Cleveland's Home For Every Neighbor Program Surpasses 150 Unsheltered People Housed

Robert Lucas, 34, had been living in a tent near the West Park Red Line Station before securing home with Mayor Justin Bibb’s Home For Every Neighbor program. Bibb lauded the program’s efforts on Monday: 154 formerly-unhoused had signed leases from September to March, Lucas included. Credit: Mark Oprea

Last October, as the temps around Northeast Ohio began to dip into frigid territories, 34-year-old Robert Lucas was worried. He was living in a tent near the Red Line Station in West Park. He had friends nearby, but was bracing for yet another brutal winter.

“I was feeling, you know, as safe as I could feel,” he said.

Today, Lucas is in a wildly different situation: He’s one of the 154 Clevelanders that have signed leases — for him, in a house in Union-Miles — and moved into stable housing in the past six months thanks to help from Cleveland’s Home For Every Neighbor program.

Mayor Justin Bibb lauded the efforts of his staff at the Cleveland Department of Health and an assorted list of social services partners on Monday morning when he and others announced an update to the initiative at I’m In Ministry in Old Brooklyn.

That program, which kicked off with a pilot version in July, ramped up gradually over the fall, Bibb said.

From October to March, Clevelanders sleeping in tents or in shelter bunks had signed leases, mostly in homes on the east side. Sixty-two people in Ward 3, which contains Downtown, were helped off the street and into apartments, a press release noted, adding that more than a dozen encampments had been dismantled.

Bibb himself recalled an encampment clean-up on Sunday, one off Scranton Road in Ohio City’s Duck Island neighborhood.

“And that encampment site had been in our city for over two decades,” Bibb said from a podium on Monday morning. “We had over 100 residents from across the city—the Fire Department was there, the Police Department, many members of my administration were there. We were all doing the hard work of cleaning up that encampment.”

Pandemic-era economics and the long-running struggle with building enough affordable housing to meet demand has lead to years of a crisis made more visible by pop-up tent cities and the city and county programs designed to help the people living in them.

The barriers aren’t just economical, many speakers reminded Scene after the presentation. Mental health issues and drug dependency plague the inhabitants of shelters and housing application waiting lists.

And those with felonies on their records, like Lucas, are essentially given a life sentence: the majority of rental agencies and private landlords reject felons, even years after they’ve done their time. As do employers.

It’s what Deacon Louis Primozic, the CEO of I’m In Ministry, seem to touch on in his address. I’m In Ministry donated thousands of pieces of furniture to the program, and even helped some new tenants in the move-in process.

“The reflection of a community is how well the less fortunate are treated,” Primozic said. “The people that are forgotten about. The broken. Folks who’ve had difficulties in life. As I’ve learned over the years: bad things happen to good people.”

“This program sends a clear message: the forgotten are not forgotten,” he added.