Envision Athens, a local nonprofit organization, brought together representatives from nine service providing and law enforcement agencies last Thursday for a summit dedicated to understanding and addressing the problem of homelessness in Athens.
Representatives from the Athens Homeless Coalition, Advantage Behavioral Health Systems, the Athens-Area Homeless Shelter and other agencies, including the Athens-Clarke County Police Department, spoke to an audience of about a hundred people about the successes they’ve had in addressing Athens’ growing problem with homelessness as well as the challenges they continue to face. The event also served to share the insights of those who have personally experienced homelessness with the nonprofit community and with Athens as a whole.
Making progress on a difficult issue
Michael Bien, the executive director of the Athens Homeless Coalition, described the enormous strides his organization has been making since securing a grant from the local government in January of last year which allowed them to have paid staff for the first time.
Bien touted a new and innovative coordinated data entry system his organization is designing that will be “completely customized to Athens.” It will also be much easier to use, which could allow partner agencies like the ACC Police Department and the Clarke County School District to make use of it to better coordinate with service providers to improve the quality of Athens’ data on homelessness.
“We’re the only community in Georgia to be doing this and one of just a handful across the country that is not using the dated, decades-old system,” Bien said. “This new system is more equitable, more efficient and more user-friendly.”
Bien said they will start the rollout of the new coordinated entry system within a month.
Bien also announced that the Athens Homeless Coalition is partnering with the Georgia Supportive Housing Institute in its inaugural year to boost permanent supportive housing in Athens. Permanent supportive housing, which combines affordable housing with support services, is “the gold standard for housing solutions for individuals and families experiencing homelessness with the greatest level of need,” according to Bien.
The Athens Homeless Coalition is currently participating in an intensive training program on how to operate a permanent supportive housing program in Athens. At the end of the training, a grant may be available for the construction of a new housing development to provide not only permanent supportive housing for those experiencing homelessness in Athens, but also affordable and workforce housing for other community members.
“That’s something that we are optimistic about moving forward on, in real-time brick and mortar,” Bien said.
Finally, Bien announced that the Athens Homeless Coalition will launch an emergency housing fund as recommended in the local government’s strategic plan to reduce and prevent homelessness. This fund will help with one-time expenses that can prevent people from accessing housing such as security deposits and application fees. It will also provide funding to assist those who are in danger of being evicted. This will hopefully prevent these families from becoming homeless in the first place, removing the need for more extensive interventions in the future.
Bien said that the homeless coalition’s emergency housing fund will launch sometime this summer.
Listening to those with lived experience
Most of the rest of the meeting was led by Dr. Katherine Adams, associate professor of higher education at the University of North Georgia. Adams was homeless herself at one point in her life and now chairs the Athens Homeless Coalition’s Persons with Lived Experience Committee.
The Athens Homeless Coalition considers those experiencing homelessness to be experts on their own lives. That’s why they actively solicit their perspectives, advice and even criticism on a regular basis through the Persons with Lived Experience Committee. This committee held 22 listening sessions since August 2023, allowing them to collect the perspectives and opinions of 220 persons with lived experience of homelessness.
From these listening sessions, six themes have emerged, according to Adams. These themes include topics like health and safety, community awareness and personal empowerment in addition to the most prominent theme mentioned throughout this meeting – the need for more affordable housing in Athens.
The need for housing
“We simply do not have enough affordable housing and because of that, the housing we do have is usually always full and it can take years to get to the top of the waiting list,” lamented Jenna Moon, care coordinator with the Athens Community Council on Aging.
Even if people experiencing homelessness do everything right, including maintaining full-time employment as many of them do, there is often no housing available. Sometimes, it can be challenging for service providers to encourage their clients to continue showing up to appointments and keeping them on the path to recovery without accidentally giving them false hope that they will be housed anytime in the near future.
“We’ve done [walk-in] appointments with 266 households since the middle of September…We certainly do not have anywhere near the ability to house that many people,” said John Morris, the THRIVE Community Programs Team Lead for Advantage Behavioral Health. “And those are only the people who can make it to our office at 10 am on a Monday or Tuesday.”
Despite all the work that so many nonprofits and service providers do diligently and with care every day, the level of need is still rising in Athens.
Last year, the annual “point-in-time” count of people experiencing homelessness in Athens reached an all-time high. The Clarke County School District also reported an increase in the number of students experiencing homelessness last year. Angela Pope, lead social worker at the Clarke County School District, explained that the school district identified 682 students who had experienced homelessness at some point during the last school year, up from 549 students in the 2022-2023 school year.
There are many factors that are driving the increase in need, according to Bien, but the most basic one is a lack of housing.
“It is a supply and demand issue. It’s happening across the country. It’s been evolving for years and years,” Bien said. “Athens is also unique in a lot of ways. The University of Georgia, for all it contributes to our community and all that it does for us and for members of our community, also applies pressure to the housing market here.”
After the “great recession” of 2008, new housing construction plummeted in Athens while the University of Georgia continued to admit hundreds of additional students every year. UGA did not build enough new dormitories in that time frame to house these students. To top it off, Airbnb and other vacation rentals have taken every room of almost a thousand homes off the market in Athens since 2008, as reported in the New York Times.
Increasing competition for limited housing has caused rents to skyrocket, putting some working-class Athenians out on the street.
“Many of these community members [who were evicted] are long-time residents of Athens who are being priced out of the homes they have occupied for years,” Moon said.
In the Q&A portion of the meeting, Morris provided some data from a book called “Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain US Problems” to give additional context. He described how Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern, the authors of the book, examined 35 cities across the country and found the factors that explain why some cities have enormous problems with homelessness while others don’t.
According to Morris, the authors found that issues like substance use disorder and mental illness do not explain the variation in homelessness from city to city.
Instead, the problem is a lack of housing.
“The cities that were doing the best in regards to housing and homelessness per capita compared to others were cities that had either less housing demand or a higher housing supply elasticity,” Morris told the audience. “They were able to demonstrate through data and develop a very strong causal argument that boosting the housing supply elasticity changes how your city responds in the per capita homeless rates.”
This means that if Athens were to build enough housing to cause slack in the housing market, that homelessness rates would likely drop.
Until then, Athens will probably not be able to tackle this problem.
“There are success stories happening every day that don’t get communicated,” Bien told APN. Bien praised the work of the nonprofit community in Athens but acknowledged the fact that, right now, “people are entering homelessness at a more rapid rate than people are exiting homelessness. So, even with all these successes, due to the economy and all these pressures on the housing market, people are being evicted and being put out on the street at a faster rate.”
Moving forward with hope
Despite the lack of housing and other systemic barriers, many speakers at the conference had a hopeful tone. For example, Olivia Amato, executive director of the Athens-Area Homeless Shelter, shared a powerful success story of a former client who is now in the process of buying her first home.
Amato expressed determination to overcome systemic barriers that prevent people from gaining access to housing through hard work and creativity.
“What I can also tell you is that the case managers at the Athens-Area Homeless Shelters and all the partner agencies…they are creative, they are innovative and they work to fill those gaps,” Amato said.
One audience member then interjected with a cheer, saying “I know that’s right!”
“I agree,” laughed Amato before she continued with her remarks. “When one program can’t assist a family due to funding rules, another steps in. When a voucher isn’t accepted, we advocate for a willing landlord. When there aren’t enough shelter beds, we coordinate hotel stays, rental assistance, diversion programs. This is how we fight those systemic barriers, by refusing to let them be the end of the road for families.”
Envision Athens will continue hosting community conversations on important topics centered around their “five pillars” of ‘Create Athens,’ ‘Healthy Athens’, ‘Abundance Athens’, ‘Educate Athens’ and ‘House Athens.’
If you’d like to hear the speakers of this event in their own words, APN has the full audio here.
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