Cleveland Okays $2 Million to Try and End Unsheltered Homelessness by 2025

Emily Collins (second from right), a special advisor to Mayor Bibb on homeless issues, at City Council on Monday. Credit: TV20

Whether encamped on the northern edge of Superior Avenue downtown or under a highway overpass, roughly 150 Clevelanders spend a great bulk of their days and nights outside, either refusing to seek shelter or mentally unprepared for the pressures of communal living.

It’s this population of 150 that, the city argued in Monday’s marathon Committee of the Whole meeting, need outside experts to decide how to best place them in housing. And do it sooner than later.

That’s why council worked to allocate $2 million for consulting work that would address the situation.

The cost to pay for such consultants, named as the Houston-based Clutch Consulting and Cleveland Mediation, was approved by the committee, yet not without scrutiny.

Solving Cleveland’s homeless issue, as local nonprofits and advocates have shown in the past, is a Rubik’s Cube, leaning on a precise orchestration of on-the-street outreach coordinators, landlords or hotel owners, along with sizable funds at the city and county level to carry out a long pathway to residency.

Emily Collins, Mayor Bibb’s special advisor on homelessness, sold the initiative to City Council as a house-first, ask-questions-later process banking on what seems to be specific data pinpointing where most homeless-in-need spend their time.

“Because we’re facing not just an increase in homelessness, but an increase in people living in unsheltered spaces,” Collins told Council. She looked around the room: “I’m sure you all know this,” she said.

According to data from the Mayor’s Office, roughly 10 percent of the homeless in Cuyahoga County are unsheltered, a stat that’s doubled since 2020. Experts tend to attribute this fact to an increasing demand for and lack of affordable housing around the city, along with landlords skeptical of Section 8 vouchers, or housing the formerly unsheltered in the first place.

What Collins proposed on Monday would tackle this directly, she said. Such “Home For Every Neighbor” program would reuse leftover surplus funds at the city to do “intensive engagement and outreach” at the street level, supposedly with volunteers or hired coordinators.

Each unsheltered person would, Collins said, get bespoke help to best link them with appropriate housing in or outside city limits. A full-time staff members would spearhead this process over the next year and a half—with, Collins suggested, the goal of lining up apartments for those on the street by the end of 2024.

Danielle Cosgrove, the director for the Cleveland Mediation Center, which leans heavily on family connections to take in the unhoused, believes that the $2 million upfront cost would suffice as a usable model in the future.

“We’re hoping that proof allows us an avenue to ensure that we can make the appropriate ask for more private dollars into a similar sustaining effort,” Cosgrove said.

Because, it seems, Cuyahoga County released its own plan to solve the unsheltered dilemma in 2022—and set the idealistic goal of doing so by the end of the 2024—many on Council felt that it was somewhat encroaching to ask Cleveland to bear six figures to solve what they painted as an issue county-wide. (Though Collins suggested four members at the County Office of Homeless Services would be involved.)

“This is what the county’s supposed to be for,” Ward 16 Councilman Brian Kazy told Collins. “The city of Cleveland shouldn’t be doing social work. This is not how we were set up.”

For Ward 13 Councilman Kris Harsh, who supported the legislation, spending the $2 million was a necessary pathway to keeping Cleveland’s—especially Downtown Cleveland’s—image consistent as a welcoming, clean place for tourists and locals alike.

He recalled a story from a tourist friend of his as example.

“He said the Convention Center was beautiful, City Hall was beautiful, but he got to Public Square, and there was human feces. And that’s unacceptable to us as a city,” Harsh said.

“We cannot have our front yard be littered by remnants be littered with people who have no other place to go.”