Gathering in Santa Fe seeks housing solutions
December 6, 2022
Richard Coleman knows firsthand the harshness of life on the streets.
For four years, he panhandled, lived in shelters and soothed himself with narcotics. When he got caught shooting up in a shelter bathroom, he said, he was ejected onto the streets in the dead of winter.
That was then.
On Tuesday, six months after Coleman found housing that helped change the course of his life, he attended Santa Fe’s S3 Housing Initiative as a member of the Lived Experience Advisory Board.
The event, called the Safe Outdoor Space Community Forum, brought together about 150 people to seek solutions to ending homelessness in Santa Fe, with a focus on one organization’s proposal for pop-up communities of tiny homes for shelter.
“We must stop managing homelessness and start solving it,” said Kathleen Van Voorhis, vice president of policy and partnerships for Project Moxie, a Durango, Colo.-based consulting firm that studies factors contributing to homelessness and best practices for ending it. “Once we have best practice solutions in place, we start seeing the solving.”
Project Moxie already has established six small-house communities in Denver and two in Aurora, Colo. It hopes to create a similar housing solution in Santa Fe.
The proposed pop-up housing communities would be made up of 25 to 50 small homes that can be constructed by volunteers in a matter of days, said Matt Lynn, Project Moxie’s director of community engagement.
Tuesday’s event comes months after the city of Santa Fe shelved a plan to develop a sanctioned tent camp to address a growing number of homeless encampments throughout the city that have raised public safety concerns and have created mounting costs.
Following the decision in August to halt the controversial project, hundreds of people remain living on the city’s streets in frigid winter temperatures.
Van Voorhis said 363 homeless people have been identified in Santa Fe, although more data is needed. Forty-nine families are homeless, and 18 youths are unsheltered, she said, adding there also are “unseen” homeless — those sleeping in cars who are unaccounted for and students attending school while staying with friends or in hotel rooms.
An increasing senior population is becoming unsheltered.
“We cannot rely on government to solve this,” Van Voorhis said. “It’s going to take all of us working together to solve this problem. Unhoused people are human beings. They are our sisters and our brothers.”
She cited the varied conditions that most often contribute to homelessness: job losses, health care emergencies, divorces, domestic abuse, fires and natural disasters.
COVID-19 contributed astronomically to homeless populations, including by reducing the number of beds available in shelters, Van Voorhis said. As advocates sought housing for the more than 900,000 identified homeless people across the nation, 930,000 more people became homeless, she added. “We cannot build our way out of it fast enough.”
For Coleman, help came slowly.
“It’s taken a long time. It is a process. A little at a time. I didn’t have a disability, and I wasn’t working. And if you’re not female, you can forget HUD,” he said, referring to assistance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “I filled out stacks of paperwork, and they didn’t call me once, not in four years.”
Jenn Lopez of Project Moxie asked the crowd members if they knew of someone in Santa Fe who was having a hard time finding housing.
Hands raised around the room.
“Housing prices have skyrocketed,” she said. “What was already hard became nearly impossible. With COVID, we learned so quickly that there are so many people living on the edge.”
With Santa Fe’s mean housing prices at $590,000 for single families, more than one-third of the city’s households are paying too much for a place to live, she said. For the homeless, it’s an insurmountable problem that requires trauma-informed specialists and volunteers.
Lopez and Van Voorhis spoke a few feet from a 64-square-foot modular tiny home equipped with air-conditioning, a heater, a fire extinguisher, folding bed, shelving, power outlets, under-bed storage and locks.
“This is based on a concept called ‘Housing First.’ It’s borne out of the idea that folks need their fundamental housing needs to be met before they can focus on things like employment,” Lynn said. “You cannot focus on those needs when you don’t know where you’re going to sleep, if your things are safe or what you will do about food and warmth.
“When we meet these basic needs, it allows people to address things like substance abuse and employment so they can begin to recover,” he added.
“Being able to lock your doors is a transformational thing for unhoused communities. They’re able to begin healing,” Van Voorhis said. “They can go to work because they can lock their doors. One tiny lock makes all the difference.”
Larger homes would be available in the housing communities to accommodate more than one person.
The shelter communities would offer bathrooms, hand-washing stations and laundry facilities, and would provide 24-hour staffing on site, meals and security with coded entry.
Case managers would come to the site regularly to offer services, such as applying online for federal food aid.
Lopez and Van Voorhis presented a slideshow from Camp Hope, a “resource rich” tent city in Las Cruces created with input from people like Coleman, with lived experience.
The site offers a safe and clean environment for sheltering the homeless with full-service bathrooms, kitchens and 50 three-sided structures with tent pads.
“If we want people to stop peeing in alleys, give them bathrooms,” Van Voorhis said.
Lopez encouraged the audience to continue advocating for funding to address homelessness. “Don’t give up. Keep fighting for the funding. That’s the only thing that’s going to get us to the finish line.”
Lynn said the Tuesday event was part of a larger ongoing effort to further community education on homelessness. “We will continue to work with the S3 Housing Initiative as we develop these recommendations,” he said.
Coleman, who found housing through Linkages, a program providing rental assistance to at-risk and unsheltered people, said he feels like he has a new lease on life.
“I surrender every day,” he said. “I go to 12 meetings a week, and I’m on my knees every morning. I cannot do this alone.”