How Wyandotte County deals with unsheltered homelessness

The 911 complaint came from an upscale brew-and-burger-restaurant in a Kansas City, Kansas, neighborhood with a suburban vibe.

Two men had set up a camp in the woods just off the parking lot, the owner reported. At first they stayed mostly out of sight, but now they had taken to hanging around the patio and the staff’s outdoor smoke-break area. Customers had complained, and the management wanted them gone.

On a Wednesday morning in early May, just after a cloudburst, a police officer and several other people approached the camp.

The scene was by no means unusual in Wyandotte County, where homeless numbers have spiked in the last few years.

In a 24-hour period in January this year, surveyors for the annual point-in-time count found 226 people who reported being homeless. Of that number, 152 of them – or nearly 70% of the overall count – said they were unsheltered, meaning they were living outside, or in cars, vacant buildings and other places not designed for human habitation.

The point-in-time count is imprecise, and advocates say that number is almost certainly an undercount. But of that overall total, 55 individuals fit HUD’s definition of being chronically unsheltered, meaning they had experienced homelessness in increments that add up to at least a year, and they struggle with a disabling condition such as a mental illness or a physical disability.

That number is significant. For the past two years, HUD has cited the reporting region that includes Wyandotte County as having the nation’s highest percentage of people within the overall homeless population who experience chronic unsheltered homelessness.

That unwelcome distinction speaks to a lack of resources for a vulnerable group of people. Wyandotte County and its largest city, Kansas City, have no year-round overnight emergency shelter. Housing for people with limited incomes is in short supply. Motels quickly become expensive, and crashing with friends or family gets old.

And so people live where they think they won’t be bothered – in the woods, under bridges and overpasses, and in vacant buildings. Some cluster in small groups; many stay by themselves.

“As our population has grown, we’re seeing a lot of camps,” says Kansas City, Kansas Police Sgt. Angela Joyce. “You’ve got people with addictions. You’ve got mental illness. You’ve got a lot of people who’ve just fallen on hard times. It’s such a big problem, and you don’t realize it until you actually deal with it.”

Joyce serves in the community policing unit, which is the department’s first point of reference for complaints regarding homeless camps. She has seen hundreds.

“Some of these camps get really messy,” she says. “So I can understand people being upset. But we don’t have a shelter in this city. We have minimal resources compared to other cities.”

A collaborative outreach network

The encounter on the fringes of the brew-and-burger joint could have ended with an order for the two campers to quickly vacate, leaving behind a trashed campsite and their dignity.

But something else happened.

While the physical infrastructure for dealing with Wyandotte County’s unsheltered population is lacking, a remarkably collaborative outreach network uses every resource it can to move people out of homelessness. The network includes social service and mental health professionals, police officers and staffers from other offices of the Unified Government.

Some of those people were among the small group that made its way toward the campsite, where the two men were seated in lawn chairs beside a newish-looking tent. The remains of a campfire-cooked breakfast were still in a pan.

Police Officer Terry Grimes checked out the situation. Seeing no threat, he walked to the restaurant to talk to the owner. Katie Wiegand and Vanessa Matt, community resource navigators with Cross-Lines Community Outreach, a longstanding safety net agency in KCK, engaged the men separately in conversation.

The younger of the two volunteered he was homeless because of alcoholism. “I’m a smart, able individual,” he said. “I drink anything, all day.”

Wiegand asked if he’d like to get help. Maybe eventually, the man said. But not today.

Matt’s conversation was more promising. The older of the two men said he’d been unsheltered for eight months after a roommate arrangement fell apart. He receives a monthly Social Security check – enough to buy food and camping supplies, a change of clothes every couple of weeks and the tent, which he found on sale. His attempts to find housing hadn’t panned out.

Matt filled him in on the services Cross-Lines provides. He could find food and showers at its headquarters, and she could help him get a copy of his missing birth certificate.

Matt rested on her heels beside the man’s chair, speaking directly to him.

“I feel like we could get you in some housing,” she told him.

The man looked like someone who’d just been thrown a lifeline. Matt gave him her card and said she’d come to him if he couldn’t get to her.

Grimes returned and said the owner was willing to give the campers a day’s grace to clear out. The men agreed to move.

“Thank you all for being nice to us,” the younger man said.

And so a potentially tense encounter ended with positive feelings and the possibility of moving one person from homelessness to housing.

“We are always turning it back toward housing,” says Rob Santel, director of programs at Cross-Lines.  “It’s not just about, ‘How can we move you to another location or help you figure out your immediate problem, but how can we figure out the solution to your experience of homelessness’?”

No shelter, and other gaps

That’s not easy work, given the limited options in Wyandotte County.

“We really lack the continuum of housing options that we need,” says Rachel Erpelding, executive director of Kim Wilson Housing, a nonprofit that operates under the umbrella of the Wyandot Behavioral Health Network to find housing solutions for people with mental illnesses.

The gap begins with the absence of a year-round, low-barrier shelter that could provide a first stop for people to get out of the elements and learn about available services.

Shelters are expensive to open and operate. They require a partnership of local government and nonprofits – something that’s missing in Wyandotte County. And in a city looking for a way to revive its downtown, a homeless shelter in the vicinity isn’t on many politicians’ priority lists.

“It’s really hard to find an area that works for a shelter,” Erpelding says. “And it’s a lot about funding. There has to be an agency that steps up and says, ‘Yes, we want to do this, and we are going to fundraise and get the money for that.’”

Beyond the absence of a shelter, Wyandotte County needs more transitional housing units, advocates say, where people can get help with sobriety and living skills. It needs more and better housing for people with fixed and lower incomes, and more landlords who are willing to accept government-subsidized Section 8 vouchers to help people afford rent.

“The reality is: Wyandotte County has been so disinvested in this problem for so long that we are in this spot now,” Santel says.

A frayed partnership

Wyandotte County is the poorest county in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Its median household income, at $59,362, is nearly $10,000 lower than in Kansas overall.

Many residents struggle with effects of poverty that drive people into homelessness – mental illness, domestic abuse, substance-use disorder and simple economic deprivation.

Fortunately, a highly regarded partnership that includes the nonprofit Avenue of Life, the Kansas City Kansas Public Schools and other groups has curbed homelessness among families with children.

Other nonprofits in the county do their best to work with homeless people. Hillcrest Transitional Housing and Shalom House offer short-term housing. Others, including the Mt. Carmel Redevelopment Corp.’s Willa Gill Center, provide food, hygiene supplies and case management. The Wyandot Behavioral Health Network is a longstanding pillar for helping individuals and the community cope with crises and mental illness.

But all those services can do little more than manage increasing homelessness in Wyandotte County. To halt and begin reversing the trajectory, advocates say they need cooperation from the  Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas. And that’s been hard to find.

Part of the problem is political upheaval. Since 2013, no mayor has won reelection. Every change of administration has brought new relationships, plans and priorities, service providers say.

Their relationship with the current mayor, Tyrone Garner, has been strained. Barely a month into his term, in December 2021, the mayor abruptly scrapped plans to open an overnight, cold-weather shelter at a former downtown convention center. Agencies had a contract with the Unified Government and were hard at work getting the place ready.

The Unified Government’s Board of Commissioners interceded, and the overnight shelter opened that winter. It has since moved.

Garner’s first year in office also coincided with an exodus of Unified Government staffers, including some of the people who had worked most closely on homelessness issues.

A month after the public dispute over the cold-weather shelter, in January 2022, Garner announced the formation of a committee focused on homeless residents.

Evelyn Hill, a Unified Government commissioner with extensive professional and volunteer experience in homelessness issues, co-chairs the Unhoused Residents and Neighbors in Need task force along with Tom Lally, the CEO of Hillcrest Transitional Housing, a regional nonprofit that operates a 90-day residential housing program in Wyandotte County.

“I think we’re at a point, as a community, where we realize we’ve got to do more than just Band-Aids,” Hill says. “We really need some serious solutions.”

Hill is steering the committee toward a strategic plan that centers on opening a year-round shelter and creating more housing opportunities.

Ultimately, that will require buy-in from the Board of Commissioners and, ideally, the mayor.

The commission needs to be on the same page regarding its priorities for homeless services, affordable housing and the local government’s role in providing those, says Unified Government Commissioner Melissa Bynum, who attends meetings of the homeless residents task force.

“I am super hopeful that this is a conversation we are going to have with the commission and the mayor sooner rather than later,” she says. “I’ve asked for it three or four times since January, and I’m really hopeful that we’ll have a deep-dive, strategic planning session with this governing body.”

The Journal’s attempts to schedule an interview with Garner were unsuccessful.

Moving forward with what’s available

In the meantime, there are immediate needs to tend to.

Every weekday morning, people without shelter file through the door of the Frank Wilson Outreach Center in downtown KCK. There, they can pick up mail and laundry, take a shower and talk to a case manager about getting their paperwork in order.

“The focus is on permanent housing, and getting someone to where they can have a lease in their name,” says Erpelding, of Kim Wilson Housing, which operates the center. “And getting them to where they are able to understand that lease and really help them to be more independent in the community. It takes a while to get there. Sometimes we work with people for years.”

The Wyandot Behavioral Health Network’s 2023 annual report shows that Kim Wilson Housing last year placed 108 unsheltered people in safe, affordable housing.

Kim Wilson Housing sends staffers to work with the outreach teams from Cross-Lines and the police community relations unit that go into the community on Wednesday mornings in search of the unsheltered. The Unified Government’s Health Department recently hired a couple of peer-support workers – people with lived experience of substance abuse who are in recovery – who also join the teams.

The unusual collaboration started during the pandemic, Erpelding says. “It absolutely highlighted the absolute need to work together to get everybody’s needs met,” she says. “Before that we were in silos.”

According to the 2023 annual report for Cross-Lines Community Outreach, the outreach teams connected with 400 individuals last year.

Help could mean a bus ticket to reconnect someone with family, Santel  says. It could mean a call to a shelter across the state line in Missouri, where more services are available. It could mean getting someone on the waiting list for a transitional housing unit or a recovery program.

“I don’t know that there’s anybody I’ve met who truly wants to be outside,” Santel says.

The older man from the campsite outside of the burger restaurant clearly did not. He showed up at Cross-Lines, just as Matt, the caseworker, had hoped he would. She got to work researching housing options.

One happy ending

But plenty of people do live outside. Joyce sees them as she makes her Wednesday morning rounds.

Joyce has been with the KCK police department since 1996, working patrol shifts and narcotics enforcement. Community policing suits her, she says, because she believes in the power of relationships.

The routine is for the community policing team to go out at 6 a.m. to check locations where there have been complaints and possible problems, then connect with the community outreach workers at 8 a.m. to follow up.

Working alongside another officer, Sabin Evans, Joyce trudges up a muddy road that used to be a city street. Now it’s just a path leading into the woods.

“There was a lady in here last week,” Joyce says. “She wasn’t doing super well.”

On this day, the camp is empty and shows signs of abandonment, with a mattress, pillows and shreds of clothing strewn about. The woods back up to a residential street, and neighbors have complained about a commotion at night and theft from yards.

Eventually, someone from the city will come and clean up the site, Joyce says. She’s been told that, taking into account labor, equipment and dumping fees, that work will cost the city thousands of dollars.

“It’s a way more complex problem than just people who aren’t housed,” Joyce says.

Her team’s responsibilities are somewhat unusual, Joyce says. Its role is to work with the outreach teams to solve problems. But sometimes the very presence of police becomes a problem.

“It’s a social issue, but pushing it into the police world is not where you want it,” Joyce says. “Because now you are criminalizing the homeless, and you are forcing officers to have negative contacts with them.”

Like others, Joyce is waiting for the Unified Government to come up with a plan.

“We have all these gaps,” she says. “The solution isn’t with the police department. The solution is with our government. They’re going to have to come up with how to fix it.”

In the absence of that overall strategy, Joyce and others do their best. And sometimes, in the face of a growing and almost overwhelming problem, they find they can make a difference.

Two weeks after the encounter in the woods behind the burger-and-brew restaurant, Santel from Cross-Lines had good news to pass on about the older man who had been forced into a camping arrangement mostly from economic circumstances.

“The gentleman … just got the keys to his unit!” Santel said in an email.

Instead of sleeping in a tent and cooking on a campfire, the man is living in his own apartment. It’s costly, Santel said – rent is 60% of his fixed income. They hope that, in time, he will get into cheaper subsidized housing for seniors.

But for now, one less person in Wyandotte County was living outside.

A version of this article appears in the Summer 2024 issue of The Journal , a publication of the Kansas Leadership Center. To learn more about KLC, visit the website. Order your copy of the magazine at the KLC Store or subscribe to the print edition.

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