According to a 2022, more than 10,000 Georgians are homeless report published by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. And a third of Georgia’s homeless live in the Atlanta metro area, said Cathryn Vassell, CEO of Partners for Home.
Every January, Partners for Home conducts its point-in-time census, when hundreds of volunteers swarm out to take a head count of Georgians camping on streets, train stations and in creeks at night. People are also counted during the day as they come to the resource centers to get a free meal, pick up their mail and shower.
Vassell said focusing the census on the Atlanta area not only helps caseworkers but also state legislators gauge which laws would be most effective in tackling the problem of homelessness. But no matter how well-intentioned some of these guidelines seek to be, they continue to miss the mark, failing to capture nuance, she said.
“In the last two legislative periods, there have already been draft laws criminalizing homelessness. We are very concerned about such legislation because we don’t want to invest dollars in managing homelessness, we want to invest dollars in ending people’s homelessness. And we think housing is doing that,” Vassell said.
Republican lawmakers are pushing for a law that takes a more punitive approach Senate Bill 62, which passed the Senate with a majority just before Crossover Day. Homeless advocates say the underlying causes of homelessness are not being addressed.
Under this law, cities that currently operate government-approved camps are required to confine their homeless population to designated spots. Local officials who fail to comply could face legal action from the Georgia Attorney General or a private citizen. And it doesn’t put a cap on how many times a person can file a lawsuit against their city for allowing people to camp in undesignated public spaces like under bridges or in parks.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Carden Summers, a Cordele Republican, said his bill would also require an audit of state and local spending on resources distributed to nonprofit organizations to help the homeless across the state.
“There are literally millions of dollars going into the 401 and 501(c)3 programs out there, and they’re not accountable to anyone,” Summers said.
Longer term, these audits would provide data points on the performance of these programs and provide a long-term view of how federal and state funds can best be used to address the problem of homelessness — not just in the state’s metropolitan areas, but in rural ones as well as well as. And the audits would help those trained to treat vulnerable people with mental health issues, Summers said.
Sen. Nikki Merritt, a Grayson Democrat, voted against Summer’s bill. She cited conclusions reached by last year’s Senate Study Committee on Vulnerable Homelessness, which Summers chaired.
One of recommendations which emerged from the study committee to “oppose the criminalization of homelessness”. However, law enforcement agencies are allowed to make arrests based on existing laws, regardless of housing status.
“Instead of applying the recommendations of this committee, we came up with a bill that resorted to prosecuting one of the most vulnerable and least supported populations in our state,” Merritt said.
The bill should include guaranteed or affordable housing, rent support, eviction protection and mental health treatment — otherwise it doesn’t reflect better solutions, Merritt said.
Carden’s bill also faced opposition from Sen. Nabilah Islam, a Lawrenceville Democrat, who says the proposal is unnecessary criminalization the homeless.
“This isn’t a perfect solution or a perfect bill,” Summer said. “This is a start to try to find a solution to make it better.”
Vassell and other nonprofit advocates for caring for the homeless in Georgia Carden’s legislation could pose a threat to homeless people struggling with mental illness, addiction, or both. Sister Theresa Sullivan, director of the Daybreak Day Resource Center in Macon, said these government-sanctioned city camps could have unintended consequences if there isn’t proper security and surveillance.
“What are you saying? Okay, Johnny, you just hit Fannie, you’re out. And then you have the problem of someone standing in the street. Some of our people know they’re not capable of dealing with other people to be together. [They say] I don’t have the capacity to wait 30 minutes in line because I’m paranoid or getting very nervous,” Sullivan said.
“If you want to focus people [in tent cities], you really have to say, what will your oversight be? What social services will you do? Pull together and solve challenges,” Sullivan said.
Now the Senate is shifting its focus to vulnerable Georgians House bill 520, who passed the other room last week with overwhelming support. The bill aims to Mental Health Parity Act B. by creating a study to monitor how often mental illness and addiction play a role in homelessness and developing a standard definition of what ‘serious mental illness’ means.
The bill also aims to ease the process of obtaining a license for foreign-born mental health doctors to open a practice in Georgia.
The main sponsors of HB 520 are Rep. Todd Jones, a Republican from South Forsyth, and Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver, a Decatur Democrat. MEPs say this is an all-round solution to the workers issue in Georgia; by not only recruiting more doctors, but also by giving people the help they need to find employment and build sustainable and independent lives.
“When you start combining mental health and substance abuse, the statistics tell us that about 70 to 80 percent of every family in Georgia struggles with someone within that family who has either one or mostly both,” Jones said .
“I think the last piece of the puzzle really comes down to how we deal with serious mental illness. And how do we then deal with this population? Many people, including Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Boggs, call this “familiar faces,” Jones said, “and those familiar faces basically go either clockwise or counterclockwise, from homelessness to our healthcare system to the Department of Corrections, which would mean jails and things like that.”
The treatment-focused legislation includes a provision that would work more directly to reduce the number of homeless people in the state.
“We are expanding crisis beds, which are essential to begin the process of getting a permanent, or at least temporary, spot off the streets or outside of crisis units,” Oliver said. “And we also have a work plan in 520 on issues related to helping the homeless.”
Even for people who struggle to keep a roof over their heads, who don’t suffer from mental illness or addiction, maintaining a permanent home can be a long and arduous process.
Looking back, how could these legislative approaches have helped Bambi Hayes Brown out of her seven years of homelessness after the economy collapsed in the 2008 housing crisis.
Even with a job and a college degree, finding permanent housing was a struggle, Brown said. She and her children spent that time in their car, suffering cold nights in run-down shotgun apartments, and living in hotels.
Now people who once had stable employment still face housing instability after the pandemic disrupted their lives, said Brown, who now serves as CEO of Georgia Advancing Communities Together — a statewide affordable housing nonprofit.
“We started going to doctors, dentists and all the people you would think wouldn’t have these housing issues,” Brown said. “And so more and more people started saying, ‘Oh, now that’s a problem. We have to do something about it.’ Even though those of us who are proponents have been talking about it for years.”
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