NEED FOR MORE PERMANENT SUPPORTIVE HOUSING

According to Newspaper Reports and Other Studies:
(L.I. Campaign for Affordable Rental Housing, FY2001 Changes in the Homeless Assistance Grant
Program, Education Committee Report April 2, 2002, Nassau/Suffolk Law Services Committee, Inc.
May 7, 2002, Newsday)

Children are exposed to an abnormal lifestyle for a long period and subject to crime and   other abnormalities when
living in shelters or motels (Newsday, June 20 2001)
Little public transportation to and from shelters isolates individuals from family, educational services, and jobs
(Newsday, June 20 2001)
Shelter stays can last up to nine months to a year or more for many families in 2001 (Newsday, June 20 2001)
·         Large shelters impose many rules making children conform to a suppressive environment.  A large shelter in
Bellport where approximately 180 children were living in June 2001imposes strict rules to make sure the place runs
smoothly.  Children are not allowed toys outside their room and only allowed sport items in a designated area.   
They also have a curfew and cannot go to the playground without an adult. (Newsday, June 20 2001)
·         Children suffer long rides to school and are often lost in the system and don’t even get the proper education
mandated by law they should receive (Newsday, June 19, 2001)
·         Shelters and motels cause temporarily homeless people and families to be mixed with the mentally ill and
substance abuse people (Newsday, June 18 & 20 2001)
·         Motels are an expensive way to temporarily house the homeless.  According to Newsday, as of June 2001, Suffolk’s DSS has spent more than $4 million since the beginning of 2000 on motels.
·         Large facilities tend to institutionalize homeless (Newsday, June 20 2001)
·         The county spent $25 million in emergency housing expenses in 2001,  $23 million to house the homeless
and about $2.3 million to transport children to school from shelters and motels across Suffolk County and nearly $1
million on taxi rides to shuttle the homeless to and from shelters (Newsday).  That breaks down to $50,000 per
homeless family a year.
·        There is a lack of affordable housing because of L.I.’s high cost of rent (Newsday).  $1,400 for a three-
bedroom house would be considered inexpensive.
                       S   O   L   U   T   I   O   N   S     

1. The philosophy of SCDSS (Suffolk County Department of Social Services) must be changed
regarding how the client can be realistically helped to become economically self-sufficient in Suffolk County.  Local Law #12-2001 of Suffolk County defines a living wage as $9.00 with health
benefits and $10.25 without benefits. Any reform would need to aim at these hourly salaries at
the start of employment.

Consideration must be given on available education, vocational, child care, transportation,
mental health services, food stamps, physical health services, rental assistance, can be given
now that will produce in two or three years the changes needed for a person (or family) to be self-
sufficient.

2.  The need for ongoing, formalized, informational sharing, communication and cross-training
between the shelter providers, DSS (Housing, CMP, SWEP) and DOL is critical if clients are to
access services. On a continual basis, information must be shared both in a broad sense and
where necessary in a case specific sense on regulations to follow as well as programs and
supportive services, i.e., child care, transportation, laundry room, and food shopping access.
Having access conducive to employment, education and training, parenting and household
maintenance is vital to self-sufficiency.

Example: With changes at DSS, DOL, and local laws, entitlements and criteria changes for
“homeless” clients, it is difficult for shelter providers to be apprised of the available resources
both new and current.

A resource manual with contact persons and phone numbers will certainly assist the shelter
providers in seeking resources for client referral services in a timely fashion. The resource
manual should include the following information:
·        A current listing of services with updated information
·        Contact persons with schedule and phone number
·        Program prospectus
·        Criteria for client referrals
·        Transportation availability
·        Child Care
3.         It became apparent that as the homelessness issue evolved from a short term problem to
a long term problem, the programs offered and the requirements enforced would need to be
adapted to the present environment. Example: Years ago because homelessness was resolved
in the short term, employment programs were relaxed during the transition period. Now that
homelessness is much more long term, we need to look at the Emergency Housing
requirements we enforce, such as 30 housing contacts per week, to determine the benefits and
fruitfulness of this effort. The Housing search must be left to the professionals, realtors,
subcontractors, etc., so that when permanent housing is finally found, the individual also has
gained some self-sufficiency skills.

DSS and DOL do have an assessment and placement procedure that could be     done better to
pinpoint which families on welfare assistance do have mental illness that is hampering their
progress.  There seem to be many people with undiagnosed mental illness that need treatment.  
There is a need to determine who can be educated (GED or better) and those who will never get
a GED because of a lack of mental ability.

We then must recognize these problems and get those families with mental illness into
permanent supportive housing and get those who will never be economically self-sufficient into
permanent supportive housing.

In conjunction with the DOL assessment program, educational experts must develop and
upgrade the present assessment tool that determines the educational level of DOL and DSS
clients. There must be tighter controls and time frames for clients to reach passing grades for
their GED exams that will prepare them for employability skills.

4. Due to changing demographics, the population of those on Public Assistance and those who
are homeless have changed. We recommend all those working for DSS and DOL enroll
periodically in sensitivity training and stress reduction workshops to aid them in dealing with
this population. Also, sensitivity training and stress reduction should be offered to the homeless
Public Assistant clients as needed.

5.  Case management, time management, and mentoring services should be made readily
available to the homeless population so that ongoing support and guidance can be provided
during this challenging time. These efforts will also ensure family stability, which will result in
greater success in self-sufficiency efforts.

Shelters that have case workers should be able to handle most DOL or DSS meetings through a
conference-call of the shelter worker, the client, and whoever else from DSS or DOL.  All
documents could be faxed from the center. Some meetings could be done via the telephone,
thus saving many hours of client time as well as financial costs to Suffolk County in meeting
DSS and DOL requirements. This requires DOL and DSS to trust the case managers’ judgment at
the local level in processing these documents, saving valuable time (typically spent on meetings
and fair hearings) for both county personnel and DSS/DOL clients alike.

There should be one case facilitator that oversees each case and to which DOL, DSS, shelter
providers, educational/vocational providers can have direct access to work out any difficulties.
This is presently in place and should be publicized more.  All those involved with the person
need access to this one case facilitator so that all agencies working with families can give
correct input.  This person should monitor attendance and progress at all educational/vocational
programs, progress should be monitored with educational /vocational providers as well.  If the
clients begin to show signs of duress, caseworkers should be assigned to intervene and assist
the client in overcoming difficulties by assessing the difficulty.

6.  Individual children and youth who are age-eligible and legally entitled to district-based
education services must/shall be given access to those services immediately upon application
to the DSS for housing services. No substitutes for legally mandated, district-based education
services are to be provided, lest any of the 7,000 children in the Public Assistance system fell
further behind in their education.
Establish a system of communication among the providers of services, i.e., education, DSS and
CBO, to ensure the development and implementation of a model to facilitate immediate access to
the legal entitlement mandates by the federal McKinney-Vento Act regarding equitable education
services for those affected by homelessness.

7.  Public transportation, including the van service in Suffolk County is inadequate for homeless
families and people on public assistance trying to meet the requirements of DOL mandates and
other responsibilities.  In addition to bus passes, each shelter needs to have a van to transport
people to educational/vocational training, for food shopping, and for laundry facilities (if the
residences do not provide laundromats).   Vans should also be run by the vocational and
educational providers to pick up and drop off all public assistant clients who are enrolled in their
programs who cannot transport themselves via a vehicle or public transportation.

8. The Long Island Association and other business groups should start interviewing shelter
families who have jobs and have a high school education to see what more education is needed
to move them out of the shelters by getting better jobs.  After this group has been helped lets
start to look at the high school graduates workers currently in the welfare system.

RESEARCH LINKS         Find full Homelessness Task Force report at www.co.suffolk.ny.us             http://www.cbpp.org         www.hungeractionnys.org         www.gao.gov         www.clasp.org

AN EVALUATION OF WELFARE REFORM POLICY IN NEW YORK STATE FEBRUARY 2006

Regionalizing the Federal Poverty Level

It is now time to regionalize the Federal Poverty level, “Yes We Can.” To think that a family of four can survive on $22,050 in Suffolk County, Long Island is ridiculous. The bare minimum is the following:

Rent                                              $1500
Transportation                                 $200                         And These Aren't Even Included:
Food                                              $400                         Child Care?
Phone/Internet                                 $100                         Health Insurance?
Water                                             $40                           How much more?
LIPA                                              $100
National Grid                                   $100
Clothes                                           $150
______________________________________
Total                                              $2,540 x 12 = $30,480 per year after taxes needed to survive


$22,050 is the magic number; it is used by the Federal Government to cut off a mother with three children from any
help with TANF (Welfare). It gets worse; she can’t even get food stamps if she made $28,665.

Even now, the Federal Poverty Guideline has three categories, 48 indigenous states as well as DC, Alaska and
Hawaii. It seems very obvious that certain areas of the country cost a great deal more to live in than others and that
must be taken into account in order to help the poor in different parts of the country.

By regionalizing the Federal Poverty level, raising it where it costs more to live would help not only with shelter and
with food for families, it would impact eligibility in over 32 government programs meant to help people. Because the
Federal Poverty Guidelines were only developed in 1963-1964 by Mollie Onshansky based upon food expenditures,
now seems to be a reasonable time to come up with a more serious accounting of how one should create the federal
poverty guidelines for each area of the country based upon the cost of living.

Please note the following research

“May 1, 2008 -- Researchers and policy analysts at the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia
University’s Mailman School of Public Health are urging lawmakers to change how poverty is measured in America.
The poverty measure the government uses today was established in the 1960s and was based on research that
said families spent about one-third of their incomes on food. To determine the official poverty level, government
officials simply multiplied food costs by three. Although the figures are updated annually for inflation, they have
otherwise remained unchanged.

The problem with using this method to measure poverty, according to NCCP, is that food now comprises only one-
seventh of an average family’s expenses, while the costs of housing, childcare, health care, and transportation have
grown disproportionately. The result is that the current poverty level has little bearing on the cost of family
necessities.

“Most analysts will tell you that today’s poverty thresholds – about $21,000 for a family of four – are inhumanely
low,” says Nancy K. Cauthen, PhD, deputy director of NCCP. When asked how much it takes for a family of four to
make ends meet, 70 percent of Americans say $40,000 or more. And in fact, research consistently shows that, on
average, families need an income of about twice the federal poverty level to meet their basic needs. “The poverty
measure created 40 years ago does not account for the vast differences in the cost of living across the country. So
poverty in high-cost cities like Boston and San Francisco is measured by the same standard as poverty in rural
Kentucky or New Mexico,” explains Dr. Cauthen. “A new formula is long overdue.”

Because the federal poverty level has never been adjusted for real changes in the actual cost of living, people who
are considered poor today by the official standard are worse off relative to everyone else, than people considered
poor when the poverty measure was established in the ’60s. The current federal poverty measure equals about 29
percent of median household income, whereas in the 1960s, the poverty level was nearly 50 percent of median
income.

Dr. Cauthen points out that most advanced industrialized countries measure poverty quite differently from the U.S.
Rather than setting minimum income thresholds below which individuals and families are considered to be poor,
other countries measure economic disadvantage relative to the citizenry as a whole, for example, having income
below 50 percent of median.

“We are hopeful that Americans will join us in urging our legislators to take a good hard look at how we as a country
address poverty – starting with a realistic way to define what it means in today’s terms, not those of the 1960s,” says
Dr. Cauthen.

For more information about poverty, including frequently asked questions on the topic, access the NCCP website at http://www.nccp.org/

Click here for a chart of the Federal Poverty Guidelines for 2009

Click here for a list of programs that make decisions based upon the Federal Poverty Guidelines