Burlco group pushes plan to aid homeless

Around lunchtime on a warm day last week, a gray van pulled to the side of a wooded road in Browns Mills and honked three times.

The silent woods seemed empty. Then, a figure in a hooded black sweatshirt peered out from the autumn foliage.

To the right, a man in a canvas jacket seemed to rise out of the ground.

His quizzical scowl softened when he saw the van, and he turned and shouted something behind him. In moments, shabbily dressed men in groups of two and three were filing up a narrow path barely visible from the road.

Fifteen in all, they are just a fraction of the more than 1,000 homeless men, women, and children of Burlington County, most of whom live in motels for months, even years at a time.

"Madelyn!" shouted one man, raising his arms. "I was looking for you!"

It was the first meal delivery of the day for Madelyn Mears-Sheldon, director of the nonprofit Christian Caring Center in Pemberton.

A friend and helper for Burlington County's homeless for three decades, she would deliver 50 Styrofoam containers of baked ziti (along with hugs and prayers) to the homeless of Pemberton Township this afternoon.

Her tireless labors may win her accolades and a place in heaven. But Mears-Sheldon is no fan of food handouts to street people, or of the prolonged, government-funded motel stays.

Typically costing $1,400 a month for one gloomy room, motels have long been the staple of homeless housing in New Jersey and most other states.

And so Mears-Sheldon has hopes, she said, in a 10-year plan to mitigate homelessness that the county government and activists like herself helped to develop nearly three years ago.

She and some of her fellow advocates disagree with parts of the plan, especially its priority on getting homeless into housing before their personal crises - job loss, mental illness, substance abuse, loss of a spouse - are addressed.

Still, "it's the biggest change I've seen in my 30 years," Mears-Sheldon said last week as she rode from the camp in the woods to a shabby motel two miles away.

"But it's still so slow. It's like a little tug trying to pull a big barge."

It feels slow, too, for 51-year-old Barbara Neal-Blair.

"I've been here two years," she said as she stood in the door of her room at the Red Carpet Inn in Pemberton. Here she cares most days for her 2-year-old grandson.

Fifteen years ago, she said, she and her husband were forced to sell off their lawn-service business, and later their house and furniture to pay for his cancer treatments, she explained.

"He had one medicine that cost $860 a month," she said. After her husband's death, Neal-Blair worked in low-paying jobs at supermarkets and discount stores, "but I got tired of struggling. If you paid the rent, you couldn't pay the electric."

"I would love to go into some of that low-income housing they're talking about," she said. "That would be ideal."

Adopted in January 2012 by a consortium of public and private service providers called Continuum of Care, and recently revised, the plan calls for several new approaches to homelessness in Burlington County.

These include:

Phasing out the use of motels for emergency dwellings while increasing the stock of apartments and homes as long-term housing for low-income residents.

Establishing a "single point of entry" onto the rolls of those in need of services.

Better integrating county services, such as job training, employment, mental health and drug counseling, along with access to disabilities benefits.

Improving oversight of clients by the use of caseworkers and enhanced data monitoring, and making service providers more accountable for client outcomes.

"In 2011 we looked at the money we were spending to warehouse people in motels," Freeholder Director Bruce Garganio said in a recent interview, "and that lit the fire. We said we have to find a new way."

He was sitting in the offices of Anna Payanzo, director of human services for Burlington County.

What emerged out of that "fire," she said, was a "good plan, an overarching plan," whose creation was "community-based and participatory."

Formerly director of housing at the private, nonprofit Twin Oaks Community Services in Westampton, Payanzo headed the plan's steering committee before the county hired her in January 2013 as head of human services.

The Continuum of Care - which includes representatives from county government and more than a dozen service providers - settled on three approaches to homelessness: prevention, rapid rehousing, and housing first.

Preventions are "quick fix" interventions, such as help with rent payments or utility bills, that keep a person or family from losing a home.

"Rapid rehousing" seeks to quickly put people who are stable and employable - but have already lost their homes - back into a dwelling they can afford. Less visible but far more numerous than the chronic "street" homeless, these "transitional" homeless may also require job training, job placement, and counseling to get on their feet.

"Housing first" calls for placing the chronically homeless, most of whom suffer from addiction and mental illness, into permanent housing. Off the street or out of the woods, they are less exposed to harsh weather and less likely to commit the petty crimes that can land them in jail. About 20 percent of homeless are considered chronic.

Like Mears-Sheldon, Payanzo concedes that the turnaround appears to be moving glacially. But she points to signs of progress.

With the help of federal tax credits and federal moneys channeled through the state, she said, the county has helped to launch private construction of four housing projects that generate 214 low-income apartments in Westampton, Burlington City, Florence, and Bordentown. Most of the housing is expected to be completed in 2015.

Not all are intended for the homeless, Payanzo said, noting that the Westampton project is intended for disabled people. And in all of them "you have to be a reliable tenant."

"But 214 units is going to make a difference, because it creates a next step for people who never had a next step. And even if every homeless person doesn't qualify for these units, it creates another 214 housing opportunities somewhere else."

Burlington County has also worked out a novel agreement with the New Jersey Department of Social Services, allowing it to divert some of the funds it receives for motel housing to create case managers for clients in the "rapid rehousing" model.

Working out of private service agencies, such as Catholic Charities, case managers will be responsible for not only placing qualified clients in permanent housing, Payanzo said, but for seeing that they get the jobs, training, and other services they need to pay bills and keep their homes.

"Rapid rehousing is the core" of the new plan, she said, "and it centers around case management."

Her staff is also working more aggressively, she said, to help disabled people obtain the Social Security benefits for which they qualify.

While the 10-year plan has some positive features, Kent Pipes, a longtime advocate for Burlington County's homeless, contends its emphasis on housing over services is lopsided.

"Many of us don't feel housing is the first and primary need," said Pipes, president of the Affordable Homes Group Inc., based in Westampton.

Homeless people "wouldn't have lost their housing had they not had other issues," such as unemployment, spousal abuse, or a death in the family. "And they won't be able to keep their housing if they don't deal with those.

"But the model we have now," he said, "is housing-based, not people-based."

Payanzo disagrees. The county model is services-oriented, she said, but grounded in a premise of "self-sufficiency."

"The best way to end homelessness is to prevent it," she said. "When that doesn't happen, the next step is to get people quickly into housing to maintain their autonomy. "