As the Quad Cities this week joined with communities nationwide to remember those unhoused people who died over the past year, several local organizations plan to partner to create a badly-needed new emergency winter shelter.
Davenport-based Humility Homes & Services took part Thursday, Dec. 18, in the National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day at Zion Lutheran Church, Davenport, where names were read (and a church bell tolled) of 29 people (including two who worked with the homeless) who passed away in the past year. Two brief similar ceremonies were held Friday (at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.) in front of Project NOW in downtown Rock Island, where many makeshift tents abut their building, and unhoused people are sleeping in the winter cold.
The National Coalition for the Homeless, the National Consumer Advisory Board, and the National Health Care for the Homeless Council encourage communities to host public events on or near Dec. 21 to remember their neighbors who have died homeless in the past year.
National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day takes place each year on the longest night of the year, the winter solstice (usually Dec. 21st), and the first such day was commemorated in 1990.
“We are part of a shared humanity. John Donne wrote a poem years ago,” Project NOW executive director Rev. Dwight Ford said at Friday night’s informal ceremony outside, quoting from the poem. “That no person is an island unto themselves. Everyone is a part of the main piece of the continent. Goes on to say that any person's death diminishes me, for I'm part of humankind.”
He noted the names that were read at 6 a.m. Friday, of those who died the past year, “when they passed, there was a part of our shared humanity that passed as well.”
“We are keepers of the memory of those who have passed. For nothing can take away from the fact that they lived,” Ford said, next to a can containing a burning flame. “But this flame also reminds us that there are still people unhoused in every year that we have to come out into the cold and show our solidarity with people that have no other recourse or detour from the reality that they're in. All of us who have assembled here have cars or transportation or a place of warmth tonight, but there are so many that do not have such.
“And for that we say this is unacceptable,” he said, voice rising like the flames. “Every time we have to burn or burrow with flame and watch over it and people are unhoused, we should declare as an entire Quad-City region, this is unacceptable. To have someone curled up in a corner between buildings with a damp and wet snow-soaked blanket trying to stay warm, we should say this is unacceptable.
“Anytime you find a person that is essentially challenged in the throes of life, whether they're dealing with an eviction that put them out on the street, or maybe they have a reality of mental health challenges, or maybe it's addiction.” Ford said. “Regardless of what the challenge is, their state of current state of homelessness is not an indicator of their lack of discipline and work ethic. That flame that we watch over is a sign of their own independent resilience. Many of us would never know what it takes to survive in a complete entire day where you wake up and you start your day off in cold and end it in freezing temperatures.
“From the moment you rise up, you're trying to find what to eat, where to carry your belongings, who will let you in without judging you, how long you can stay inside and how can you make it to 9 p.m., if we have a winter overflow shelter,” he said.
Project NOW is working with other agencies, like Christian Care (which operates a shelter a few blocks east), to create that shelter.
“These last few days can show us, with the wind whipping through clothes, how frigid it is outside. We are running out of time,” Ford said. “We have resources that we have amassed and yes, we could use more, but if we don't find a shelter soon, that the resources that I've retrieved through the work of this team for a shelter I will have to send back to the state. We're running out of time.
“Every night that someone goes to sleep on these streets, living with co-morbidities, challenged with their own health realities, that can take a nap and never wake up, we're running out of time and we're going to continue to say the same thing. This is unacceptable,” he said. “As a region, we are better than this and we need to live up to our true value and potential. So don't stop putting pressure on. Don't stop making the phone calls. Don't stop contacting your elected officials. Don't stop rallying the business community. Don't stop working with your faith institutions. We're going to find a way forward, but it's not going to be because of one or two people. It's going to be because of all of us, including those voices that are currently unhoused.”
“Far too many people think that these individuals are the ones that made mistakes,” Ford said. “But I'm going to tell you something. In this country, you don't have to make one mistake at all to end out on these streets. Your company could be bought out and you could be severed from your place of employment and be homeless. You can in fact get eviction of something that you hadn't planned. Dealing with a health crisis. And you fought to use all of your resources for another round of chemo for your loved one and everything fell apart.”
“You don't have to do anything wrong to experience homelessness,” he said. “We can't have ordinances that block and hinder. We cannot have pieces of ordinances that limit when so much is at risk. Shelters just don't secure people for the night. They actually save lives.”
“The real judgment is not whether they do or didn't do to put them out there. The real judgment is on us as a society of what we haven't done to ensure that people at least have an option of a shelter in times like these,” Ford added, before saying a prayer that we can solve this crisis together.
Christian Care perspective
The nonprofit Christian Care is at capacity at its 42-bed shelter at 2209 3rd Ave., Rock Island, with a waitlist of about a week (or 20-25 people), operations manager Cindi Gramenz said at Friday night’s event.
“We are consistently at capacity,” she said, noting they also have a shelter for women and children that serves 20. She said last weekend’s temporary emergency shelter at the MLK Center was a big help, during the bitter cold.
“Those folks would have been outside and no question there would have been death,” Gramenz said. “I was out here for two hours. We were out here this morning at 5:30 and I was out here for two hours and I was just like so cold. Then I'm looking at these tents over here. Like they've been out here all night long and I've been out here for two hours. It's humbling and it's just really sad.”
She said the people memorialized from the QC ranged in age from 19 to 70-plus, and she knew several of them.
“I’ve been in homeless services for a while. So many of those individuals are people that I knew. You know, some of them are people that were in a shelter just a few months ago,” Gramenz said. “It's really humbling to just see them on that list and be like, you were just with us and you were just such an amazing person. So it's just always humbling and it's good to read the names.”
“It’s important that we're still recognizing and speaking the names because they're not invisible,” she added.
Gramenz has worked in QC homeless services over 15 years, “and this is the worst it's ever been. And we've never not had a place for people to go in the wintertime,” she said. “So this is a huge step back for us.”
“We have an incredible community, and they are fighting hard, and I believe that has been significant,” Gramenz said. “We're just going to continue to press on. We're going to advocate. We're not going to stop because we can't let people die. So that's all we can do.”
Humility Homes response
Ashley Velez is CEO of Humility Homes & Services, which operates a year-round shelter at 1015 W. 6th St., Davenport. It has an 88-person capacity, and housed 96 people Thursday night.
Humility does a count of Quad Cities homeless people every January, and there were 34 unhoused last January, and they did an additional count in July (just for the Iowa side), when there were 55 homeless individuals, Velez said.
“The point in time count number is the federal count, which is every January. So it's a thing that happens nationally,” she said, noting the data goes to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which uses it to award grant money for homelessness services.
“That count is very important,” Velez said. Homelessness has risen locally and nationally in part due to after-effects of COVID, she noted.
“In my opinion and talking to some of my colleagues, we really think this is the downfall of COVID because when COVID happened, they were not kicking people out of their house,” she said. “There were eviction moratoriums. Landlords could not get into their units. And so some of the units, because also through COVID, domestic violence hit an all-time high, as you can imagine why. And the units got destroyed because nobody was going to check on them.”
When units got remodeled, owners had to hike rental costs, and tenants couldn’t afford them, Velez said.
“Income sources haven't gone up, they're still struggling. And so it's just that vicious cycle,” she said. “Then on the flip side, when you have landlords who are outside of the Quad Cities are not as easy to work with. They're really just in it to be a slumlord, in my opinion, because there's tax write-offs and that sort of thing. It's then those individuals who are suffering more, and those are generally the people who are right on the verge of homelessness.”
“Now they're living in substandard housing. It's a vicious cycle. And so that's why it's so important that we come up with a regional approach where we have local government support, because they can be a little bit more nimble and change their dollars differently than like a federal level,” she said. “We have social service providers that have years of experience in working with this population, Humility being one of them. We have innovative solutions, we have ideas. We know what could work because we've seen it work in other parts of the country or we've seen it work here on a small scale.”
Working together to reduce homelessness
“We just need everybody to come together to say, okay, the number of people who are experiencing homelessness -- has it gone up? Absolutely. Is it to a point where we can't get control of that very quickly and get people housed? No,” Velez added. “When you look at bigger cities, their numbers are skyrocketed. Ours aren't there yet. And we should work together to ensure that this doesn't go higher.”
In 2023, Humility could not raise enough extra funding to expand capacity in its shelter for the winter (ideally allowing an additional 49 people in), and closed that extra capacity as it had planned after a five-year phaseout. Before that, the nonprofit had to raise about $150,000 for staff and resources to serve the expanded capacity.
“We stopped that after five years. One, because the cost, the community didn't step up to really fundraise that additional cost,” Velez said. “It hit Humility's bottom line more because we were doing this on behalf of the whole community with the Quad City Housing Council. And so the Quad City Housing Council was helping us fundraise and run it every year.”
“We did a five-year approach and we were very clear that we're going to work to phase this out because we need the communities to step up on the other side to create that long-term solution,” she said.
In the past two years, Humility has developed 45 new rental units of affordable housing in Davenport and Rock Island, including supportive services in Davenport. It is among five nonprofits working with QC Housing Council (which recently received $900,000 in transformation grants from local funders) to create 25 more units of affordable housing over three years.
“It's a great start to say, listen, we do believe you, we hear you and we want to make this investment,” Velez said. “We're going to use that to leverage other communities, other dollars to say here's a model, we know it works. We have some investment from the private funding. But now we need funding from the cities especially.”
She and Ford believe a regional partnership also must work to create a new emergency homeless shelter here this winter.
“It’s the nonprofits with the government, with the business sector, with the faith communities -- everybody has a portion in ending this,” Velez said. “So the winter emergency shelter would just be hopefully that -- an emergency for the next couple of years where we've got to open one, but then hopefully from there we wouldn't need it, that we'd have enough capacity within the shelter systems already to not have to create this additional need. And when you're looking at 55 to 65 individuals, like I was saying over the weekend that access it, that's not a large number overall. It's not a good number. But the number keeps getting higher, and we need to stop it before it gets any higher.”
Last weekend, the city of Rock Island partnered with Project NOW to open an emergency overnight shelter at the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center, 630 9th St., Rock Island, which housed 55 people from 9 p.m. Friday, Dec. 12, to 7 a.m. Monday, Dec. 15, including food and snacks.
MLK director Jerry Jones said that City Manager Todd Thompson reached out to partners to see if the King Center could be a resource for the community in need of shelter last weekend as the temperatures dropped well below zero, placing many lives at risk and in danger.
Project NOW perspective
Rev. Dwight Ford said before Friday’s memorial, that at the King Center shelter, “we have people also in there that were normally sleeping in their cars and it was just too cold. These are individuals that get up and go to work every day and can't muster up enough money right now to take care of first and last and deposit.”
Ford is hopeful a regional solution can be found.
“I would not be able to be president and CEO of an organization that has to believe that there's still hope. If you don't have hope for tomorrow, you won't have strength for today,” he said. “I wake up every morning saying today could be the day that we finalize the relationship for a new shelter because we're fighting for one every day. We haven't stopped talking to cities, we haven't stopped behind the scenes negotiation and exploration. We're working and I'm hopeful and not in the sense of hope saying maybe it'll work out, but hope in the sense that we are working it out. And everyday people, folks that work here and people and friends and allies and municipalities that are trying to pull this off.”
Ford estimated the homeless population now at about 400 in the area.
“What we're saying is that a regional approach makes sense. And not only a regional approach, a comprehensive approach,” he said. “We're not expecting every city to do the same thing, but we are asking for a comprehensive plan that allows coordination between what cities are doing. Because at the end of the day when people ask, well, what city did he belong to? The one they slept in last night.”
Shelters alone aren’t solutions to people’s problems, but a transition and step up.
“Shelters are the first station and stop on the journey to stability and security,” Ford said. “We don't look at this as a panacea or the end of all to the ailment of the housing crisis, but it is a necessary element. It is the fundamental first stop. Because with a shelter, people cease from trying to survive and they could actually have time to think about how to live. Now we can wrap around services, we can try to figure out, is it mental health, if it's addiction, are there providers? Some have benefits already, some have Social Security, some all they need is the first month in deposit to get into a place.
“Their credit is pretty bad, maybe they've been evicted. We can take care of that,” he said. “Out of the entire amount of people exposed to the elements that are unhoused, I surmise, and the data shows this, that about 30% are non-functionally addicted, because most addicts in America are functional.”
“We're not new to cold weather. The difference is that we always had secure contracts with five years in advance that ran through with Humility and of course King's Harvest,” Ford said earlier this month. “So what was always in place was the emergency winter overflow shelter that was low barrier that would normally be in operation December 1st. And so that's why we start December 1st so it doesn't run into the harshest weather immediately.
“So that's the only difference now that we don't currently have for the region,” he said. “This is a regional challenge. No one city has ever owned in its entirety the reality of the winter overflow low barrier shelter. It may be housed in the city, but it has always been a response from the region. The city governments contribute to it. The police and law enforcement work together on it. The councils are in communication and for sure the city managers and the city administrators work behind the scenes whenever there is one because it takes a regional response to this challenge.”
Project NOW worked with The Third Place in downtown Rock Island (2000 3rd Ave., in a building owned by Project NOW) to get transportation for anyone who needs from MLK Center to there last Monday morning.
At Moline City Council’s meeting Tuesday, Dec. 16th, 7th Ward Ald. Anna Castro and 6th Ward Ald. Dan McNeil motioned to send $25,000 in contingency funds to the city’s Community and Economic Development departments, to study homelessness in the city, and potential solutions.
“This funding is not a path to a complete solution. It does provide the flexible funding that we think staff needs at this time,” McNeil said. “And I know staff has been working daily to find pathways to support our own shelter.”
“I think the need overall in Rock Island County is significant,” he said at Friday’s event in downtown Rock Island. “Together in many partnerships, we're looking for that solution. And Moline has some opportunities that I'd say we're deep into exploring.”
What happens next?
Rock Island is reaching out to other cities and organizations to address the problem of a more permanent winter overnight shelter.
“A lot of that is happening with the assistance of our city manager to find out what resources are available and when we could have a sit-down discussion with them, with the city managers of the different cities, municipalities and county,” Rock Island Ald. Mark Poulos said.
“The work doesn't stop with this,” Ford emphasized. “We have to keep fighting for a pathway forward and city governments have a part to play in this. Nonprofits, institutions, business, community, everyone. This is our shared reality. And more importantly, we just don't share space. We share humanity.
“And I want to thank City Manager Thompson as well for brokering the hard question, trying to hash out how do we care for the most vulnerable now?” he added. “And now that this is secure, we’ll keep fighting for what's next. And you can see how fast things can come together, not only with staffers for the city, but also with city elected officials, partners that are at the table and a region worth of friends who said what can I do to help? So this gives us some light. It may not be long to many but for those that we're working with, every hour makes a difference toward their lives.”
There is no timetable for coming up with a regional winter shelter solution, Ford noted.
“With the heavy commitment to investigation and follow through with the projects that we do have on the burner now,” he said Friday. “We've already looked at a couple of opportunities and they could not get through fire marshal realities. And so there are some things that we just have as a challenge but what we don't have as a challenge is communal support, in a sense of people wanting to see this happen.
“Public will is enormous toward this right now, regardless of what municipality that they're in,” Ford said. “This is probably one of the most galvanizing Quad Citizen responses that I've seen. This is one that you'll get calls and volunteers from every last one of our cities, funds people willing to try to help, individuals reaching out individually and collectively saying, what can I do? To see that kind of response is something that is encouraging. That's why I'm hopeful, because it's just not Project NOW against the world.”
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