Dozens of Durham residents experiencing homelessness are now on the path to more permanent housing thanks to a new initiative from the city of Durham.
On Tuesday morning, members of the city’s Community Safety Department met with more than a dozen individuals living in an encampment at Oakwood Park in downtown Durham to offer them interim housing at nearby hotels, with the plan to eventually move those folks into permanent long-term housing within the next year. The outreach effort is part of the department’s five-year plan called the “Strategic Framework to Make Homelessness Rare and Brief.”
All 18 individuals at the park accepted the offer, said Director of Community Safety Ryan Smith.
“Everyone was very happy to move indoors,” Smith said. “Everyone basically gets their own room, their own air conditioning.”
Following the move into temporary housing, individuals and families are paired with a case manager who works with them over the next six weeks as part of a “housing sprint” to establish permanent housing, which could take the form of having their own apartment, living with a roommate, or reuniting with family. Folks remain in the rehousing program for the next year so their case management team can help people collect the resources they need—employment, healthcare—to ensure long-term stability.
“We use a model called critical time intervention, which we view as a critical moment to develop what we call a ‘month 13 plan’ that incorporates the different sorts of elements of sustainability that a person might need to maintain housing,” said Anise Vance, assistant director of the Community Safety Department. “We have this 12-month problem-solving period where we can really figure out what sustainability looks like for this household and what we need to do to get there as a team.”
The Community Safety Department has operated two housing sprints since the beginning of the year, which Vance said served as pilots for the new rehousing program. The first came in February following a series of frigid “white flag” nights when temperatures dropped below freezing and the Triangle was hit with multiple winter storms. Housing partners worked with the city to expand temporary shelter for individuals and families in need, using congregate shelters and hotel rooms. But those families, many with small children, still had no home to return to once the storms had passed.
“None of us wanted to just say, ‘OK, time to leave the hotel, go fend for yourselves,’” Vance said. “We thought, ‘Well, we’ve been working on this concept of a sprint and putting the pieces together for it for a whole year. Let’s try this. This is an emergent situation, let’s see if we can get something done.’”
The outreach team worked closely with Durham housing nonprofits Families Moving Forward and Housing for New Hope during the first sprint, ultimately housing 15 families, while placing an additional three families in noncongregate shelters. For the second sprint in May, 14 additional families were brought into stable housing from different encampments across the city.
“Our selection process, if you will, isn’t necessarily a selection process,” Vance said. “We’re going to be following the queue that’s already established in coordinated entry, starting with folks who are in noncongregate shelter, then moving to folks who are on a street outreach caseload, then the by-name list in sort of that sequence, and that’ll be the order that we’ll move through.”
Extenuating circumstances, like at Oakwood Park, could push an encampment higher up on the priority list.
“There’ll also be moments where, if there is an encampment that is a significant public safety or public health risk, that we might move to resolve that encampment sooner rather than later,” Vance said.
Oakwood Park, which is now temporarily closed for cleaning and repairs, has been a flash point in Durham’s efforts to end homelessness.
Over the past several months, encampments have regularly sprouted up at Oakwood Park before being uprooted by city staff, only to return a few weeks later. Throughout this cycle, neighbors and social justice advocates have held similarly conflicted positions as city officials on how to manage the park. Nearby families want a safe place for their kids to play and have raised concerns about criminal activity at Oakwood, but those same neighbors, and other outspoken residents, feel the city hasn’t done enough to fix the root cause: People in the encampments have nowhere else to go.
Tasha Melvin has been working with Families Moving Forward, a temporary housing shelter next door to Oakwood Park, for 16 years. She noticed tents popping up in the park in the last year after construction in the neighborhood took away other frequent gathering spaces, including empty parking lots and other parklets, where folks previously made camp.
The park is also only a block from Urban Ministries of Durham, a homeless shelter and community resource center, as well as the downtown Durham library branch, where individuals often seek daytime shelter to escape the heat or use the bathroom. The proximity to services likely made Oakwood an attractive destination, said Melvin.
Like other neighbors, Melvin said she recognizes the difficult balancing act between protecting the park’s intended use while also supporting unhoused neighbors with limited options.
“This is a park where kids should go and be able to be kids,” Melvin said.
Families Moving Forward offers 20 rooms at any given time to families with children, with a consistent waitlist of about 30 families the last few years. Many of the children who stay at Families Moving Forward use Oakwood Park. Last month, someone broke into the Families Moving Forward building. Melvin said they could not confirm the identity of the burglar, but the increased activity at Oakwood forced Melvin and her staff to confront the situation in the park more directly.
“Once the criminal activity started to intensify and created more concerns for all of our neighbors here in the Cleveland-Holloway community, then it was time for me to raise my voice and say we need to do something,” Melvin said. “I don’t want to criminalize folks who just need a place to call home.”
Melvin was one of the partners who worked with the Community Safety Department to develop the homelessness plan. Families Moving Forward also works to place families who come through its program into more permanent housing within 90 days of joining. The city’s homelessness plan is designed to bring the various organizations serving the unhoused population under one roof to accomplish everyone’s shared goal of reducing homelessness to a rare and brief occurrence.
“We cannot continue to work in silos,” Melvin said. “That has been the problem that we’ve faced in the past. You have nonprofits working alone, you have the city working alone, the county. We have to pull together and work together. I am excited that we actually have a framework with objectives in front of us that we’re working to achieve. I appreciate the city’s leadership in pulling us together.”
In the first year of the strategic plan, $13 million has been invested between public and private funding. As the program looks to scale in the future, it will rely on a variety of funding sources to expand its reach.
“We feel like we’re at a point now where we’ve done this a couple of times, we’ve learned from a lot of different cities, we’ve done a lot of different work internally in the system and refining processes,” Vance said. “We’ve restructured our staff. We feel like we’re really in a good position to make this process work in a systematic, ongoing fashion. The question is around funding for this kind of initiative.”
Initiatives like the city’s homelessness plan could be even more vital in the near future. House Bill 437, which passed the state House and Senate before being vetoed by Gov. Josh Stein, would ban camping on public property outside of specially designated areas. The state legislature is likely to override the governor’s veto, putting the bill into law, and taking effect next summer.
The legislature has not signaled any plans to financially support local communities in their efforts to mitigate homelessness, though. But even with the looming legislation, Vance and the Community Safety Department are staying the course. In just six months, it’s clear to his team that they have a formula worth investing in.
“When [street outreach] first arrived, somebody was not so happy that they were there that early,” Vance said. “One of our teammates told the person, ‘After you hear what we have to say, you’re going to smile.’ They delivered the offer, and then he saw the person start smiling, and they started laughing at each other because it was such good news. … The whole thing, from when the offers were made to when folks were in transportation on their way to interim housing, took less than two hours.”
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