How Will Rome Address Homelessness Issue? What We Know

A decades-long discussion about how best to address the issue of homelessness in Rome was revived Wednesday.

Talks restarted at a meeting on homelessness comprised of city, county and state officials, law enforcement, nonprofits as well as healthcare organizations Wednesday afternoon.

“This is only a conversation,” Rome Mayor Craig McDaniel said. “But it’s a conversation that every community on the planet is having.”

Downtown Development Authority Director Aundi Lesley said she and her staff have documented hundreds of instances of homeless people sleeping in doorways, leaving trash and fecal matter as well as harassing behavior in the last few years.

“We’ve had problems with people bathing in the fountains,” Lesley said. “And we’ve had to remove or restrict most power receptacles and the public restrooms.”

The downtown area isn’t the only area impacted by homeless people, according to Rome-Floyd Transportation Planner Julie Smith. Rome’s system of exercise trails has also seen increased contact, she said.

“We’re one of the only communities in the state with a title sponsorship for their trails,” Smith said. “And it’s something we need to protect.”

The meeting appeared to be an attempt to reenergize work done in 2019, as well as years earlier.

In 2019, the city and county created a task force that brought together nonprofit organizations under a homeless task force umbrella to assess and create goals to address the problem in this area.

The task force’s goal was to pool the community’s resources, and it had a lot of momentum then. However, those efforts were stymied by the pandemic.

In 2009, a 23-goal action plan called “Breaking the Cycle of Homelessness” came out of the efforts of a Rome and Floyd County Task Force on Homelessness formed in 2007. Those efforts ran into the challenges of economic downturns in 2008 and were put on the back burner.

One place where a conversation on homelessness should start, McDaniel said, is agreeing on how many homeless people there are in Floyd County.

“And right now, I bet there isn’t one person in the room who can tell me how many homeless people we have,” McDaniel said.

Measuring the size of the homeless population is challenging, as is defining the word “homeless.”

The term can also be used for those who live from hotel room to hotel room. There’s a roof over their head but no clear place of residence, even for those with a full time job.

“We have dozens of full-time workers at the Kellogg plant that can’t find housing, and some live in their cars,” said Rome United Way Executive Director Alli Mitchell. “They work full time, 40-hours a week, and can’t find a place to live.”

The lack of affordable housing is clearly the biggest driver of the homelessness problem, Mitchell said.

However, according to McDaniel, very little can be done to address the lack of housing immediately.

“We’re still dealing with the effects of covid and the collapse of the supply chain,” McDaniel said. “It’s not something that can be fixed tomorrow.”

McDaniel recommended that the city and county agree to put a single person in charge of the problem, a move that not everyone agreed with.

“I think the proper way to address our homeless problem is through our Joint Services Committee,” said Floyd County Manager Jamie McCord.

Another way to potentially alleviate the homelessness problem was addressed by Floyd County Commissioner Scotty Hancock. He’s been working on a co-responder program that would pair a behavioral health clinician with a law enforcement officer.

During an 911 call or other emergency response where a mental health problem might be indicated, police would have the ability to send the person to a diversion center for a short period of time.

The idea of that program, alongside the expansion of an existing Highland Rivers facility on Lavender Drive, is that it could be deployed relatively quickly, assuming the state would fund it, according to Hancock.

“We’ve sent out grant requests for the co-responder program, to hire some behavioral specialists,” Hancock said. “And we’ve started talking with Highland Rivers about a proposal for a diversion center, so we’ll see.”