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Been hot lately? If you’re a farmer, you know all about that. Ditto for construction workers, city public works employees, high school kids in the marching band all decked out in their uniforms. But perhaps no group of people is more attuned to changing weather and temperature extremes than those who don’t have a home.
For these folks, where to sleep on any particular night is always an issue, of course. But so is figuring out how to shower and wash clothes, how to protect personal possessions from theft or confiscation, how to take care of relatively minor injuries or illness before they blossom into left-threatening maladies. All those efforts are complicated by extreme heat, such as we’ve been experiencing this summer, but also by extreme cold, snow and ice, as when Staunton was hammered this past winter.
So it’s encouraging, at this summer mid-point, to learn that Staunton’s government, the city’s faith-based community and its social service agencies have finally acknowledged that they have a responsibility to help this most vulnerable segment of our local population. Thanks to the outspoken leadership of several key community leaders and a vigorous fund-raising effort, augmented by a generous allocation of city funds and an outpouring of volunteer support, we can now expect . . . ha-ha-ha! Just kidding. None of that actually happened.
What did happen was very little, and the near-term outlook is for even less than that.
Here’s some of the good stuff. The Valley Mission continues to operate the area’s primary homelessness shelter, supplemented by other organizations providing limited shelter space for women. Trinity Episcopal in downtown Staunton is still serving free lunch each weekday (as does the Mission), thanks to a rotating roster of supporting groups of volunteer cooks and servers. After a fumbling effort last year, a cooling shelter has been open for eight hours each weekday since early July in the basement of Faith Lutheran Church, also in downtown Staunton.
Here’s some not-so-good stuff. Valley Mission continues to sit on a multi-million-dollar windfall it amassed, thanks to a surplus of pandemic funding, with no public indication of how it might use that money to expand its operation. The cooling shelter is scheduled to have its last day Sept. 4, long before daytime highs will be reliably moderate, but not before its volunteer staff dwindles to a fraction of its start-up numbers. The director of the Waynesboro Area Refuge Ministry, which provides overnight shelter in church facilities during the winter months, is stepping down for health reasons—even as church participation in the effort has been declining.
And looming over all of that is the federal government’s attack on social services funding of every description, from SNAP (food stamp) benefits to housing vouchers to Medicaid coverage. Perhaps most egregious, however, may be the Trump administration’s efforts to kick people out of permanent supportive housing and back onto the streets by changing the way the Dept. of House and Urban Development (HUD) grants more than $4 billion to homelessness programs. Although those changes have been enmeshed in months of court challenges and reversals, there still is no clear resolution in sight.
“HUD doesn’t know what’s going on,” said Crystal Stuck, chair of the Valley Homeless Connection (VHC), in a recent conference call of local service providers. “For now, things are going to stay the way they are—but we don’t know what’s coming down the pike.”
Meanwhile, the homelessness situation in our region is only getting worse. Because this past winter’s devastating snow/ice storm essentially torpedoed the annual Point in Time (PIT) census, limiting the count exclusively to sheltered populations, VHC for the first time decided to conduct an additional, summer-time census. Although the statistical analysis of the summer PIT isn’t expected until next month, the raw numbers July 15 were 101 people in shelters in the VHC service area of Augusta, Rockbridge and Highland counties and their cities, as well as 73 people living unsheltered, primarily in tent encampments or cars. That contrasts with 259 people that VHC has on its list of coordinated entry applicants for housing, suggesting that fully a third of the area’s homeless people could not be located.
(By comparison, the local PIT census last year turned up only 156 homeless people, of whom a mere 19 were unsheltered. Then again, the day of that count, Jan. 22, had a high of 22 degrees and a low of 4 degrees in Waynesboro, so once again extreme weather undoubtedly distorted the results.)
According to VHC vice chair Jackson Weatherly, the July PIT counters found “a lot of abandoned encampments” in Staunton and Waynesboro, presumably the result of their occupants being forced to move out. Consequently, he added, “there were many people we were unable to find,” with other homeless people attesting to the existence of new encampments that are staying under the radar. Crunching all the numbers, Weatherly concludes that the SAW region has less than 40% of the shelter space needed for its homeless population.
Moreover, the shortage is more dire for some groups than for others. The Mission, for example, although a local mainstay, does not admit homeless people who are registered sex offenders and cannot accommodate couples or people with pets. Meanwhile, as both local and national statistics attest, the homeless population is aging—according to the PIT count from this past winter, 29% of the sheltered population was 55 or older—which creates additional mobility challenges; half of the Mission’s beds are top bunks that may be inaccessible for much of that group.
So the squeeze is on—more homeless people living in more extreme circumstances but with dwindling prospects for more help. Indeed, it’s fair to say that after a whole lot of talking and hand-wringing locally about the homeless, the local people and institutions that ostensibly were coming to their aid are faltering, at best, and dropping away altogether at worst.
Meanwhile, hard though it may be to envision in mid-August, there is another winter coming.
Looking askance 