Housing

The smell of coffee filled the air on a recent Thursday morning in Carpenter’s Shelter, a homeless shelter here, as about a dozen people milled about.

Two U.S. Army veterans were among them: a middle-aged man and woman who aren’t looking for a permanent place to live. They said the food, showers and services at the shelter are enough, for now.

The Obama administration, in June 2014, challenged local governments to find a home for all veterans who want one by the end of this month. At least nine states and 850 municipalities tried to meet the goal, but Virginia and 15 municipalities were the only ones that succeeded.

But even there, hundreds of veterans remain homeless, most often because they have mental health or substance abuse problems, or just want to live on the street. In Virginia, the two at Carpenter’s Shelter are among about 600 homeless veterans. There are hundreds more in the municipalities that met the goal — in Alabama, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas.

The goal did not require municipalities to show that all veterans had been housed — just to prove they could quickly provide shelter, if needed. And even in places that did find a home for most veterans, some of them found themselves on the street again.

Challenges
The fact that so few cities, and just one state, have met the challenge points to just how complex the issue is.

At Carpenter’s Shelter, staff comes at it with “a heavy dose of optimism, with some pragmatism, as well,” said Shannon Steene, the shelter’s director.

“They didn’t get here overnight,” he said, “and they probably aren’t going to get out of it overnight.”

In many of the states that still have thousands of homeless veterans on the streets — the largest populations are in California, Florida, New York and Texas — the biggest challenge is there simply isn’t enough affordable and suitable housing, people who work with homeless populations say. That’s a problem not just for the homeless, but for many middle-class families, and it’s one homeless advocates cannot solve on their own.

In San Diego, California, for instance, at least 200 veterans who have housing vouchers that would pay some of their rent aren’t able to find apartments because the vacancy rate is so low, said Phil Landis, president and CEO of Veterans Village of San Diego. The nonprofit has been helping homeless veterans since the 1980s.

“The greatest hurdle here isn’t the outreach and the motivation, it’s in finding suitable housing,” Landis said.

Success Stories
Cities large and small met the federal milestone this year. Philadelphia, with a population of about 1.6 million, announced Friday that it met the goal. Troy, New York, a city of about 50,000, met the goal in September.

Virginia, the first and only state to reach the goal, and New Orleans, the first city to do it, used similar tactics to attack the problem. They employed a “housing first” strategy of getting veterans off the streets, out of shelters, and into stable housing as the first step in trying to bring stability to their lives.

Local governments joined with advocacy groups to enlist a swarm of volunteers who walked the streets and visited shelters, handing out fliers and encouraging veterans to take advantage of the programs.

They made lists of the names of each veteran living on the street or in a shelter, and tried to help them one by one. And they checked back often.

Organizers convinced landlords to house the veterans, and gave the veterans vouchers to use to pay rent for as long as they need. Some nonprofits even signed their leases for them.

That’s known as “master leasing,” and Pamela Michell, director of New Hope Housing, an Alexandria nonprofit that uses the approach, said it provides residents and landlords with a go-between, should any problems arise.

The work is ongoing. Shelter workers continue to try to build relationships with veterans who still don’t have a roof over their heads, urging them to get off the streets and to get help with the problems that keep them from being permanently housed.

“I try to encourage them,” said Sharon Addison, coordinator of the day program at Carpenter’s Shelter in Alexandria. “I say, ‘The new year is coming up. The shelter’s next door, whose gonna go next year?’ Sometimes they go, sometimes they don’t.”

Addison gave both of the veterans who were in the shelter on that Thursday morning information about services weeks ago.

One of them, Aaron McCullough, 55, stays at the shelter some nights despite the fact he is paying $90 a week to rent a small room in a house in Fairfax, Virginia, a 20-minute bus ride away.

The shelter is closer to where he works. He said he would try to find a more permanent place, but he “doesn’t think it will work. It’s too complicated, or something. I’m saving money.”

The federal push to house homeless veterans also encourages the housing first approach of first providing shelter, before the underlying reasons for their homelessness — such as mental illness or drug addiction — can be addressed. Seventy percent of homeless veterans have substance abuse problems and half have a serious mental illness, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

Virginia and Louisiana had both signed on to this strategy before the national effort to focus on homeless veterans. The model has often demonstrated that people are more likely to succeed when given a stable place to call home, according to a joint study by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans.

Much of New Orleans’ progress was a result of the rapid re-housing system it put in place after Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, said Martha Kegel, director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, the nonprofit that has led homelessness efforts in the city since then. Rapid re-housing, like housing first, focuses on quick housing as the first step of intervention, but it focuses on homeless people with moderate needs only, not the chronically homeless.

What New Orleans did became a model for other municipalities across the state, and it was largely successful. In Louisiana, the number of homeless veterans fell more than in any other state from 2011 to 2015, by 58.7 percent, to 392.

In Virginia, the number fell by 35.1 percent, to 604.

National Progress
This kind of progress has been seen nationwide. The number of homeless veterans living on the streets or in shelters fell by 27 percent, to 47,504, according to the annual count by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released last month.

Colorado, Louisiana, New York and Texas made the most headway, all cutting their numbers by more than half. Even in California, where the average cost of monthly rent is 50 percent higher than in the rest of the country, the number of homeless veterans fell by 32.6 percent, to 11,311. Local groups say the decline came as federal funding funneled into their communities. In 2009, the VA made ending veteran homelessness a priority, and in 2014, the VA joined with HUD on new initiatives: the Mayors Challenge to End Veteran Homelessness and the 25 Cities Effort. Federal funding for programs that serve the population more than tripled from fiscal 2009 to 2014, from about $399 million to $1.37 billion, according to the 2015 Congressional Research Service. That included new veteran housing vouchers each year from fiscal 2009 to 2014, totaling $425 million. Appropriations for government-contracted nonprofits that work on housing for veterans totaled about $764 million nationwide from fiscal 2011 to 2014.

States and municipalities that have met the federal goal have proven that they have identified and reached out to all homeless veterans, and have the resources and systems in place to house any homeless veteran who wants to be housed, said Beverley Ebersold, regional coordinator at the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.

The times veterans do face homelessness should be “rare, brief and nonrecurring,” Ebersold said.

Housing First Has its Critics
Housing first, the chief tactic used in the national battle, isn’t without its critics.

Landis, of Veterans Village of San Diego, said that while rapid re-housing is effective overall, it sometimes leaves veterans without the case management and mental health services they need.

His group runs a Veterans Treatment Center for those with substance abuse and mental health issues that provides case management and individual counseling. The organization receives about $2.4 million from the VA for the program, which funds 165 beds in the center. Those beds are always full, Landis said. But with the focus on housing first, he has heard that the money will soon dry up.

He and others in the city were upset to see the number of homeless veterans in San Diego rise from 2014 to 2015, from 1,307 to 1,381, despite their focused effort and increased funding.

He suspects the increase may be due, in part, to people who have been rapidly re-housed, without receiving the services they need to succeed.

“We don’t disagree that housing first has enormous positive impact,” Landis said. “But for those vets seeking treatment there should be at least one place in America where they can get it.”

Read Original Article – December 21, 2015
Cities, States Fight Veteran Homelessness

Five local Native dance groups organized a fundraiser Monday night, raising about $32,000 for Juneau’s shelter and soup kitchen. About 400 people attended and contributed money to the Glory Hole through donations, silent auction, fry bread sales, dancing, raffle and a $9,500 matching donation by the Rasmuson Foundation.

Nancy Barnes is head of the Yees Ku.oo dance group. She helped organize the fundraiser with Kolene James, who was inspired by a Juneau Empire story on the Glory Hole’s financial deficit. Barnes was blown away by how much the event raised in two hours.

“I don’t think anybody thought we were going to make that much money. Somebody said, ‘What’s your goal?’ And I was saying, ‘If we raised $5,000 just to help them have a wonderful Christmas that will be great,'” Barnes said.

The other dance groups at the fundraiser were Ldakát Naax Satí Yátx’í (All Nations Children), Eagle/Raven Dancers, Yaaw Tei Yi and Woosh.ji.een.

The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska donated planning space and the Elizabeth Peratrovich Hall for the event. President Richard Peterson said the Central Council was happy to help.

“Our culture is about holding each other up and the Glory Hole is an entity that’s always holding our people up, so it’s time when they’re hurting to give back and help them out,” Peterson said.

Glory Hole Executive Director Mariya Lovishchuk said the funds raised Monday night, plus other donations, will close the $58,000 deficit the shelter was in when the story ran in the newspaper earlier this month.

Lovishchuk said the deficit was largely due to a burst pipe that flooded and closed down the shelter last December. The inside of the building had to be rebuilt. The shelter has also been focusing more on getting the Housing First project built than on fundraising.

Lovishchuk said she can’t say thank you enough to the dance groups, community organizations and people who contributed to Monday’s fundraiser.

“This is beyond gratitude. This was a really amazing thing and it really ensures that we’re going to be able to meet our mission of providing everyone in need of food, shelter and compassion. It also means that we’ll keep on working on the Juneau Housing First project and making it a reality,” Lovishchuk said.

She said it’s an honor to be supported by the Alaska Native community and to start the New Year on a positive note.

Utah has housed nearly all of its chronically homeless people — those who have a disabling condition, and who have been homeless for more than a year, or four times in the past three years. These days, there are fewer than 200.

But chronic homelessness is just a small part of a major problem.

An additional 14,000 people in Utah experienced homelessness this year. As in many places around the country, housing prices are rising, forcing people onto the street and into shelters.

The streets outside the Salt Lake City shelter The Road Home are still bustling with activity — people waiting for a free meal, or looking for a room inside.

Jennifer Carter has been living at the shelter with her two children, who are 5 and 7, for about two months.

The Carters share a room with roughly 200 other people, all families, at the shelter. The room is full of steel bunk beds with thin mattresses. Carter says people who live at the shelter call them “jail beds.”

“I sleep on the bottom, and I let [the kids] sleep on top,” Carter says. “Most of the time, my youngest sleeps with me.”

Plastic bins full of clothes, shoes, fleece blankets and jars of peanut butter are stacked on the bunks.

Carter, who is 30, has a degree in business management and accounting. She used to have a job answering phones. But when her work hours were changed to evenings, Carter says, she couldn’t afford child care.

So she quit and worked odd jobs but couldn’t make rent.

“I tried to talk to the landlord about making an arrangement,” Carter says. “I had most of the money, but I still needed a little. And so I was like, ‘Can you wait till Wednesday?’ And she told me if I didn’t have [the rent] by Friday I had to leave.”

Carter was evicted.

At that point, she went to the shelter. It was the second time the family has been homeless this year.

Carter’s children keep going to school, but, Carter says, living at the shelter has been tough on them.

“The hardest thing is like they’re tired because it’s loud,” Carter says. “There’s a lot of people. There’s a lot of crying babies. It’s loud, they don’t get a lot of sleep.”

But Carter has a plan. While the kids are at school she works the computers and phones at the shelter.

“My strategy is I do 10 job [applications] a day,” Carter says. “And I call 10 of the previous week.”

But she’s worried that even if she gets a job and even if she can leave the shelter, she might not be able to afford everything — like rent, food, clothes, toiletries and utilities.

“Even [when] I was making $13.50 an hour. My rent was almost $900 a month for a two-bedroom,” she says.

And then there’s after-school care for her two children.

“They would have to go to day care for two hours, [and] that was $800 a month for both of them,” says Carter.

How is she going to handle all of those expenses?

“I don’t really know,” she says.

Carter has now moved to another Road Home facility, just outside Salt Lake City in Midvale. She’s also is in the process of getting assistance called Rapid Re-Housing. Many cities and states are using the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development-sponsored program, which gives people just enough money to get a place to live.

The idea is it costs less to pay a family’s security deposit and first month’s rent than it does to keep the family in a shelter for months and months.

But as housing prices continue to rise, in Utah and in most major cities across the U.S., this won’t work long-term, says Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

“A better solution would be to have more longer-term rental subsidies,” says Roman. “But we don’t have them. So rapid rehousing is better than leaving people in shelter.”

The real need, Roman says, is simply more affordable places for people to live.

Officials in Utah agree the need is urgent.

“The market is very, very tight,” says Janice Kimball, executive director of the Housing Authority of the County of Salt Lake. “And we’re seeing a lot of lower-income people get priced out of the market. … We just don’t have enough affordable housing at any level.”

According to Roman, this lack of affordable housing is a newer problem.

“When I started working on housing and urban issues in the 1970s, we really did not have widespread homelessness at all,” says Roman, “and that’s because there was an adequate supply of affordable housing.”

Roman says a big part of the problem is inaction from both developers and politicians.

“It’s a mystery as to why there’s not more attention paid to it,” says Roman. “Congress regularly ranks housing as one of the things that they’re least interested in pursuing or working on. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of political will around it, and it’s hard to see, with 560,000 homeless people on any given night, how bad things have to get before we decide to do something about it.”

The federal government has a plan to end family and youth homelessness in five years.

But with housing costs and rents continuing to go up all around the country, getting people housed keeps getting harder.

 

Juneau’s city manager is making changes to key leadership positions. Shortly after the New Year, Deputy City Manager Rob Steedle will be the Director of Community Development and Human Resources Director Mila Cosgrove will move into the deputy city manager role.

Steedle has been serving as interim head of community development since former director Hal Hart left in September. City Manager Kim Kiefer said after two rounds of recruitment, no one in the applicant pool was a good fit.

“Then I looked at Rob and he knows what is needed both internally and externally to continue to move economic development forward in our community,” Kiefer said.

As community development director, Steedle will oversee the department responsible for the city’s land use laws, including building and zoning codes. For Steedle, the job change is a voluntary demotion.

To fill the deputy city manager position, Kiefer appointed Cosgrove.

“Her skill set, her understanding of the departments – because she’s the HR director, she touches all departments within the city and she has a good understanding of our workforce,” Kiefer said.

The manager and the deputy city manager split supervision duties of department heads. The deputy city manager also assists the assembly, fills in as acting city manager when needed and serves as the city’s hearing officer for parking violations, among other duties.

Kiefer says Cosgrove will also help with the transition to a new city manager. Kiefer originally planned to retire at the end of this month, but extended her time through the end of April. The city has already gone through one recruitment period and is set to start a new one soon.

To fill the human resources director opening, Kiefer has the option to appoint someone or go out for a new hire. The city’s HR director is also head of HR for Bartlett Regional Hospital.

Kiefer also announced a brand new city job – chief housing officer.

“That person will be a very outward focused person, really working with developers and lenders and contractors to build housing in this community, a variety of different kind of housing and maybe bring in new ideas on how we can do it possibly different than how we’re doing it to bring more stock out there,” Kiefer said.

The chief housing officer job announcement is open until filled. The salary ranges between $92,000 and $98,000 annually.

A decade ago, Utah set itself an ambitious goal: end chronic homelessness.

As of 2015, the state can just about declare victory: The population of chronically homeless people has dropped by 91 percent.

The state’s success story has generated headlines around the country, and even The Daily Show With Jon Stewart has looked to Utah to understand how the state achieved its goal.

In fact, Utah still has a substantial homeless problem. The overall homeless population is around 14,000.

The chronically homeless, on the other hand, are a subset of the homeless population that is often the most vulnerable. These are people who have been living on the streets for more than a year, or four times in the last three years, and who have a “disabling condition” — that includes serious mental illness, an addiction or a physical disability or illness.

According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, that represents about 20 percent of the national homeless population.

By implementing a model known as Housing First, Utah has reduced that number from nearly 2,000 people in 2005, to fewer than 200 now.

‘I’m Gonna Lay In The Bathtub For About A Week’

Kim Evans is one of those few who remains chronically homeless. And his life is about to change.

Right now he lives outside of Salt Lake City, in the woods next to a highway.

Amanda Lee and Sanela Piragic, outreach workers from the nonprofit Volunteers of America, regularly visit him at his encampment.

Evans has cleared out a lot of the trees there himself. He says he likes to think of this place as his own park. He is 54 years old, but looks a lot older.

He has a tent with a fence around it made of wood, piles of tarp, and grocery carts full of stuff he collects. He wears a good new winter coat, which was donated. He says he’s been living outside for five years.

“Too long,” says Amanda Lee, one of the outreach workers.

Evans agrees.

He has a bad back injury and has struggled with drugs and alcohol. When he talks, he’s a little hard to understand. He said he’s had a stroke and is missing some teeth.

But any day now, he’s about to get his own apartment, mostly paid for by the federal government. He says he doesn’t want to spend another winter in the woods.

“Now that the trees are thinner, it’s even colder,” Evans says. “I’m gonna lay in the bathtub for about a week.”

Under a previous anti-homelessness model, Kim Evans would’ve had to prove he was sober and drug free before he could get housing and take that warm bath. Or he might have just stayed homeless.

Under Utah’s Housing First approach, he’ll get housed with few questions asked.

A Doubter Becomes Director Of Housing First Efforts

The idea of Housing First is that housing comes first, services later. Clients do have to pay some rent — either 30 percent of income or up to $50 a month, whichever is greater.

A similar approach was first tried in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and New York City in the early 1990s.

Later, the Bush administration adopted the model, and cities and states started writing 10-year plans to end chronic homelessness.

“And I said you guys are smoking something, because there’s no way on this earth that you’re going to end homelessness,” says Lloyd Pendleton, who at the time ran humanitarian services for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

He says as a conservative, he didn’t think the government should simply give people a place to live.

“Because I was raised as a cowboy in the west desert,” Pendleton says, “and I have said over the years, ‘You lazy bums, get a job, pull yourself up by the bootstraps.'”

Then in 2003, Lloyd Pendleton went to a conference on homelessness in Chicago.

At that conference, a founder of the Housing First philosophy, Sam Tsemberis, told him that chronically homeless people cost the government a lot of money when they’re living on the street, because of services like emergency room visits and jail time.

HUD estimates that annual cost as between $30,000 and $50,000 per person.

Housing them simply costs a lot less.

On the way home Pendleton says he sat in a window seat on the plane.

“And as we flew out and we flew through the clouds,” Pendleton says, “I can remember looking out at the clouds and saying, ‘Lloyd if there’s any state in the union that can accomplish this, it’s the state of Utah.'”

Back in Utah, he helped launch a pilot project in Salt Lake City that housed 17 of the hardest cases and provided them with services. Almost two years later, Pendleton says, all those people remained housed.

“Political people became believers, because it worked in Salt Lake City,” Pendleton says.

Pendleton eventually became the director of the state’s Homeless Task Force. And he got everybody all the way up to the governor on board.

According to Pathways to Housing National, Utah was the first to take the Housing First model statewide.

And even though many cities in the U.S. have also been doing this for a while, they still come to Utah to study why it’s working so well here.

“I get probably two to five calls a week now, wanting to know how we did it, what’s unique about Utah,” says Pendleton, “because it can be done.”

What Powered Utah’s Success

Advocates and officials say a few factors helped Utah near its goal of ending chronic homelessness.

For one, Utah is small. Ten years ago, when the efforts first started, there were nearly 2,000 chronically homeless people in Utah. By comparison, there are currently more than 29,000 chronically homeless individuals in California.

Second, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has significant influence in Utah, was a big supporter of Housing First.

As well, Utah had a champion in Lloyd Pendleton — someone who believed in the idea and was willing to push politicians and advocates to go along.

And finally, most of the advocates and agencies in Utah know each other and work well with each other. They also know most of the homeless people by name.

Matching The Homeless With Homes

Every Tuesday in Salt Lake City, people in all the organizations that work with the chronically homeless gather in a small meeting room at a nonprofit called The Road Home.

On a recent Tuesday, Kevin Austin, the group’s housing supervisor, looks through a list of 86 chronically homeless people in the Salt Lake region who qualify for housing.

Even though Utah is committed to Housing First, there still isn’t enough housing for every one of the chronically homeless. And so the group has to assess need, and match the right apartment opening with the right person.

(For privacy reasons, NPR is not revealing clients’ names.)

For instance, there’s an opening at a group living site with shared bathrooms. Austin notes they need a candidate who is male and “plays semi-nice with others.”

One person recommends a name from the list. And just before the group is ready to finalize that decision and move on, Ed Snoddy, who does medical outreach for Volunteers of America, a faith-based nonprofit, speaks up.

“He is notoriously dealing (drugs) right now,” says Snoddy.

“Yeah, let’s not do that then,” says Austin.

The group agrees that this individual does not play nice with others, and isn’t right for this particular apartment. For now, his name stays on the list.

The group works through a few more openings, trying to balance the needs of people living on the street, with the housing they have available.

After the meeting, Austin says those decisions are tough.

“When we comb through and we’re picking out three people from this list of 86,” Austin says, “it does kind of suck to know that we left 83 people on that list that don’t have an option — or at least a permanent option right now. But (for) those three people, that’s their lifeblood.”

Adjusting To A New Home, And A New Life

Grace Mary Manor is a two-story building with hallways lined with doors to studio apartments. It’s one place in Salt Lake City where chronically homeless people are placed in housing, and it provides services like counseling on site.

Joe Ortega has been living at Grace Mary Manor for six months.

He has a 1,000-piece puzzle laid out in his room.

“It’s my new addiction,” says Ortega. “You know, it takes my mind off the old addiction.”

Ortega used to drink a lot and do drugs. He says it’s how he dealt with life on the streets. He was homeless for 20 years. For the past two years he lived under a bridge.

Then one day he started losing movement in his arms and losing his balance. He went to a doctor who told him to get sober.

“That was my first challenge,” says Ortega. “Getting sober was the hardest.”

It was right around this time that outreach workers started telling him that his name had come up, and that he was next on that list to be housed.

But Ortega didn’t believe it. He says he kind of liked living in the streets.

“You think it’s fun, when you first get out there,” says Ortega. “It is fun to an extent. Because you’re like, ‘I’ve got freedom, and I don’t have to answer to a landlord, and don’t have to pay the light bill.’ … And that’s what kind of keeps you out there.”

Eventually the outreach team convinced him that the offer of housing was real.

“I was in shock at first,” says Ortega “It was a little scary. I was scared. And I was like, ‘What am i gonna do alone? I gotta find things to take up my time.'”

This is one challenge with housing the chronically homeless. Advocates say it takes time for people to get used to the fact that they have a home. Some people will sleep in tents, inside their apartments. Some will even go sleep on the streets a few nights a week.

For Joe Ortega, it means getting used to not having to hustle for everything — and getting used to being alone.

Ortega says he spends his days with puzzles or watching documentaries on TV.

“I make the best of every day,” he says.

 

Jobs in rural Alaska are often seen as a career stepping stone. Professionals take a job for a year, maybe two, and leave. They take career skills and experience with them rather than reinvesting in the community. The high turnover rate prevents institutional knowledge from accumulating and community trust in its professionals from strengthening.

How to break the cycle and retain workers is one of rural Alaska’s most vexing puzzles. The community of Bethel thinks it’s got one piece figured out.

Walking into the room, the first thing I notice is the view — a fringe of willows and then miles of snowy tundra. The window belongs to one of six new apartments, specifically constructed for public safety, education and health professionals in Bethel.

The idea is by providing high quality, affordable housing, Bethel can better recruit and retain personnel.

Bethel Community Services Foundation led the project. The group wants to address community issues, and Executive Director Michelle DeWitt says housing sits high on that list.

“When people leave positions here,” DeWitt said, “housing is often at the root of one of their challenges or one of their areas of dissatisfaction. We have a lack of new, appropriate, nice housing.”

These apartments are nice — wood pattern floors and cabinets, modern appliances, high energy conservation ratings and, of course, the scenic views.

Mayor Rick Robb was also impressed.

“Well this is beautiful,” Robb said. “There’s no doubt. Course it’s brand new, all redone, so it’s beautiful. This was kind of a white elephant, kind of an albatross. It’s been totally renovated.”

The building was once a daycare center, left vacant several years ago. The push to revitalize an older building helped attract one of the project’s funders — the Alaska Housing Finance Corporation.

For over a decade, the corporation has funded housing projects for teachers, health professionals and public safety workers across rural Alaska to decrease turnover. So far, the program has shown success with teacher retention.

Derrick Chan is a planner with AHFC and said the key to keeping workers long term is getting them to stay past their first year.

“If a person works in an area beyond that one-year period,” Chan said, “they’re less likely to transition out. We’re really trying to provide an environment where they can call home, and at the end of the day, they have a place to kick their feet up. They feel welcome.”

Bethel City Manager Ann Capela said that initial welcome can make or break a new employee’s first impression.

“This is a true story. We had an employee come, take a job at Bethel. We had no place to put him up for the night. We put him up at the annex. He looked at his surroundings, and he left on the first flight in the morning,” Capela said.

The city’s newest hire, a firefighter EMT, will have a different experience. He arrived this week with his family and moved directly into one of the units. It’s a step up from the fire department’s usual protocol of housing new recruits in the fire station for their first month.

Fire Chief Bill Howell hopes the apartments will attract more workers.

“I would think this is definitely helpful from a recruiting standpoint,” Howell said. “You know, a lot of the times, people have the financial resources to get housing in Bethel, and they just can’t find it.”

DeWitt said she’ll consider the housing successful if people stay past one year.

“I’d be really excited if we had people who were in the units for 18 months to two years,” DeWitt said, “and I’d be even more excited if they left the units to purchase a home in our community. Retention is a really positive thing. When you have quality people in important positions, the outcomes are better for everyone.”

The units opened on Nov. 30 and already four of the six spaces are occupied. Tenants include the firefighter, two police officers, and a community safety patrol officer and their families.