Annual Count Finds Drop In Homeless

Forty-nine homeless people were found on New Haven’s streets Wednesday night. Two were keeping warm in the emergency room waiting room at Yale-New Haven Hospital — until volunteers found them and got them rides to a shelter and warming center.

That finding was the result of an annual ​“Point-in-Time” (PIT) count organized by the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness (CCEH).

The PIT count gathers data about the locations and needs of the homeless, and also allows the state to measure progress in ending homelessness, according to the CCEH. The CCEH conducts a count of sheltered individuals every year, and unsheltered individuals every other year, including this year.

The last unsheltered count in 2013 found 132 people in New Haven who did not have a place to stay. (The full data set from the 2013 count is available on CCEH’s website here.) Local care providers attribute the declining number both to recent new programs and the freezing weather.

Sylvia Moscariello, program director at Liberty Community Services, noted the changes to the way that New Haven organizes services for the homeless. Last spring, New Haven kicked off a 100-day challenge to house the homeless, and found homes for 102. (Read about that here.) In late January, Greater New Haven implemented a statewide coordinated access network, organized around the phone number 2 – 1‑1, that streamlines the housing process. She said it is too early to tell whether there is a causal relationship between the changes and the reduced count.

Volunteers Wednesday night attributed the low count in part to the weather. It was about 10 degrees warmer on Jan. 28, 2013, the night of 2013’s PIT count, than it was Wednesday night.

‘We didn’t suspect that we were going to find a ton of people here because it’s so cold,” said Sara Loffredo, an mHEALTH case manager at Liberty Community Services and one of the volunteers who found an unsheltered individual in the emergency room waiting room. ​“Most people, we’d like to think, were in a shelter, a warming center, a friend’s house — any place.”

This year’s count also had a new element. In addition to counting the number of sheltered and unsheltered individuals, volunteers collected comprehensive information on people’s needs. This information will be entered into a database shared with care providers around the state in order to be able to increase opportunities for people to get the services and housing they need, said Lisa Tepper Bates, CCEH’s executive director.

New Haven started collecting this data during the 100-day challenge to end homelessness. ​“They were ahead of the curve,” Bates said.

Ed Mattison (pictured), along with a team of volunteers, gathered about 30 of these stories from individuals at the warming center at Church On the Rock. Mattison is the director of South Central Peer Services, a program of Continuum of Care, and also chair of New Haven’s City Plan Commission. He said that it took his team two or three hours to conduct all of the interviews.

Meanwhile, Loffredo, along with Kalekye Kivinda and Alyssa Eckstein of Columbus House, hit the streets. They canvassed an area near the hospital — around the medical campus, and a few blocks north and south. They stopped a few people on the street and asked if they had a place to stay. Two were headed to warming shelters, so the volunteers did not count them. The team was looking for unsheltered individuals. Other volunteers were stationed at the warming shelters.

It wasn’t always easy to tell who was homeless. Near the intersection of Lafeyette Street and Washington Avenue, the volunteers noticed a young woman walking alone. She was wearing a zip-up sweater and no gloves. The volunteers pulled their car over to the side of the road. Kivinda jumped out. Kivinda asked if the woman had a place to stay. ​“I’m not interested,” the woman said.

As they drove away, the volunteers noticed something suspicious.

“There’s this guy walking behind her,” Loffredo said. ​“That scares me for her.”

“I feel like we should follow him,” Eckstein said. She was driving the car. ​“He’s watching us.”

“He is watching us,” Loffredo said. ​“He’s coming this way. Is he running? He is! He’s running!”

Eckstein floored it and started speeding away, but Kivinda and Loffredo wanted to see if the young man needed help. So they pulled over, and Kivinda rolled down the window to introduce the volunteers. The man didn’t need a place to stay, he said; he just wanted to make sure that the young woman was OK. After all, a car had just stopped next to her and rolled down the window.

“That was nice,” Kivinda said as the volunteers drove away, more slowly this time. ​“You see, everybody’s looking out.”

This difficulty with identifying homeless individuals was also apparent in the emergency room. Loffredo said that she tries to look for unusual signs. She saw one man with two bags and a cooler; he said he wasn’t homeless. Another person was wearing multiple pair of pants. He, too, said he wasn’t homeless.

The closest the volunteers came to finding an unsheltered individual was near High School in the Community, where people have been found sleeping outside in the past.

“Why don’t you pull up, Alyssa, and see if we can see any footprint in the snow,” Loffredo said.

A line of footprints led to the street to the barrier, and then stopped. The volunteers got out of the car, flashlights in hand. They walked up to the barrier. They found a duffel bag and an overturned table. This was evidence that someone was sleeping there, Loffredo said, but the person wasn’t there at the moment.

It’s too early to tell how New Haven compares to surrounding regions, and how the rest of the state has progressed. Elissa Bass, CCEH’s communications consultant, said that the organization’s goal is to release an anecdotal snapshot of the data in 30 days, preliminary results in 90 days, and a final report two to three months after that.

CCEH staff will spend the next few months verifying the data and formatting it for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In October, about eight months after the PIT count, HUD plans to release results for the entire country.