Linn, Johnson counties homeless counts continue to rise

Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment of an occasional series.

CEDAR RAPIDS — Under the radiating heat of a concrete bridge, a woman woke up late the night of July 26 to find four strangers with flashlights approaching her tent.

“Why do you got to come out so late at night?” she asked homeless services volunteers doing a census with flashlights around 1 a.m. “I was just about to fall asleep.”

On a day when sweat wasn’t enough to cool anyone, the woman had just managed to relax enough to sleep. Her pregnant daughter-in-law, sleeping in a tent nearby, had fallen asleep earlier.

On one of the hottest weeks of the year, she said, her son’s wife was biking several miles each day to reach the nearest cooling station — the Cedar Rapids Public Library.

The day’s heat index of 105 was not the only number that hit triple digits.

At this year’s annual summer Point in Time count, volunteers from homeless service organizations found 123 people living on the streets in Linn County — more than ever before.

The new count, up from 107 one year ago, continues an upward trajectory that has broken records for three years straight.

Hide, seek

But this summer, the count conducted by volunteers nationwide took on new meaning for both the homeless and the volunteers surveying them in Linn County: a form of “hide” and “seek” because volunteers didn’t find homeless individuals at some of their usual, discreet spots.

This year, the usual places to check around gas stations along 33rd Avenue SW were uninhabited. The wooded area behind a popular northeast Mexican restaurant was empty. The parking lots of budget chain hotels were filled only with vacant cars.

As volunteers for Willis Dady Homeless Services and Waypoint continued their search, they found many sleeping in two places: the obvious, visible places, and ones much more out of the way than typical.

Before the night was over, teams were running out of the paper forms used for the census — a foreboding sign before the numbers were even tabulated.

“To call it anything other than a crisis would be underrepresenting the scale and scope of the situation.” — Christine Hayes, development director of Shelter House

In an increasingly more challenging environment for homelessness, the usual spots aren’t cutting it as those living outdoors are “moved along” more quickly than in past years.

For the chronically homeless, that often leaves two options: sleep in the visible spots while you can, or move farther from the city center, meaning you’re also farther from where services are located.

“Because homelessness has grown so large, there’s less and less places where people can hide and sleep,” said Denine Rushing, a shelter services director for Willis Dady Homeless Services with 17 years of experience.

“People are hiding farther out (from the city center) and moving around more frequently than in previous years,” said Crystal Carter, outreach case manager for Willis Dady. “They’re trusting us quite a bit less.”

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Escaping the heat

As veteran volunteer Jade Riley’s car quietly meandered through parking lots and streets, Riley said he had talked to more people during this count than he ever has in his 10 years of doing the survey.

In the back seat of a car parked in the Sam’s Club parking lot, Riley’s team found a man dabbing sweat from his forehead with a rag. His only reprieve from the heat was leaving a car door open so he could hang his foot outside.

The Point in Time team left him with a bottle of water, a bottle of Gatorade, and contact information for services he didn’t know how to access.

Down the line, another middle-aged man slept with his car windows completely shut, providing thin separation from a nearby jackhammer being used in overnight construction work, but providing no relief from temperatures by then in the mid-80s. The flashlight’s beam didn’t wake him, so he was identified in the survey only by an estimate of his age.

There is no overflow shelter to use during the summer when the regular homeless shelters are full, even though hot summer days can be as brutal as cold winter nights, when an overflow shelter is open in Cedar Rapids. Recent weeks of a “heat dome” in the United States have highlighted the challenges of living on the streets during extreme heat — heat exhaustion, third-degree sunburns, hospitalizations.

For volunteer Maxine Prime, a Willis Dady housing case manager volunteering on her first Point in Time count, seeing pregnant women struggle during one of the hottest weeks of the year left a lasting imprint.

Prime, with a sensitivity to heat developed during one of her pregnancies, said she sees people like her clients in a new, resilient light.

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“It killed me to hear about the pregnant woman out in the heat. That was upsetting,” she said. “You could never do it — you could never be homeless.”

Advocates, like the staff at Willis Dady and Waypoint, do as much as they can to keep the unhoused hydrated and cool. Staffers keep cases of bottled water in their trunks at all times and place frozen bottles of water outside their center doors at night. Others hand out printed lists of cooling centers.

Sometimes, they get donations of sunscreen to hand out. But UV protection purchases are not part of the budget.

Later in the count, the Point in Time team found another man sleeping under a bridge near a liquor store — a low-key spot he discovered two months ago after breaking his foot. He said he’d had a disagreement with another person at a homeless shelter and couldn’t go back there to sleep.

Each day, he goes to the splash pads in city parks to escape the heat.

More shelter space needed

Emergency shelters are not the solution to homelessness, advocates have noted, repeatedly. But they remain a necessary tool to help some survive day to day, offering some security to sleep out of the elements.

For years, the number of beds at the Willis Dady shelter was sufficient. A 2016 fundraising campaign for renovations helped it expand from a capacity of 12 beds for single men to 30, plus 10 for veterans, who are usually single men.

“In the past we had (enough) shelter beds, or people had places they could sleep outside and be concealed,” Willis Dady’s Rushing said. After the derecho and pandemic in 2020, “it just seemed like there wasn’t enough.”

Now, with local shelters completely full through the spring, summer and fall, there’s nowhere else to go. For the Willis Dady shelter, the only one for single men in Linn County — the largest portion of the unsheltered population — that’s a problem.

In the summer, when extreme heat and sun exposure pose serious dangers, shelters remain at their baseline capacity — a fraction of what’s available when the winter overflow shelter is open from November to March.

Currently, no consideration is being given to expanding shelter capacity from April through November.

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Johnson County unsheltered count doubles

While Iowa City’s Shelter House does not participate in voluntary summer Point in Time counts of those living on the streets, its homeless services have seen a similarly alarming uptick in usage.

In July, Shelter House’s outreach case manager worked with 83 people living unsheltered — nearly twice as many as the organization worked with in July 2022.

That doubling erased the gains Shelter House made right after opening a 36-unit supportive housing complex with case management, when its unsheltered contacts dropped over 20 percent.

Like Willis Dady, Shelter House is at 100 percent capacity daily, forcing it to turn some people away.

“People overuse the word crisis, but I don’t know what else to call it when this many people are living outside and using shelter services every day,” said Christine Hayes, development director for Shelter House.

“To call it anything other than a crisis would be underrepresenting the scale and scope of the situation. There just is not enough housing available to help people in extreme poverty.”

Shelter House is in conversations to expand its shelter capacity. Space and funding remain the primary barriers.

Two-thirds of their shelter’s operating budget relies on fundraising.

Different solutions needed

With an rise in the unsheltered numbers comes an increase in those who are chronically homeless — a majority of those living outdoors in the Corridor.

To fit this definition, people need to have a diagnosed disability and be homeless for at least one year, or have four episodes of homelessness within a year.

“It’s more of a challenge to rehouse them,” said J’nae Peterman, director of housing services for Waypoint. “Once they hit the chronicity of it, they just stay in that cycle.”

To her, it’s a reminder that providers and communities need to get more creative with housing solutions.

Programs like Rapid Rehousing, which provides short-term rental assistance without preconditions like employment or sobriety, are not enough to help this population.

“We need to find ways to bring more housing subsidies and intensive case management that currently doesn’t exist at the level it needs to,” Peterman said.

Some communities have transformed old schools or hotels into supportive housing units, but programs with more intensive case management typically need one case manager for every five to 10 clients. With other types of homelessness, it’s one to about 35.

But as expensive as that is, she said, the long-term savings are greater: a decrease in law enforcement interaction, hospital stays, trips to access centers for mental health support, all funded by taxpayers.

“The challenge is finding sources to fund that,” she said.

In June, the National Alliance to End Homelessness held a two-day clinic with Cedar Rapids and Linn County elected officials, service providers and other key stakeholders. Its top three recommendations were:

How to approach homelessness

As displaced homeless individuals becomes more visible in residential neighborhoods, advocates ask residents to approach those who may be living on their streets with dignity and respect.

If comfortable, offer them water, make small talk and ask their name to build rapport. Outreach case manager Crystal Carter said notifying Willis Dady of situations can help the organization dispatch a specialist to make contact.

Calling the police first, she said, can make the homeless feel like their existence is criminalized — a pervasive feeling in the community that has made trust-building more difficult for advocates.

“(Police) tend to judge more than somebody who’s in outreach,” Carter said.

“They just want to be treated like normal people,” said Willis Dady shelter manager Denine Rushing. “If you see people in your community, don’t look down on them. This person has probably experienced some form of severe trauma throughout their life.”

And contrary to misconceptions, they’re not typically rude, angry or violent.

“I’ve never, in my 18 years, been assaulted or physically harmed by anybody experiencing homelessness,” Rushing said. “One day, they could be your neighbor.”

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