjunction with the city, it has begun a second round of a grant-funded program that pays 40 Liberty tenants to clean public spaces over nine months, with the goal of moving 20 of them to permanent work.

Over the past decade, advocates and and government officials even began proclaiming that they can end ​“chronic” homelessness. Liberty and other local agencies united with the city and the state to effectively end chronic homelessness among veterans in Connecticut. This month they declared that they have matched every chronically homeless adult to longer-term housing. Liberty and other New Haven agencies like New Reach and Columbus House helped do that by working together; they now keep one database of homeless people in town and steer people to the right agency for help.

Bradley said his experience at Liberty has shown him how people can indeed change their lives. He said he has also seen how root causes of homelessness, from addiction to poverty to joblessnessness to education deficits, are interconnected and require a multi-progned approach.

Plenty of people remain homeless, at least short term. Bradley’s successor will have plenty on her or his plate as ideas continue to evolve about how to fight homelessness. Bradley leaves in May; the search has begun for his successor.

Click on or downloand the above audio file to hear the full interview with Bradley on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”