Regional approach needed to ‘eliminate’ homelessness, officials say

Critics of the plan say the population of homeless people isn’t static, that governments need to work together to find the most effective solutions and worry that people who refuse the city’s offer of housing or services will be taken to jail.

DeKalb Commissioner Ted Terry, whose Super District 6 includes the parts of the city, noted the county refers more than 200 people per year to the Salvation Army’s Red Shield homeless shelter in downtown Atlanta.

“If other communities are sending people to downtown Atlanta at the same time Atlanta is trying to move people out of downtown, you know, how is any of that going to work?” Terry said. “We’re just moving people around like little ping-pong balls.”

Of the strategy, he added: “It will work if we’re working together.”

Credit: Steve Schaefer/AJC

Credit: Steve Schaefer/AJC

Cathryn Vassell is chief executive officer of Partners for HOME, a nonprofit that coordinates the city’s strategy to combat homelessness. She has said Downtown Rising is a “coordinated effort” that involved neighborhood, civic and nonprofit organizations.

Neighboring jurisdictions, Vassell said, need to “advance, invest in and accelerate solutions for homelessness as well, so that people don’t have to go from one jurisdiction to another to access emergency services.”

Of the 908 homeless people referred to the DeKalb County Regional Crisis Center last year, more than one-third of them came from the city of Atlanta, said Fabio van der Merwe, chief executive officer of Claratel Behavioral Health, DeKalb’s community services board that runs the crisis center. More than half came from DeKalb, he said.

Even though Claratel assists homeless people who leave downtown Atlanta, van der Merwe said he has not been invited to any of the Downtown Rising planning meetings. He learned details about it from coverage in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“Sometimes when we have encampments that get cleared in the city, we’ll have people come to our crisis center from those encampments as referrals because they need crisis stabilization,” van der Merwe said.

Likewise, he said people who are stabilized at Claratel could benefit from housing opportunities being offered in the city.

“What Partners for HOME is doing impacts the entire region,” van der Merwe said.

DeKalb has been making strides toward addressing homelessness in the county, but some of those solutions are years away from fruition.

This year, the Board of Commissioners approved a resolution, sponsored by Terry and Commissioner Michelle Long Spears, to establish a homelessness plan that takes a “housing first” approach. The county approved $8 million to secure 60 apartments to serve unhoused and housing-insecure families. And DeKalb recently hired its first chief housing officer.

Claratel hopes to eventually open a new facility in DeKalb with an additional 30 crisis stabilization beds, 20 temporary observation beds, and 24 beds for a transitional housing residential program with on-site services like therapy, psychiatric care and case management.

Van der Merwe said the county has approved $15 million for the project, adding that he hopes the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities will contribute another $10 million.

In the meantime, the county is finding shelter for people where it can.

DeKalb’s Community Development Department, which operates the county’s Continuum of Care, made a total of 496 referrals to the Salvation Army shelter in downtown Atlanta in 2023 and 2024, said Allen Mitchell, director of the department. This year, as of July 31, there have been 196 referrals.

Mitchell said the county also refers people to other shelters that are under contract with the county; most of those are in the city.

The Salvation Army’s Red Shield shelter has 321 beds and stays full most of the time, said Maj. Thomas McWilliams, metro Atlanta’s area commander for the Salvation Army. A planned expansion will bring the number of beds to 437.

Some people who leave the downtown shelter after being referred from DeKalb end up staying outside in the city, which is at odds with Downtown Rising’s goal of ending homelessness in that area.

Jack Hardin, co-chair of the United Way Regional Commission on Homelessness and a board member for Partners for HOME, dismissed the criticism of how Downtown Rising was rolled out.

“You get a lot of opinions from people who only have half the information,” he said.

Downtown Rising, Hardin said, is focused on housing people, not sending them to DeKalb or elsewhere. Encampments are only closed when there are enough places to shelter their residents, he said.

Hardin, who also founded the Gateway Center, said he has been “intimately involved” in planning for Atlanta Rising, a long-term effort to “end unsheltered homelessness in Atlanta” of which Downtown Rising is a part.

Still, Hardin acknowledged the closure of downtown to outdoor sleeping might prompt some to decide: “‘Hey, I’ve got to get out of here’” and move to DeKalb or another jurisdiction.

“But it goes the other way, too,” Hardin added, suggesting that people also could flock to an encampment closure in the city in hopes of being housed.

Pitts, in a statement from a spokesperson, said Fulton County is not “responsible for homeless services” but provides support by working with community groups and funding homeless assessment centers that provide wraparound services. The county has also invested “substantially” in the Center for Diversion & Services in an effort to keep homeless people out of jail, and instead refer them to services including housing and mental health.

Of the approximately 4,000 unhoused people in Fulton County, roughly 3,000 reside in the city of Atlanta, Pitts said.

Failed regional approach

Metro Atlanta once had a regional approach to homelessness, at least in name.

The city of Atlanta, DeKalb County and Fulton County all used to be under a single continuum of care known as the Metro Atlanta Tri-Jurisdictional Collaborative on Homelessness, or the Tri-J, which formed in the mid-1990s, Hardin said.

But officials in the three jurisdictions did not collaborate well and the Tri-J collapsed, he said. Fulton and DeKalb each formed their own continuum of care, and Partners for HOME was founded a decade ago to run the city’s.

Spears, the District 2 DeKalb commissioner, said she only learned about Downtown Rising from the AJC’s coverage.

She recently organized a trip for metro Atlanta officials to Houston and San Antonio to observe how those areas address homelessness. She said Atlanta should consider forming one continuum of care to include the city and the counties of Fulton, DeKalb, Clayton, Gwinnett and Cobb.

Spears, who grew up in unstable housing and was briefly homeless, said she wants to explore “new ways to align our priorities, our goals, our funding and certainly with data and resource sharing.”

Credit: Photo contributed by the candidate

Credit: Photo contributed by the candidate

Hardin said he opposed the breakup of the Tri-J and agrees there should be a regional approach “because people do move from DeKalb to Atlanta, to Gwinnett.”

Across metro Atlanta, Hardin said he is hopeful collaboration will increase now that Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens is chair of the board of the Atlanta Regional Commission, known as the ARC, a group that oversees long-range planning around issues like transportation, homelessness, workforce development and water resources management.

“I think we have the best chance we’ve ever had to get more effective regionally,” Hardin said, adding that Dickens is “knowledgeable and supportive regarding homeless issues.”

In late June, the ARC held its first Regional Assembly of Public Officials, a gathering of elected leaders across more than 70 cities and the 11 counties it represents from the metro area.

Dickens, in remarks during the event in Cobb County, told attendees that “collaboration isn’t just nice to have, it is a must have.”

“None of us work in isolation,” the mayor said, two weeks after the AJC broke news about the Downtown Rising strategy. “What happens in one part of the region affects the rest of the region, and our biggest challenges are regional in scope.

“Think about it, things like traffic, housing costs, air quality, homelessness. Those things don’t just stop at the city or county line.”

Tonisha Hines is one of the innumerable people whose journey in homelessness crossed jurisdictional boundaries.

Hines grew up in Lithonia and lived on the streets from 2013 to 2015. Hines said she was staying in a shelter for women and children in the city of Atlanta, while going to therapy in DeKalb County when she was placed in permanent supportive housing, which involves long-term leases or rental assistance and consistent supportive services for issues like mental illness and substance use.

That was a decade ago. Now, the 39-year-old Hines lives in a community in Scottdale run by Claratel.

“There is help out there, if you want it,” Hines said. “And the people who sleep up under the bridge and things like that, to be honest, they have a choice.

“I’m not saying that there’s a whole bunch of help,” she added, “because there could be better help.”