Kansas weighs investing millions in shelters after years of increased homeless populations

On a single night in Kansas last year, there were about 2,636 homeless people living in the state, including about 400 in Shawnee County, according to the statewide Point in Time Count that likely undercounts the total number.

But there are less than a thousand shelter beds available statewide.

The House Committee on Welfare Reform is tasked with finding ways to address the growing homeless population in the state, which reached the highest levels it has seen since 2014 after six consecutive years of rising homeless populations.

The committee heard a bill, House Bill 2723, which would establish a $40 million grant fund that would go to communities around the state that create a plan to create more shelter beds. Grants would only go to cities that do the following:

• Provide the same amount of money they receive.
• Submit a building plan to create or improve a shelter.
• Collect data on the populations the shelter serves.
• Enforce laws criminalizing vagrancy and public camping.
• Prioritize Kansas residents who’ve lived in the state for more than eight months.
• Provide “wraparound” housing service.

Those wraparound services aren’t defined in the bill, which several legislators and advocates raised concern about. But legislators got a better sense of what those services include at a March 14 briefing from homeless service providers and cities seeking to expand their services.

Shelters, services and statutes

Of the 2,636 homeless people identified in the latest Point in Time Count, 943 resided in rural areas. Several legislators on the reform committee raised concerns about equitably distributing funds to address both categories of homelessness. McPherson Housing Coalition runs a non-congregate shelter in the 14,000-population town, hosting up to 10 families in separated tiny homes.

To get the shelter up and running cost around $1 million, said MHC’s executive director Chris Goodson. The most important part, though, is the social services included to help get families back on their feet.

“You can build affordable housing, but if you don’t offer social services of some sort to help families work through those roadblocks, it’s not going to work,” Goodson said.

City officials from Wichita presented their idea of addressing homelessness in a much larger City. Their proposal is to refurbish Riverside Hospital into a complex that includes a congregate shelter, where people share rooms for an overnight stay, as well as solo non-congregate rooms, low-income housing, space for homeless services, dining rooms and classrooms.

“The more that we can bring under one roof,” said Troy Anderson, Wichita’s assistant city manager. “There are efficiencies of scale, there are efficiencies in trying to achieve that functional net zero because there’s not a lack or a confusion of trying to connect one resource to another.”

The “functional net zero” of homelessness is effectively getting more people out of homelessness than are becoming homeless. Anderson said if they can consistently graduate people toward housing stability, it’d eventually mean that the homeless population is almost entirely temporarily displaced people, rather than chronic homelessness, which accounts for about 25% of Kansas’s homeless population.

Wichita has the largest homeless population in the state, and its proposal may have the highest price tag. The city said it would likely be asking for $20 million, half of the total grant money available in HB 2723, to construct the complex.

Advocates from all over the state spoke to the committee, from Liberal to Wyandotte County. Though smaller communities will need less money for their projects than larger communities, their less resourced local governments may have additional barriers to proposing than more heavily staffed urban areas.

Committee-members considered earmarking a certain amount for more sparsely populated areas or allowing cities to bolster their applications with donations from nonprofits.

Is the bill enough to address homelessness in Kansas?

Some homeless service providers had quibbles with the bill, including the provisions on enforcing vagrancy laws, that the data collection doesn’t feed into other reports, that nonprofits should be able to apply for funds and including a severability clause that would ensure the program continues if parts of the legislation are struck down in court.

One conferee, though, sharply differed from the others in their rejection rejection of “housing-first” policies that offer transitional housing, pointing to increases in homeless populations in areas that adopted a housing-first approach.

“Obviously homelessness and there’s many factors, but we believe housing first is making the problem worse, it focuses dollars away from shelter and toward permanent supportive housing,” said Andrew Wiems, of Cicero Action, a group that last year advocated for legislation that would criminalize public homelessness.

House Bill 2723 had its hearing on March 5 and isn’t scheduled for debate on the House floor, but if passed could significantly impact the scope of homeless services in the state.

“From the conversations I’ve had with prospective bidders, communities that are considering applying for the funds, I feel like the $40 million, with the one-for-one match which would be $80 million, I think would be sufficient to address the chronically homeless population that we’re looking to target with our funds,” said Andrew Brown, deputy secretary for programs of the Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services.