Q&A: Katie Symons, Park Hill resident working against homelessness in urban and rural Colorado

GPHN: Thanks for taking the time to chat with Park Hill readers about homelessness in Denver. Tell us a bit about your background and involvement in this issue.

Katie Symons: I am a Denver native – I grew up in Capitol Hill. I now live on Leyden St. in North Park Hill.

In 2005, when Denver came out with its 10-year plan to end homelessness, I worked at the University of Denver’s Center for Community Engagement & Service Learning. In partnership with the City over the next three years, DU co-hosted emergency winter shelters and hosted three Project Homeless Connect events. In 2009, I went to work for the City as Program Manager for Denver’s Road Home. For the past two years, I have been an Independent Consultant on issues related to homelessness.

What current homelessness project are you working on?

As part of the national 100,000 Homes Campaign (100khomes.org), I am working with communities to help them utilize the Vulnerability Index tool to determine the medical vulnerability of people experiencing homelessness. Through the Governor’s office, we’ve taken this tool to six regions around the state to help communities identify and prioritize their most at-risk populations.

You were at City Council for hours watching the deliberations on the Camping Ban. What can you say about that evening?

It was pretty heartbreaking to see the City Council vote in favor of a camping ban when more than two-thirds of the citizens in the room were opposed.

How has the ban on urban camping affected Denver’s homeless population?

We can’t just ban “camping” when we don’t offer reasonable alternatives for people to be inside. We have to figure out better alternatives until folks are able to return to work and find affordable housing. There is an increase in homelessness, not just in Denver but in the entire front range.

Are there any positives that have come out of the camping ban?

We have seen the faith community step up in a big way in Denver. Through the Women’s Homeless Initiative, seven churches take turns offering nightly shelter and meals to single women. Also, Denver’s Road Home just committed money to have a 50-mat facility open for women during the winter at the Minoru Yasui building and there are recreation centers that open for 90 days at a time as temporary shelter sites for single men. There have also been conversations about creating a 24-hour shelter, or “rest and resource center,” which would offer shelter, case-management, mental-health and substance-abuse services to men, women and families.

There are stop-gaps that the City has created, such as a voucher program where women or families can get a voucher from the Police Department or other human services locations late at night if shelters are full so they don’t have to be on the streets.

But this is far from a permanent solution. We still lose more homeless people than we ever should on the streets each year due to exposure to the elements and other conditions that just beat a person down over time from being homeless. The annual Homeless Persons Memorial Vigil took place December 17 on the steps of the City & County of Denver building honoring the 140+ people who have died this past year. For many, that was the only memorial service conducted in their honor.

This December, Denver’s Road Home released an independent shelter assessment completed by the National Alliance to End Homelessness. The Denver Shelter Assessment states that the city is doing well with limited resources. Would you agree?

Well, this is a tricky question, because many of the shelters in Denver are not funded with city dollars (or are only partially funded) and therefore, they can function pretty independently. I believe we still have a long way to go with making improvements to the way our shelter system is run. While Denver’s Road Home has tried to put some consistent guidelines into place with shelters in Denver, I believe that most shelters still continue to function in silos and not with a coordinated intake system such as NAEH recommended.

How well is Denver doing at creating permanent housing for the homeless?

Denver’s Road Home has struggled for years to come up with a comprehensive evaluation strategy to determine how well the city is doing with creating permanent supportive housing. Since 2005, 2,373 new housing units have been created. However, so much more should be taken into consideration: Denver’s overall population growth, the economic downturn, and an increased number of people who cannot afford to buy or rent. So, it’s complicated, to say the least.

The NAEH report stated, “People are in the shelter system for longer than is necessary… Addressing this need should be the city’s first priority.” Can you explain this issue?

When Denver’s Road Home came out with its eight goals, permanent housing and supportive services were at the top of that list. That was long before anyone could have imagined what the last two years would have looked like. We now see that over a third of the homeless population are families. It also takes someone much longer than one might think to navigate all of the necessary “systems” to exit shelter and enter into transitional or permanent housing.

HUD’s $1.5 billion Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program (HPRP), a program funded by President Obama’s Recovery Act, focused on housing search and financial assistance (or you could say, it focused on preventing people from becoming homeless and then quickly re-housing people who had recently lost their homes). It spared more than 1.3 million people from homelessness. This is a good model and it is the path that we need to go down in Denver.

Besides the urban camping ban, what other 2012 developments took place in Denver on the homeless front?

In early October, Denver and other communities around the state committed to the goal of housing 100 Veterans in 100 days. This brought folks together from local housing authorities, the VA, and community providers to figure out how make the process more efficient. The group is over half way to getting these Veterans housed.

Finally, how will you continue to work on the issue in your career?

I’m certainly passionate about the issue of homelessness, and have decided that my efforts are probably best directed toward working with communities from a strategic, grassroots level. Change can occur when leaders from all ends of the spectrum are brought together so that we don’t continue to have so many people living in dismal conditions.