A street medical team in New Haven is seeing a surge in demand for health care from people experiencing homelessness.
“We've gone from 1,800 individuals [in the last three years] … [to] around 2,600 individuals that we see yearly, and we see them on a regular basis,” said Phil Costello, clinical director of homeless care for Cornell- Scott Hill, the oldest community health center in Connecticut.
While demand for Costello’s services continue to grow – up by nearly 20% in the last year alone – Justin Elicker, mayor of New Haven, said his city is also expanding the number of beds available to unhoused residents. Currently, the city says there are 260 individual and 40 family units.
“New Haven already is providing the lion’s share of the support,” Elicker said. “Like cities around the nation, we’re struggling with homelessness and we can’t do this alone. We need to see a lot of our surrounding towns help support these struggling populations right now.”
Costello acknowledged the town’s efforts.
Last year, the city opened its largest shelter for unhoused people at a former Days Inn that it purchased. New Haven is also rehabbing parking lots to make space for affordable housing. And in July, the newly formed New Haven Land Bank, a nonprofit that is aligned with the city, was tasked with acquiring vacant and blighted properties to create more affordable housing.
But Costello said there are still currently more people on the streets than there are beds. And some of those people, he said, would never go into a shelter – they lack transportation to get medical care if the shelter is not within walking distance. Or they struggle with trauma or substance use disorder, making it nearly impossible to live in a shelter.
That’s because of the way the shelters were set up, he said, where people are crowded into a small space – some of whom may be incontinent or intoxicated.
“And now they have to go in and climb over somebody else to get into a bunk bed, and that person below may have been the victim of violence, especially people with trauma, they're afraid of the other people, or they're afraid of their own actions because of the way the other people are acting,” Costello said.
The fear stems from the fact that they could go to jail because they are provoked into retaliating if the other person is disrespectful of what little personal space they have, and so they remove themselves from the situation “knowing that they can't be there because of their own emotional instability,” Costello said.
Alternative housing – like tiny homes, designated places to camp, and affordable private housing – could all help these people, Costello said.
But New Haven deemed that palette houses, or tiny homes, built in the backyard of a housing activist in the city do not meet the state’s building code. Costello said there are no designated places for unhoused people to set up camp and form a community, and the lack of access to private housing is exacerbating the crisis.
Families earning very low incomes, seniors, and people with disabilities are eligible for federal rent subsidy so they can afford private housing. Dubbed the Housing Choice Voucher Program – formerly Section 8 – the program is administered by the state.
But for many, using these vouchers is not a realistic option, he said.
“The state has vouchers, but the property value has gone up above the voucher value,” he said. “So it's become very, very hard for any of our people who actually get vouchers to get into a house or an apartment.”
“The landlords can get a lot more money than the state or the federal government would allocate for these people,” he said. “It's leading to more homelessness.”
