Allison Geyer
Gina Watanabe and her children Paisley, Toby and Autumn (from left) are off the streets thanks to Housing First.
Homelessness can happen to anyone.
It’s a lesson Gina Watanabe learned in 2012 after her husband of eight years — a military man — developed schizophrenia. When the marriage ended, she and her three young children had to leave the army base in Colorado where they had been living. They moved in with Watanabe’s aging mother in her small apartment in Middleton, but the arrangement didn’t last.
“When we left my mom’s place, we had nowhere to go,” Watanabe says. “We were completely homeless.”
For about a year, the family of four lived out of their car and on friends’ floors and couches around the Madison area. Sometimes Watanabe would drive all night while the children slept, looking for a safe place to park. She would drop her oldest children, now ages 8 and 9, off at school in the morning — often in clothes they had been wearing for days. During the day, she passed time in the car with her youngest daughter, now 3, singing songs and playing games.
“We weren’t living day-to-day,” she says. “We were living minute-to-minute.”
Watanabe tried looking for part-time jobs that offered child care, but a medical condition similar to narcolepsy makes it difficult for her to be a reliable employee. She briefly went back to school for legal studies and was doing well in her classes until her ex-husband found out where the family was living and attempted to get custody of the children. Unable to afford a lawyer, Watanabe put her legal skills to work. She got to keep her children, but her resources were exhausted.
“The more we tried to hold on,” she recalls, “the more it all fell apart.”
As the nights started getting colder, Watanabe panicked. She checked into a shelter at the Road Home Dane County and learned of its one-year program that provides homeless families with rent assistance and supportive case management services. Rapid Rehousing is a collaboration with YWCA Madison, the Salvation Army and the United Way of Dane County. It follows the Housing First model — an evidence-based approach to combating homelessness that has proven successful in numerous communities nationwide. It’s a model that’s now gaining traction here.
The Housing First approach focuses on getting people into stable, permanent housing as quickly as possible while providing comprehensive services to support them as they get back on their feet. Without the stress of life on the streets or in a shelter and with a support system in place, people are better equipped to recover from the challenges that led them to homelessness in the first place.
The United Way was the first local agency to adopt a Housing First approach, about eight years ago, says Martha Cranley, the United Way’s Housing First coordinator. And the program is a success — close to 80% of families are able to stay housed after the program ends, and more than 70% after the second year.
“That’s really tremendous for any kind of practice,” Cranley says.
The approach also has fiscal benefits. Numerous studies have shown that providing housing for the homeless is actually less expensive for taxpayers. A chronically homeless person can cost communities between $30,000 and $50,000 per year in emergency services, according to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. Individuals in permanent housing with supportive services cuts the cost to about $20,000 per year.
Mayor Paul Soglin has long been a proponent of Housing First, adopting various elements of the model over the last several years as the city invested in affordable housing initiatives.
But Soglin says a number of factors prevent fully implementing a Housing First approach here — the difficult of acquiring closed-out funding from tax incremental funding (TIF) districts, the challenge of getting tax credits in place and the process of reviewing developers and submissions.
Beyond the administrative challenges, local efforts to combat homelessness have focused on supporting individuals living on the streets and operating temporary shelters, Soglin says.
“The strategy of supporting people on the streets without effective rules has two impacts that are adverse,” Soglin says. “First, it attracts the chronically homeless, very troubled people to the city; and second, it’s contrary to what we know are the effective practices.”
But Housing First efforts gained momentum this summer, with city and county officials partnering with state, federal and private partners to build new facilities.
Workers broke ground earlier this month on a first-of-its-kind supportive housing complex on Madison’s east side that will provide studio apartment homes and supportive services for the chronically homeless, including at least 25 veterans. The four-story, 60-unit building behind the Aloha Inn on Rethke Avenue will be ready for occupants by early next year and will provide onsite mental health and case management services.
The project involves the combined resources of the city of Madison, Dane County and the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority, as well as Heartland Housing, Heartland Health Outreach, U.S. Bank, BMO Harris, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, the Home Depot Foundation and Enterprise Community Partners.
The Rethke project is the first of several Housing First developments on the horizon. Dane County has earmarked $2 million in funds for housing initiatives and is in the midst of a request-for-proposal process focusing on affordable rental housing, more cooperative housing and transitional housing for criminal offenders reentering society.
“This is part of a comprehensive approach that we have on so many levels,” Dane County Executive Joe Parisi says. “There’s no one solution, and no one entity can handle it by themselves.”
Brenda Konkel, a housing activist and homeless advocate, calls the momentum behind Housing First the “biggest step in the right direction” that the city has taken in addressing homelessness in the last 20 years. But more work is needed.
“For Housing First to work, a lot of things have to come together,” she cautions. “This can’t just be the homeless service providers. This really has to be the hospitals, the landlords, the mental health, alcohol and drug treatment providers.”
For Watanabe, the local commitment to Housing First has helped her family achieve a sense of security and community in their new home near South Towne Mall. Their neat, sunny apartment overlooks a courtyard jungle gym where the kids can play. Watanabe loves the privacy and freedom that comes from finally having her own space.
They are just getting settled in — the kids still need dressers, and a stack of family photos is sitting on a coffee table waiting to be hung on the walls. Other belongings remain packed in bags — a remnant of shelter living, Watanabe says. She’s not sure where the family will be in a year, but when the Road Home program ends, she knows she’ll have a good reference.
“For now, it feels awesome,” Watanabe says, seated in her new living room. “We feel safe.”
