- We convened a round table on the state of homelessness in the city and the urgent need for affordable housing.

Here's my conversation with BridgeDetroit's Nushrat Rachman; the city of Detroit's Group Executive for Housing, Planning, and Development, Donald Rencher; and Linda Little, who is CEO of the Neighborhood Service Organization.

So, Nushrat, I wanna start with you, because the piece that you've done about this, the conversation you had, I think illuminates this issue in such a critical and personal way.

Tell us about Tonya.

- We met Tonya when a photojournalist and I over at the Free Press were working on a story about the Housing Choice Voucher program and how difficult it is to navigate that program, especially for those who were trying to exit out of homelessness.

She was in the middle of... She had just gotten her voucher, and she was right at the beginning of finding a place.

And so we decided that we would follow along on her journey, just to illustrate any challenges that she would face and what that experience was like.

Throughout the course of that, the several months that we've been with her, we learned about her journey, how she got into homelessness, and the challenges that she's experienced since then.

Tonya is someone who, one of the, I think the main reflections that I've learned throughout this experience is that homelessness in the city is not a monolith.

There isn't a one size fit all model, I guess, for lack of a better word of what homelessness looks like in the city.

Tonya's story is this.

She's someone who suffered an economic challenge.

Last year her husband died from complications from COVID-19.

He was a sole breadwinner.

After that she lost her home.

She lost not only her husband but her home, and then she entered into shelter.

One economic financial challenge set off this cascade of other financial challenges in her life, but she's someone who's looking for housing while there's a shortage of affordable housing, while she doesn't have an income coming in, and while she's coming up against landlords who aren't willing to rent out to her.

- Yeah, so, Nushrat, talk about a little of the reasons it's hard to maintain the amount of affordable housing we need and hard for people who need it to access it.

- One of the challenges, and I'm talking specifically about people who are experiencing homelessness, so they're in the homeless shelters.

The challenges that they've told me is that they have the voucher in hand, but as they're setting out to find a place, it has to fit within the certain budget, it has to meet certain requirements, but what they're confronting is not being able to find places that fits within that budget.

So it falls outside of that scope, but also quality units.

Last year we did a story, like I mentioned, about the voucher program.

One of the women that we featured she said she came across places in Detroit, some didn't have porches, some didn't have windows.

And so you have the voucher in hand that's able to subsidize your rent, but you can't find anything in the city.

- Linda, this is, I see you nodding as as she's talking, and I know it's a nod of knowledge and familiarity with this experience.

Talk about what you see at NSO every day.

Not with just one person, but with many, many folks.

- Yes, so what Nushrat has expressed is absolutely correct in what we see every day.

You know, we have many Tonyas, and it is not a monolith why people end up homeless.

But I will add this point of contact, that poverty is the root cause of homelessness.

If Tonya had resources, because wealthy people have their breadwinners die every day.

They suffer life challenges every day, but they don't end up homeless.

So without resources, people without those resources end up being homeless, housing instability.

So housing instability is not, it's multifactorial.

I just wanna point that out.

But there are Tonya's all over the place.

And they are people who work.

Tonya may have a job, but her employment circumstance does not allow for her to pay 15, $1,600 a month for rent, which is the going price for rental units today.

At NSO we contract with landlords to help people get into rapid rehousing.

And over the last three years, those contracts with those landlords have diminished, because they want market rates, because the market is demanding double, triple what we're used to paying.

And so we are having trouble with placing our clients that we have traditionally not had an issue at all with placing.

But I really want to, for your viewers to understand, that homelessness is so much more than the people that stand on the corner.

That's a very small subset of the homeless population, by the way.

And it is something that affects all of us.

I have had friends who have encountered homelessness at a certain point in their lives, and people that we see in the grocery store.

People that we might walk by down the street.

At work.

There are people who go to work every day and sleep in their cars, or they're couch surfing, because they cannot afford stable housing.

So this is a major issue, and I'm glad that you're raising this topic so that we can bring it to the forefront and help create some innovative solutions.

- Yeah, yeah, so I know that at NSO you're focused on both issues, right?

The emergent issue that people have if they don't have housing or if they find themselves without housing, but then also what you're talking about in terms of bringing some stability to their lives so that they don't find themselves there again.

It really is doing two very different...

I mean they are very different tasks.

They require different kinds of resources and focus.

Talk about how that works in a city like Detroit.

- So we believe and adopt (voice cutting out) premise of Housing First.

So you get people housed first.

You get them that stable environment, and then you can address the other issues, which sometimes include their healthcare needs, physical and behavioral health.

There may be some social issues that are going on.

Maybe there is a need for a guardian.

Maybe there's some other issues that need to be addressed before you can even focus on employment, let's say.

Maybe they're not employable.

Maybe they're disabled, permanently disabled.

So we help them get that disability income.

So whatever it is that we can do to help provide a sustainable solution to maintain that housing is what we strive to do at NSO addressing the needs of that whole person.

It's a very person-centered approach.

You have to have these different modalities to offer solutions that help meet the needs of that individual.

And that's what we do at NSO.

- Yeah, yeah.

Donald, I wanna bring you into the conversation here, both to talk about, from the city's perspective, the challenge that we face in terms of people finding themselves homeless, but then also this question of affordable housing more generally, and how the city approaches the question of making sure that there is enough affordable housing for folks.

- So thank you again for inviting me on the show.

I appreciate it.

Work with Linda Little a lot, and she is one of our champions.

And I was the housing director for about two years, 2018 to to 2020, mid 2020, and I think the question I got the most was like how can I find an affordable housing unit?

It was like the question that I've received all the time.

And I remember at the time answering that question, and saying, I really am not a real estate broker or in the business of doing that, but I'm trying to ensure that we intervene by providing policies and building more affordable housing units.

But I can tell you that we're not gonna be able to build enough units quick enough and fast enough to solve the issue.

And so it really is gonna come with real policy change, and so I can tell you when I look at affordable housing, affordable housing, it just means to me 30% of your income is being spent on your housing expenses.

No matter how much your income is, you can be, it could be challenging to meet your housing conditions.

And so as Linda said previously, this is a poverty issue.

And I find it the large challenges is working with the group of folks that Nushrat actually alluded to at the beginning, the people who don't have the resources you need to find housing units.

Now, housing choice vouchers, in this particular situation with the woman that you discussed previously, I think honestly she was one of the lucky ones to get a voucher, because it's not an unlimited resources, because it's really hard just to get that.

And once you get that it's really difficult to actually find a unit.

And so I am proud of the fact that the mayor saw this fact and we built out a Housing Services Team.

It's 60 folks, and their job every day is to find actual housing units.

And these housing units are not necessarily government sponsored or funded.

They're regular housing units that are in areas of, I would say, low-market areas that can actually take rental value that are comparable to very low income housing units.

And we're trying to find really good units, and we found upwards to at least 1,000 in our pipeline.

And we have a number that people can call.

We've made the number available for people who are facing eviction.

And so we encourage people to give out the number.

I can give out the number before we get off today, but we're really trying to connect to housing opportunities outside of just building units, 'cause we're building units very quickly.

We've built around 300 (voice cutting out) housing.

Linda's one of the ones that we've been able to put in place, and I think we're gonna do 250 more in the next three years, but it's not going to necessarily solve the issue.

And so we really need to figure out how to get people the resources they need and the financial wherewithal to get them in place or of strength where they can live on a daily basis.

Yeah, so let's also talk about the condition of some of the housing that people find themselves in.

I mean, we hear a lot about people not being able to find suitable housing.

Even if it is affordable, it's just not suitable for someone to live in.

What can the city do?

And what is the city doing about that?

So two things, and I don't necessarily expect folks who already don't have real access to resources to also go find a unit, too.

But again, like I said, we can give the the number out, but we are challenging landlords to fix their units and get them to a place before they're able to rent it to a quality and level which makes it rentable.

But that's also usually a financial exercise, too.

If I have to spend a bunch of money to make my unit nice I'm going to try to see, to make sure that, I'm gonna have to increase the rent of that particular unit.

And so one of the things that as far as the policy change that we're looking at, the state of Michigan just passed a law that allowed municipalities to provide what we call PILTs, Payments in Lieu of Taxes, is something that every affordable housing developer receives as an incentive to bring affordable housing.

But the regular Joe Blow does not receive this tax incentive, and we wanna change that actual ordinance in the city of Detroit to allow tax incentives if you are going to provide affordable housing units at quality standards.

And that's one thing that we're working on right now to increase the ability for people to find accessible units that are quality.

- Go ahead and give that phone number just so that... We'll also put it on our website and (voice cutting out).

Otherwise, but tell people what number they can call.

- 866-313-2520 is the number, and you'll get connected to someone and we'll help you try to find that and locate that unit.

And we've received over 10,000 calls to try to help people navigate this space, and and it's been going so we encourage people to actually make that call.

- So, I wanna quickly have you guys respond to the environment that we're in and the evictions, the rental evictions that were on a moratorium during the pandemic.

When that restarts, of course, we're gonna have a bigger problem.

Nushrat, talk just a little about how that's gonna affect the folks who find themselves in this situation.

- Yeah, so I can break down the numbers of what evictions are looking like in the city.

So the number...

In 36 District Court, which covers the city of Detroit, the number of eviction cases against tenants is approaching pre-pandemic levels.

So that's surpassing 23,000 filings last year alone.

Before that in 2019, it was kind, I believe it was like almost 30,000 filings.

So we're creeping back up there.

During the pandemic that went down to the thousands.

The thousands, and so that's approaching back to those pre-pandemic numbers.

During the first four months of this year judges in Detroit's 36 District Court signed more than 1,800 eviction orders.

So that is that final, yes, that an eviction can happen.

That's a 136% jump compared to the same time period last year.

And so we're definitely seeing an increase in evictions, and that's kind of gonna play into the landscape that we're talking about right now.