Homelessness Update Uncovers Mental Health Toll

A few days after obtaining stable housing, Philip Paris approached a committee of alders with a message he’s still trying to fully believe: that regardless of the fact that his addiction played a role in his homelessness, ​“my need is just as valid as anyone else’s.”

At a Board of Alders Health and Human Services Committee meeting on Tuesday night at City Hall, Paris testified along with several other people who have personally experienced homelessness. 

They all called attention to the mental health harm of homelessness and its causes, and advocated for more of a focus on community-building and healing in the realm of homeless services.

The alder committee held a four-hour workshop with the city’s Department of Community Resilience and roughly 10 local nonprofits, which provided updates on their efforts to address the needs of unhoused New Haveners — a population that has dramatically increased in the last year, providers said. 

Local homelessness drop-in centers saw, on average, a 27 percent increase in calls for service last fiscal year, according to City Coordinator for Homelessness Velma George. 

Community Resilience Director Carlos Sosa-Lombardo joined George and numerous local nonprofit leaders in pointing to a dearth of housing options as the primary cause of homelessness. 

With a very low local vacancy rate of about 1.4 percent in the New Haven-Milford metro area, according to Sosa-Lombardo, there’s not enough housing available. Meanwhile, multiple nonprofit leaders attested that landlords have gained enough market power to require that tenants pay higher rents, earn higher incomes, maintain good credit scores, and have no previous evictions — making it especially difficult for low-income tenants with spottier eviction or credit histories to find a place to live.

While city officials and nonprofit CEOs spoke to a need for more housing in order to address homelessness, about five local residents with current or past experience being unhoused emphasized that housing itself isn’t enough.

"I Still Have Feelings. I Still Have A Heartbeat"

“Once you are housed, that’s one stepping stone,” said Claudette Kidd, an organizer with Mothers and Others for Justice and the Room for All Coalition who was previously homeless. ​“The other stepping stone is letting all of that out and dealing with the mental part of it.” 

Alexis Terry, a formerly unhoused advocate with U‑ACT (the Unhoused Activists Community Team), echoed this sentiment. 

Not only are many unhoused people contending with lifelong mental health challenges — ​“they may have had childhood trauma and they are well into adulthood,” she said as an example — but the experience of being homeless itself adds to their mental distress.

“Once they do find housing, it’s hard to get out of that transient mentality,” she said, describing people who ​“pitch a tent in the living room” to sleep in as they transition out of living on the street.

She added that a new apartment can come with its own challenges, such as negligent or discriminatory landlords. ​“That puts the person who was already in crisis back in crisis, even though they are already housed.”

Kidd and Terry both called for more of a focus on counseling and mental health services when addressing the homelessness crisis.

Paris said he’s in the throes of contending with his mental health now that he has moved into an apartment — including grappling with the guilt that he has safety and stability that others who are still homeless lack.

“I just have this feeling that because other people weren’t addicts… my issue of needing to be housed is less valid somehow,” he said. 

Paris said he tries to remember that ​“it doesn’t quite matter where we came from. We’re here. I still have feelings and I still have a heartbeat.”

Homelessness Is Also "A State Of Mind"

In addition to formal counseling, testifiers on Tuesday called on the city and other homeless services providers to prioritize building and maintaining community in their work. 

Jean-Claude Harrison, another U‑ACT advocate, spoke outside the meeting in support of an encampment where he used to live, known as Tent City, which the city ultimately dismantled in March. 

Harrison said that living in Tent City provided him with social support that he wasn’t able to find through traditional, sanctioned services (many of which have a waitlist anyway). ​“There was a lot of drugs and hunger, but it was a community,” he said. ​“Tent City was a home, and they dispersed it.”

“A building doesn’t make a home,” he said. ​“Being homeless is not just a state of being. It’s a state of mind.”

He called for more officials, social service providers, and city residents in general to recognize the humanity of people who are homeless and make an effort to form true relationships.

Fellowship Place’s Mary Guerrera argued that the city can incorporate a sense of community in the permanent housing solutions it supports. 

Guerrera said that the overall need at Fellowship Place’s drop-in center has more than doubled since the pandemic. Prior to 2020, about 150 people each year — on average, 25 people per day — used the drop-in center. Last fiscal year, 399 people used the space, about 60 per day. And in the last three months alone, 370 people — about 80 per day — have come by. 

More and more of those clients, she said, are over the age of 60. More and more are struggling with mental health and addiction. 

Guerrera said that in her experience, many of Fellowship Place’s unhoused clients had at one point received housing vouchers, but ultimately lost their housing because they struggled to thrive among neighbors who couldn’t relate to their life experiences. She argued for the city to create more ​“site-based housing” — apartment buildings designed specifically for recently-unhoused people, with onsite supportive services and perhaps even a more empathetic community of residents.

Providers Pitch Solutions

Guerrera’s pitch for site-based housing was just one of various priorities and approaches that providers argued the city should champion when addressing the homelessness crisis. 

DESK’s Evan Serio, for instance, called for more ​“low-barrier” services that welcome people who are actively using substances and allow clients to come and go whenever they’d like, respecting their ​“freedom of movement.” 

Rosette Neighborhood Village’s Jacob Miller advocated for the city to retroactively permit the low-cost ​“tiny home”-like shelters built near the Amistad Catholic Worker home in the Hill, which he heralded as a far more financially feasible pathway to building transitional or supportive housing. 

Sosa-Lombardo called attention to the city’s plans to convert the former Days Inn hotel on Foxon Boulevard into a non-congregate homeless shelter, with more privacy and flexibility afforded to clients. 

Paris soaked it all in. He decided to testify on a whim — and heard affirmation from Alders Alex Guzhnay and Richard Furlow that he does, indeed, deserve the housing he secured. 

He left the meeting focusing not necessarily on any any one specific proposed ​“solution,” but on a feeling that the very discussion of those possible solutions is important — that ​“we all need to be patient and ask questions.” He kept thinking about a statement from Liberty Community Services Executive Director Jim Pettinelli — that homelessness is ​“an ​‘us’ problem.” 

“It’s nice not to feel invisible. Like, ​‘Get out of the way, we don’t want you here,’ ” Paris reflected. It was helpful to be in the room, listening and eventually speaking, he said — ​“reminding me that I exist.”

See below for more recent Independent articles about homelessness, activism, and attempts to find shelter.

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