CT city explores revolutionary plan for dealing with homelessness

Homeless residents at a long-standing Connecticut encampment expected to be evicted this week, but instead of sending in cleanup crews, city officials are exploring something new — a direct encampment-to-housing model that could revolutionize the region’s response to unsheltered homelessness.

Since its debut in Connecticut at the start of 2024, the barrier-breaking model has successfully placed 18 individuals into permanent supportive housing in Hartford and New Britain, with eight more participants in the process of obtaining an apartment.

Now, advocates hope to take the model to Bristol, where the pending sale of a city-owned parcel to a private owner has jeopardized an encampment.

For years, homeless residents have sought refuge beside a section of train tracks off Prospect Street. Last weekend, city officials told occupants that they needed to vacate the encampment by Thursday, July 18.

But three days before the eviction deadline, at a meeting of the city’s Opioid Task Force, Bristol Mayor Jeff Caggiano said the city decided to pause disbandment efforts to explore implementation of the encampment-to-housing model.

Caggiano said the goal is to place the encampment’s residents into apartments where they can receive wrap-around services including health care, substance use treatment, therapy and job training.

The model, which was first developed by the Clutch Consulting Group , has seen success in Oklahoma, Louisiana and Texas.

The model has been pioneered in Connecticut by Journey Home , the organization at the head of the central Connecticut and Greater Hartford coordinated access networks for shelter and housing.

Sarah Pavone , the director of strategy for Journey Home, said the organization’s goal is to use the encampment-to-housing model to house 200 individuals within the next two years to combat the state’s growing homelessness crisis.

Between 2021 and 2023, homelessness in Connecticut rose 13% according to annual point-in-time counts.

As of June 28, 4,812 people in the state are experiencing homelessness, according to the most recent data. A total of 2,143 residents were living without shelter, including 148 children and 603 older adults over the age of 55.

The rise in unsheltered homelessness has coincided with a rise in encampments, and municipal efforts to “clean up” sites.

The encampment-to-housing model reinvents the traditional encampment response by public and private partnerships to streamline resources and house individuals within four weeks.

“This model is truly the most low-barrier form of housing that I’ve ever seen,” Pavone said.

She explained that the model works by hyperfocusing attention on a specific location and group of people. A team of specialists works to provide outreach, housing, and services. Other staff work to engage landlords by building relationships and offering financial incentives for property owners who agree to work with Journey Home and provide flexibility in their tenant screening processes. Once housed, participants continue to receive support services to ensure that they maintain their housing.

But the process also requires a commitment from municipalities to not touch a campsite for the three to four weeks it takes to house residents.

“If you do not tie housing to an encampment response, you are doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result,” Pavone said.

“We know that the cost of housing somebody is drastically less than the cost of emergency shelter and emergency department visits and incarceration and pushing people into our criminal justice system,” Pavone said. “We can permanently get these folks off the street, reduce their trauma, and reduce the cost to the municipalities and the taxpayers and businesses.”

Sarah Fox , CEO of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness , said the model’s effectiveness lies in its ability to “remove a lot of the bureaucratic red tape that holds up housing.”

“This is a model that says ‘let’s meet your need, move you into housing and then stabilize you,’” Fox said. “It’s very early on, but across the nation, in the communities that have done it, they’ve just seen tremendous success.”

Within the next year, Fox said the coalition hopes to scale up the model’s operations to all seven coordinated access networks in the state.

Fox said the expansion “will have to be funded, but it’s an intervention that works.”

“When we talk about people experiencing hunger, the intervention is food. When we talk about people who are experiencing homelessness, how we solve it is we house them,” Fox said.

“We know how to solve homelessness,” Fox said. “Coming into shelter is not the solution, it is just a means to an end.”

‘We need to treat this’

Caggiano said similar attitudes drove the city’s interest in pursuing the encampment-to-housing model as a way to clean up the parcel off of Prospect Street.

Caggiano said the city recognized that if they forced unsheltered residents to leave the site, many would have no option but to resettle in another area.

“We need to treat this like we treat lots of other symptoms and illnesses,” Caggiano said. “Until we solve those (underlying problems), we would just be cleaning up place after place.”

Caggiano said the encampment-to-housing model still needs approval from other departments in city hall before it becomes official. The plan is to use state funds and opioid settlement money to cover costs.

Caggiano said that vacating the property before the sale is critical. Once ownership transfers, Caggiano said complaints to the police “would result in a different reaction … it’s actually trespassing if this becomes private property.”

Advocacy workers stressed that the parcel represents just the tip of the iceberg — they estimated that more than 100 people in Bristol are living without shelter, many of whom are seniors or individuals with disabilities.

Advocates say the encampment is one of five sites where unsheltered residents seek refuge in the city, but Caggiano said that, currently, there are no plans to disband the other locations.

Caggiano stressed that this particular encampment is different.

“(It’s) a city property going into private sale and its location is also very important, close to the developing downtown,” Caggiano said. “It’s not hidden anymore.”

As news spread to the encampment Tuesday of the city’s intent to secure housing for the residents, Demetrius Hernandez described the prospect as a major “pick me up.”

“We don’t feel like numbers. We feel like we’re actually being seen and not because we want to cause a scene, but because we need help,” Hernandez, who has lived in the encampment since March, said.

According to Hernandez, 40 people have stayed at the site, passing in and out over the last month. Local advocacy workers estimate the number of residents is closer to 20 to 25. The mayor said he believes “maybe up to eight people max that have camped there for a while.”

On mid-day Tuesday the Courant observed at least nine individuals at the site. By that time, several residents were gone — heeding the city’s original notice to vacate from the weekend before.

“This site will be closed and cleared on Thursday, July 18th,” the notice read in English and Spanish. “Please make arrangements before July 18th.”

With talks of the encampment-to-housing model underway, the sign was outdated, but Hernandez said many residents had already “moved on.”

“I don’t know where the young people went, I don’t know what tents they’re using or what site they found, but that’s what happens,” Hernandez said. “There’s not a lot of places for us to go.”

Hernandez said that “it’s definitely scary because a lot of us don’t make it out.”

“There’s no face to homelessness,” Hernandez said. “All walks of life have ended up out here and most of them have gone on so this housing thing, it’s a lot of motivation for all of us to keep going and to keep trying, and sometimes to get off our asses because we become complacent in that doubt, and when we’re in dark places, we look for dark places to hide.”

Hernandez said Bristol’s interest in the encampment-to-housing model shows that addressing homelessness is a priority.

“It’s beautiful that the community finally sees that we can’t just mute it, we can’t just give it sandwiches, we can’t just come out of our pockets and help individuals that want to be helped, because some people are helpless because they’ve been so long with no resources except for themselves.”

‘I feel I’m alive’

Beth Schlichting was 10 years old when her journey with unsheltered homelessness began.

She ran away from home, staying two days outside before Schlichting said the police found her and brought her back.

As a child, Schlichting said she was physically and emotionally abused by her parents and sexually abused by her father who introduced Schlichting to substances at the age of 7 when he handed Schichting “a pill and a can of beer” on the nights he came to “visit” her in the room.

“Any chance I had to get away, I would,” Schlichting said, describing the many days and nights on the run.

Schlichting said she would pitch a tent off of I-84 in Manchester and “live with the foxes.” The more times she ran away, the easier it would get, and the longer Schlichting would stay. Schlichting said the first time she “really lived out there” was at age 14.

As an adult, Schlichting struggled with substance use and developed a history of incarceration. For years, Schlichting and her abusive partner floated in and out of homelessness.

During the pandemic, Schlichting said she moved outside on her own.

With the help of a friend, Schlichting said she built a hutch in a section of woods off of Weston Street in Hartford where she lived with her cats.

Some nights, Schlichting said, she would wake up to strange men entering her site. In another incident, she walked up on two women who robbed her.

Schlichting had been outside for more than four years when she said she got a call from Officer Jim Barrett, the city’s homeless outreach officer, informing her that she had been chosen for an apartment through the encampment-to-housing model.

Within 20 days, Schlichting said she “was packing and moving out.”

“My head literally was spinning,” Schlichting said. “I don’t think I slept for two weeks because it was so surreal … I thought something was going to stop it, because in my life that’s how everything always went.”

In February, Schlichting moved into an apartment near Trinity College.

After living “outside longer than inside,” Schlichting said getting used to having neighbors was the biggest adjustment. Schlichting said the building is infested with cockroaches, but she is able to live with her cats, who she credits as the one thing that kept her alive all those years in the woods.

Before getting her apartment, Schlichting started treating her substance use disorder through a methadone program and went back to school for the first time since she was 12.

Last month, she graduated from the BOTS Center for Creative Learning at the Charter Oak Cultural Center and will start college on a scholarship to Goodwin University this fall.

Today, Schlichting plans to become a veterinarian and open up her own no-kill shelter nonprofit for pets and farm animals. But just a few short months ago, the 55-year-old said she never could have pictured this life.

“I thought I would just stay out there (in the woods)” Schlichting said. “But that’s not living.”

Schlichting said that now, she is “where I’m supposed to be.”

“I have a roof over my head,” Schlichting said. “Now when I get up in the morning or when I go to bed at night, I can take a shower. I can cook. I have a fridge.”

“I’m paying bills, and that’s like a huge thing,” Schlichting added. “I’m responsible now. Out there, I didn’t have to be responsible.”

Schlichting described the new sense of responsibility as transformative.

“I feel I’m alive,” Schlichting said. “I’m not just surviving. I’m alive.”

Sharing success

After so many years of living unsheltered, Pavone said people like Schlichting can often be labeled as a “refuser.”

Pavone emphasized that the idea that people “choose” to live outside is “a very big misconception.”

In Schlichting’s case, she did not want to live outside, but she did not know how to navigate the network of services in her community and refused to move into a shelter or an apartment that would require her to abandon her cats.

Pavone said that “just because folks may have said no to our resources in the past, it doesn’t mean that they don’t want housing: We might not have been offering them what they need.”

The encampment-to-housing model is proof of that.

Of the 26 individuals that Journey Home has engaged through this process, Pavone said that 100% have accepted housing.

An equally important factor: Everyone who has received an apartment through the model has maintained their tenancy.

Pavone said that the idea is not just to correct homelessness when it happens, but to prevent it.

Pavone explained that landlords who participate in the encampment-to-housing model are connected with a specialist at Journey Home who can provide assistance if a program participant, or any other tenant, is at risk of losing housing.

“I think sometimes when folks first hear (about the model), it sounds too good to be true and they’re skeptical of it,” Pavone said. “But so far we’ve had success. Of course, we’ve had challenges, but the whole point of this model is (to have) all of us come together to overcome those challenges and make sure we’re getting as many people in the housing as possible.”

“We don’t want this to be a one-and-done,” Pavone said. “We want this to truly be a system redesign so that we can reduce the trauma of unsheltered homelessness in our community.”