‘The beginning of the end for homelessness’
A Greater Lafayette coalition builds, finds new fuel in filmmakers’ vision after screening of ‘Beyond the Bridge’
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A GREATER LAFAYETTE COALITION BUILDS, FINDS NEW FUEL IN FILMMAKERS’ VISION AFTER SCREENING OF ‘BEYOND THE BRIDGE’
Inspired by a pair of filmmakers’ look at homelessness and solutions to get people housed, a call went out Thursday to redouble efforts on that front in Greater Lafayette.
“My hope and prayer for today is that this day marks the beginning of the end for homelessness,” Wes Tillett, executive director of Lafayette Urban Ministry, said after an afternoon screening of “Beyond the Bridge: A Solution to Homelessness” that brought more than 300 people to Connection Point Church in West Lafayette.
The question hanging out there during a panel discussion that followed: How?
“The first step for communities like this one is to develop a table,” Don Sawyer, who directed “Beyond the Bridge” with cinematographer Tim Hashko, told the crowd that filled the church sanctuary.
“There’s always, in every community, a table of people who are working on the issue, but that table needs to be expanded to include city and county government, to include the business community,” Sawyer said, following that by rattling off the faith community, police, judicial system and others. “You need everybody at the table, because everybody’s going to have to have a part and do their role in fixing the problem. That’s the first step. And once you get that table together, you’ll find that it’s much easier to solve than you think.”
The screening Thursday came via the Greater Lafayette Homelessness Steering Committee, a group that includes representation from the two cities, Lafayette Urban Ministry, YWCA, Area IV Agency, Lafayette Housing Authority, LTHC Homeless Services, Purdue, Valley Oaks Health and others.
Pablo Malavenda, who is with LUM and is part of that committee, said members took in “Beyond the Bridge: A Solution to Homelessness” during a similar event in Indianapolis and saw how the film – and a first installment that outlined the issues of homeless encampments there – had spurred attempts to rally around housing questions there.
“We thought, Why not Lafayette?” Malavenda said.
The film documents interviews Sawyer and Hashko did while traveling to Milwaukee, Houston and other cities that had made inroads on homelessness, seeking what was working and what wasn’t. The upshot was that communities that figured out ways to get beyond the stigma surrounding those who were homeless and got roofs over heads allowed people to deal with addictions, mental illness, finding and keeping jobs and other issues without contending with the mere survival on the streets.
“The stigma,” Dawn Baldwin, part of a panel discussion Thursday, said about what “Beyond the Bridge” got right. “I see it every day. I was homeless. I was that person that people looked at and looked down upon. And can’t you get yourself together – that type of deal. I catch myself sometimes now that I’m not homeless, but I stop myself. That is a person that just needs a little hand up to make it.”
Jennifer Layton, CEO of LTHC Homeless Services, said her agency leans into the conclusions the filmmakers came to – that “housing ends homelessness.”
“It’s really just so simple,” Layton said. “But it’s really very expensive.”
After asking those in the room who were part of Greater Lafayette’s homeless response team to stand, she suggested that those who were still seated would need to be ready to get involved and “change the narrative” to make any initiative would work.
“I have been around for a long time, and so it does tend to fall on LTHC’s shoulders,” Layton said. “We have committed ourselves to be an entity that has a 24/7 location for people who are experiencing homelessness, which also means that when people drive by my building and see people experiencing homelessness, I get to hear and how uncomfortable it makes people. … What I really want people to focus on is that housing ends homelessness.”
In a conversation that followed, touching on the prospects of affordable housing, the cascading pressures of university enrollment on available housing stock and changes in funding from federal, state and local sources, Tillett asked the mayors what they were willing to do and where they saw such a project landing in, say, the next year.
Lafayette Mayor Tony Roswarski said more was happening on that front than people recognized. He pointed to Lafayette Transitional Housing Center’s McCarty Hope Apartments, a $9 million plan that eventually build units targeted for homeless veterans and seniors, on city-owned land off McCarty Lane. He said the city had played roles in Snowy Owl Commons, a senior housing project initiated on Lafayette’s south side by Area IV Agency on Aging, and the Jeffersonian, a Lafayette Neighborhood Housing Services senior housing complex opening in the next month at North Ninth and Brown streets. And he pointed to ongoing work to extend water and sewer lines south and southwest of the city, a project that would eventually provide infrastructure needed to open 4,000 acres for needed housing lots. He said there were other city investments that dealt with various aspects of housing, even as the city dealt with declining revenue from the state’s push for property tax reform.
And Roswarski said one takeaway he had from the film was how solutions in other cities involved private businesses investing.
“Sounds like they have a lot of private folks that jumped on the bandwagon, which is really what kind of help we need,” Roswarski said. “I’m not going to stand up here and make a bunch of stuff up or anything like that. … It’s going to take everybody working together to try to bring all those pieces of the puzzle together. But it’s hard, and I think we do try to prioritize housing, but we don’t control housing prices. We don’t control inflation. We don’t control what a two-by-four costs or what a sheet of drywall costs. We do the best we can.”
Tillett said the plan was to reconvene in January “and see what we can do to take the next step towards the systemic solution to homelessness.”
“Look at this powerful, talented, diverse group of people – this community that has gathered around you,” Tillett said. “We can work together to solve homelessness in Greater Lafayette. It is successfully being done just on the road in Indianapolis, in Milwaukee and in Houston and many other places. We can do it here.”
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