Homeless in the county
It’s not just during cold snaps, area officials say
YOUNGSTOWN — Mahoning County officials went on the offensive when temperatures plunged to dangerously low levels over Christmas weekend, urging people in danger of being homeless to seek help from the Rescue Mission of the Mahoning Valley or call 211.
But homelessness in the county is a growing problem more than just during a cold snap.
Nancy Voitus, executive director of the Catholic Charities Regional Agency, told the Mahoning County commissioners recently that her agency received federal CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and. Economic Security) money in January 2021 to open a homeless shelter for women and children on Glenwood Avenue in Youngstown.
But it wasn’t enough to meet the need.
“Within three days, it was full,” she said. “In a week, we had a waiting list and have been running a waiting list.”
So on Dec. 1, Catholic Charities leased the former Daybreak shelter at the corner of East Indianola and Homestead avenues near Homestead Park on Youngstown’s South Side and is having work done to prepare it to become a second Catholic Charities shelter. It will be for families and women with children.
“It is sad that we need to continue to open shelter beds, but the reality is we do have the homeless issue in this area, people who are very unstably housed, and we are working hard to get it up and running, hopefully by the beginning of January,” she said.
Last week, workers were painting and continuing with the renovations to the building.
Voitus said Catholic Charities is working with the Mahoning County Mental Health and Recovery Board and the Mahoning County Homeless Continuum of Care “to address the issues.”
Mahoning County Mental Health and Recovery Board recently hired Lee DeVita as a program coordinator to focus on housing and the homelessness involving clients of the Mental Health and Recovery Board, because people with mental health and substance abuse issues run into problems with homeless issues more than the average population, said Duane Piccirilli, the mental health and recovery board’s executive director.
Mahoning County Homeless Continuum of Care receives funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, coordinates homeless services in Mahoning County and provides funding to nonprofits for housing.
Catholic Charities has funds through several sources, including a U.S. Housing and Urban Development grant and from the PNC Charitable trust and Huntington Trust, as well as Cares Act funds, Voitus said.
Catholic Charities also still has funds for mortgage and utilities assistance for people who qualify, Voitus said. The commissioners also allocated federal funds to Catholic Charities for those services.
Piccirilli said Mahoning County is coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic “with a real shortage of housing stock, and that is creating a bottleneck, because people will go through treatment and go through recovery housing and go through group homes and then there’s no independent housing for them to move into.”
He added, ‘We are just seeing a lack of large houses for people to rent with children.” Vouchers are available to help the residents to rent a home, but “We just can’t find landlords that are willing to take advantage of it. Therefore, people are showing up at the Rescue Mission,” Piccirilli said.
“A lot of the landlords are not seeing the turnover they used go get. People are kind of staying put,” DeVita said.
Locally and nationwide, rents have increased substantially since COVID-19 began, DeVita said. “The people who are trying to move into places, they don’t have the extra money to pay for the deposits and the rent because of the increases.”
Homeless in the county
Tents and sleeping bags: Federal report shows higher numbers
YOUNGSTOWN — Heading into Youngstown northbound on Martin Luther King Boulevard, just past the Rescue Mission of the Mahoning Valley, to the right a number of small tents are tucked away.
Keep on driving and under the U.S. Route 422 overpass, to the left, scattered clothes and a sleeping bag can be seen.
These visuals represent pieces of Mahoning County’s struggle with homelessness.
A new report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development chronicled one night statewide in the early months of 2022. The report shows Mahoning County has seen an increase in homelessness since 2020.
Prepandemic in 2020, the total homeless, sheltered and unsheltered, stood at 100 people based on checks around the county by volunteers tasked with interviewing and counting the homeless population in shelters and on the street.
Now looking at 2022 , 174 people have been identified as homeless in the county, sheltered or unsheltered.
Key findings from the nationwide report speculate a possible factor being the easing of pandemic-related restrictions on emergency shelter providers. These restrictions were in place during the previous years and reduced shelter capacity to allow for more space between people sleeping in a congested setting.
Colleen Kosta, coordinator with the Mahoning County Homeless Continuum of Care, said she agrees with that assessment.
For example, looking at 2021 numbers for Mahoning County with only 62 homeless reported in the area, they seem to show a grim increase in 2022.
But Kosta cautioned the numbers are reflective of issues in how the 2021 data was reported.
Kosta said a reduction in capacity for homeless shelters, such as the mission, aimed to slow the spread of the coronavirus and allow room to isolate and quarantine. This contributed to numbers not being as reflective of the homelessness outlook.
“Some homeless people were also not presenting at our homeless shelters. Our homeless street outreach team would try to get people to go to shelters but they didn’t want to go for fear of getting sick,” Kosta said.
John Muckridge III, the mission’s president and chief executive officer, calls the HUD report a reminder of what we already knew about the area: “It’s consistent with what we experienced here with an increase of families. At the mission we’re averaging 160 a night; 30 to 35 are children,” Muckridge said.
Last week, Muckridge put the mission’s capacity at 186 beds with the majority occupied.
In the mission’s women’s section, housing for the 86 beds is full at the moment.
Across the U.S. the report shows for 2022 the number of unhoused has stayed relatively the same since 2020, with this year’s total at approximately 582,500 people, up 1,956 from 2020’s numbers on homelessness nationwide.
About 60 percent of the total represent those staying in sheltered locations, emergency shelters, safe havens or transitional housing programs.
The other 40 percent were reported to be in unsheltered locations, whether they were living on the street, abandoned buildings, or in other places not suited for human habitation.