Where the Homeless can go for Help in Tacoma, Washington

Recently one of the downtown service centers for the homeless, the Nativity House, has received a bit of attention- and it made me think of the other efforts to help the men, women, and children who are left out of the prosperity we are enjoying at the turn of the millennium.

I went over to see George Zantua, head of New Start, an agency that finds employment for the homeless at 2342 Tacoma Ave. South. New Start was clean inside and out, with a covered outdoors smoking area in back, and a warning sign that it was not to be used for overnight stays. Inside there were about a dozen men and one or two women sitting at a couple long tables in the center of the waiting hall. A man was sitting at one of several computers at one end of the room.

Even though I was a few minutes late, George was happy to talk to me about his agency, which is funded though the Metropolitan Development Council and HUD. When I asked him how many homeless there were in Tacoma, he had to say that it is hard to say. The Homeless Coalition does a count once a year, but "sofa surfers", those who stay with one friend or another for a few days at a time are left out of the count.

Speaking of his own clients, Zantua said, "Lately we've been getting a lot of families," adding that many of those are single parents.

The New Start Program requires enrollees to want to work and to be seeking housing. There is further screening for those who are unemployable due to severe mental illness or drug and alcohol problems.

Out of 900 sign-ups, New Start was able to enroll 400, roughly half of those being families. He observed that most of those families were homeless single women with one or two children.

This is in contrast to six years of experience with HEP, the Homeless Employment Program, where they saw about 3% families.

The overall rise in families could be due to the outreach that his program does, noted Zantua, adding that many of the young single mothers have no education or work experience.

Many of these are sent to New Start by the Work First and Jobs program run by the Department of Social and Health Services, which does not contribute to the funding of New Start in any way. Sometimes New Start, which does not have a jobs training program, will put someone to work in the office, who is paid through the Pierce County Community Action Program.

The system of Find Work First is that the individual is to find a job, then go back to Work First, which will offer training to someone who is working 20 hours a week or more.

On the question of who the homeless are, David Boyd of the King Center said, "Not all are drug addicts- the woman whose arms were cut off by a rapist came through our shelter system. It is not a choice for most people to become homeless. TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) is rated at $642.00 a month for a family of four. Which means that they will most likely live in a single bedroom apartment. And a single mistake of bad financial decision can lose that for them."

The King Center has moved from 18-20 families in the past year from fire department evictions where the landlord got the notice to make improvements, did not notify the tenants or even the manager, and continued to collect rent.

"Now we have formed a task force," says Boyd, "the Human Rights Commission is called by the fire department," so that they can prepare people who are about to lose their homes due to landlord neglect. "The primary reason for homelessness is the lack of affordable housing," says Boyd, who went on, "we have some very dedicated people working for next to nothing," and that donations of all kinds were welcome at the Martin Luther King Center at 1143 Tacoma Ave South.

by David E. Freeman

davidefreeman@yahoo.com

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