Many questions have surfaced in the days since the city announced a new policy to prioritize Douglas County residents with homelessness services — among them, how does someone without an address prove they live here?
The City of Lawrence this week shared details of a policy that’s actually been implemented over the past few months.
Under the policy, the city provides “non-resident homeless individuals” with short-term assistance and helps them return to their “place of origin,” according to a city news release.
Misty Bosch-Hastings, director of the city’s Homeless Solutions Division, answered questions about the policy, its purpose and how it’s played out so far.
‘It’s really not meant to hurt anybody’
To understand how the city got here, it helps to understand the recent past.
Bosch-Hastings came to Lawrence in July 2023 as homeless programs coordinator after previously working in positions at the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services and at Topeka Rescue Mission Ministries. The position had been unfilled for several months, since the resignation of the previous coordinator that January.
She said she realized pretty quickly the magnitude of what was happening when she came to Lawrence.
Her previous work informed her that correctional facilities, mental health facilities and hospitals aren’t supposed to just release people into homelessness.
“What I saw was agencies within the state that were releasing people to the sanctioned camp,” she said, referring to the city-sanctioned camp that opened in fall 2022 behind Johnny’s Tavern in North Lawrence, “because it kind of met the criteria of, ‘We’re not releasing people into homelessness.’”
But there weren’t really many rules or regulations at the camp, and people could stay there, get food “and not have to work on recovering from homelessness,” Bosch-Hastings said. “They can come and stay stuck in whatever environment they were in, and nobody was really doing something about it.”
The city wasn’t in a place to immediately start trying to determine who people were and whether they qualified for services — the priority was to increase shelter bed space, “so that when we did start interacting with people, we had places for people to go,” Bosch-Hastings said.
The Lawrence Community Shelter has since expanded its capacity to be able to provide shelter to up to 140 people per night during weather emergencies, and the Pallet shelter village on North Michigan Street provides cabin-like shelters for 50 people on a longer-term basis while they transition out of homelessness.
The city closed the North Lawrence sanctioned camp in March, and everyone still living in that area had to move in April.
There still aren’t enough shelter beds for every person experiencing homelessness in Lawrence, not everyone living outside is able to stay in a congregate shelter situation, and there’s still no emergency shelter for families — but sheltering capacity has significantly improved. Extreme weather emergency shelter spaces this winter will rely upon churches and community organizations, and the coming winter will be the city’s first with Pallet operational.
But Bosch-Hastings said she was working on the city’s contract with LCS in December, and she got a call one night that a Topeka mental health facility had just dropped a person off outside the shelter, “and the person can’t even get in the door,” she said.
“We don’t have the capacity for everybody from every county,” she said. So the contract with LCS was the first to include that the organization needed to prioritize Douglas County residents.
Over the winter, which saw several days of extremely dangerous cold temperatures, the numbers of people seeking overnight shelter increased significantly, and ultimately, multiple sheltering sites and much community support were needed.
In the months since, Bosch-Hastings and her colleagues have worked as a group to refine the policy and get all the partner organizations on the same page, and that policy is going into every contract, she said.
“It’s really not meant to hurt anybody,” she said of the policy.
Residency and reintegration
How does one prove residency without a residence or ID?
There are a number of ways, Bosch-Hastings said. If someone went to school here, if they’ve had a lease or employment, if they’ve had treatment at the hospital or Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center — all of those kinds of things can help the city track down the documentation people need.
“We’re not trying to exclude people. We’re going to work on the side of the individual” and find the connection, Bosch-Hastings said.
She said the city is generally looking at six to 12 months or more in Douglas County as a guideline to establish residency.
The majority of people experiencing homelessness who agreed to answer the point-in-time count survey in January reported that they have lived in Lawrence or Douglas County for 12 months or more, according to data from Kristen Egan, Douglas County regional coordinator for the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition.
Of the 414 respondents counted in this year’s survey, 289, or 71%, said they’d been here for more than 12 months; 51 people, or 13%, said seven to 12 months; and 69 people, or 17%, said they’d been here for zero to six months.
2024-Douglas-PITAlthough the PIT count is only one set of data, it indicates that 84% of people experiencing homelessness in Douglas County do meet the city’s residency requirements.
“I really think that the recent point-in-time count kind of shows that the problem isn’t as big as the community thinks it is, as far as outsiders,” Bosch-Hastings said.
For those who aren’t from Douglas County, “We hope to facilitate reintegration with family or friends or whatever natural supports people have,” she said.
Bosch-Hastings gave an example. A couple of weeks ago, she found a man she didn’t recognize at the camp behind the Amtrak station. She started asking him the normal questions the team asks to try to assess what barriers to housing people are facing, “because what we’re trying to do is really wrap around that individual and see what we can do to get them off the street,” she said.
The man told her he was from another city, and he didn’t have a phone. He said he came here because of a friend, things didn’t work out, and he was stuck here. The same day, the team was able to connect by phone with his supporters, Bosch-Hastings said.
“It was agreed upon that he was welcome home, and so we took him home,” she said.
Bosch-Hastings estimated that at least once a week, the city is seeing people reintegrated with their families and other supports, whether the city is paying to transport them, family members are coming to Lawrence to pick them up, or even if city staff members are giving them a lift.
“We’re not just loading people on a bus — nothing like that,” she said. “It’s an offering. We’re trying to do things compassionately.”
If someone is fleeing an abuser, they’ll be connected with the Willow Domestic Violence Center or a similar secure shelter.
And members of the multidisciplinary Homeless Response Team are not going to camps, demanding to see ID from people, she said.
“People have free will,” she said. “They can choose not to work with us, and that’s their choice. This is the offering. It’s not a mandatory requirement.”
The Jax Project is now a registered nonprofit launched by Trina Tinsley and her young son, Jax, in late 2022. Their mission is to serve “love with a side of food.”
The nonprofit does not receive any funding from the city, though the city has provided supplies when staff have asked Jax Project to serve food at an event, such as the upcoming resource event set for Tuesday.
Tinsley has spent a lot of time getting to know folks living at camps around Lawrence in the past couple of years.
“I have not seen anybody be forced to leave the city of Lawrence, if they’re in city limits, without them actually asking to go back to where they came from,” Tinsley said.
And in some cases, even folks who have been here for years have been able to happily reunite with their families because of these efforts.
“I just know that her heart is in the right place,” Tinsley said of Bosch-Hastings. “I really honestly believe that she cares about these people, and she cares enough to not see them stay being homeless.”
She said she thinks people read one line of a news article and run with it — while one side says it’s “about time” the city gets folks who aren’t from here to leave town, another side worries that “they’re trying to send all the homeless people out of Lawrence.”
“You’re never going to make everybody happy,” Tinsley said.
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‘We’re going to walk alongside somebody’
Bosch-Hastings said she gets calls from people all over the country saying they want to leave where they are and asking how they can get into the Pallet village. She also gets calls from case managers in other counties whose clients want to move here. She has to explain that the services are for folks who already live here.
And people do still get dropped off here, Bosch-Hastings said.
“We’re not just going to ignore people or not try to help them — we’re going to try to help them still,” she said.
“We’re still going to have compassion and understand that people are going to be struggling. If they’re dropped off by highway patrol or a county over, whoever — we’re going to take the time to work with them. We’re going to give them a place to stay, and we’re going to figure out the plan that gets them back to their network,” she continued.
Sometimes all that’s taken is a gift card for gas or, once, helping someone replace their car’s starter.
People want transparency. They want to know where people are going and what the city is doing to help them. For some, it comes down to how taxpayer dollars are being spent; others want to ensure that the people who need help are getting it.
Bosch-Hastings said every person’s story is different, and everyone has different needs. The Homeless Response Team is trying to find out what those needs are for each person and meet them. But oftentimes the specifics of those needs include people’s private health information. And sometimes revealing specifics could put someone in danger.
“We’re going to walk alongside somebody to develop a personal plan for each person,” she said.
Tinsley said the city has made decisions that she doesn’t agree with, though she doesn’t necessarily have better solutions. She doesn’t always see eye to eye with members of the Homeless Response Team, either, but “it’s always our desire to help support the unhoused community, and to work with the other agencies that are trying to do the same.”
She shared similar sentiments about people’s needs.
“Each individual is different, and each individual’s need is so complex that trying to serve that many people, you don’t have a cookie-cutter response,” Tinsley said.
“… Of course we want something better for them, which means we need to continue to pour love into them, and we need to continue building up that self-worth so that they know that they deserve something better than that, because nobody really, honestly wants to just be homeless for the rest of their life.”
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Mackenzie Clark (she/her), reporter/founder of The Lawrence Times, can be reached at mclark@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
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