Monarch Housing’s Blog!

We were very pleased to hear today from our friend Bob Guarasci,the President of the New Jersey Community Development Corporation that the Birch Street Apartments is up and running. Bob told us “We are very happy that our Birch Street Supportive Housing is up and running and serving formerly homeless individuals who are enormously grateful and can’t believe their good fortune. We’ll work hard to engage our residents to help them overcome obstacles and reach their fullest potential.” The site provides fifteen (15) permanent, affordable and supportive units for very low income individuals who are homeless with a mental illness. Every unit will have it’s own living area, as well as a kitchen and bathroom.

This is a photo of Bob and some of the new tenants of the Birch Street Apartments.

To read our previous post on this project click here. To see photos from the construction click here.

The Herald News, the hometown newspaper in Passaic County, published an editorial on Monday about the outreach by the New Jersey Community Development Corporation (NJCDC) and the Paterson Housing Authority to develop the waiting list for permanent affordable and supportive housing developed by NJCDC on Birch Street. The fact that the waiting list identified over two hundred (200) eligible applicants for the fifteen housing units is a sign that much more work must done to achieve the critical goal of ending homelessness. As exciting as Birch Street will be, it is merely the first important step in the long journey that we will need to travel to end homelessness not only in Passaic but all of New Jersey!

Apartment lottery will provide shelter for some

As hundreds of homeless people make their way in Passaic County, their presence poses stark questions: How did they get that way? How did we?

Was it bad luck, bad decisions, bad behavior or some combination of the three that has put those men, women and children on the street? Are Garden State rents and mortgages too high? Are salaries in too many jobs too low?

In what ways do our homeless people reflect the cracks in our criminal justice, welfare, foster care and mental health systems?

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Ending Homelessness, NJCDC, Passaic-County, Supportive Housing

We have some new photos provided to us by Bob Guarasci of NJCDC from Passaic County’s Project Homeless Connect event held on Tuesday January 29, 2008. Click on anyone to see it full size. Click here to view all of the photos. To view a slide show click here.

Passaic County hosted a successful Project Homeless Connect event on Tuesday January 29, 2008. These are some new photos from the event. Click on anyone to see it full size. Click here to view all of the photos. To view a slide show click here. As they become available more photos will be posted.

The Bergen Record published an article entitled “Annual count of homeless questioned“. The article focuses on HUD’s claim of a dramatic drop in chronic homelessness. The challenge is the presumption that the annual counts are accurate enough to make such projections. We should focus on how we end homelessness which is what both Bergen and Passaic are doing as they develop and implement their ten year plans to end homelessness.

This is a portion of the article. To read the full article click here.

Counting the chronic homeless is difficult because they are transient. Adding to the problem is that the federal Point-in-Time surveys haven’t been standardized until now. For instance, the 2006 survey was in April, while the 2005 and 2007 surveys were in January. Future surveys will be in January.

BERGEN COUNTY

2005: 151
2006: 119 -21 percent
2007: 78 -34 percent

PASSAIC COUNTY

2005: NA
2006: 73
2007: 194 +165 percent

Sources: Bergen County Department of Human Services; Passaic County Department of Human Services

Annual count of homeless questioned
Sunday, December 23, 2007

By SCOTT FALLON
STAFF WRITER

The number of homeless who continually live on the streets is down in Bergen County and up in Passaic County in recent years, according to the latest counts, but some advocates say the numbers are faulty.

At issue is the Point-in-Time Count, a federal survey administered annually by local organizations to document the number of homeless in a region on a given day.

In Passaic’s survey, the number of chronically homeless went from 73 in 2006 to 194 in 2007. But the 2006 survey was taken on April 27 while the 2007 number was taken on Jan. 25, when the chronic homeless are easier to count because many are in shelters.

The Bergen counts, also done at different times of the year, showed the number of homeless fell 48 percent from 2005 to 2007, or to 78 people. The results led the county to reduce the planned number of beds at its new Hackensack shelter.

Just how accurate are the numbers that are driving public policy?

“The count of the homeless is a stab in the dark sometimes,” said Barbara Niziol, an executive at Eva’s Village in Paterson, one of the largest social service non-profits in North Jersey. “It’s still very limited.”

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Tags: Bergen-County, Community development, Eva's Village, homelessness, HUD, NJCDC, Passaic-County, Supportive Housing

The Herald News has published a follow up article on the homeless crisis in the City of Passaic. The second article focuses on the need for a shelter. The solution to Forys’ homelessness in permanent housing not a shelter. A shelter would not be the solution as Mary “Forys prefers Main Avenue to a shelter, which she considers too dangerous.” The editorial correctly holds Passaic to “the moral responsibility of working with community activists to provide safe shelter for people with no place to go.” We agree but again the solution is permanent, affordable and supportive housing!

We provide an excerpt to the editorial. To read the latest full article click here.

The face of the homeless on Main Avenue - Editorial
Thursday, December 6, 2007, HERALD NEWS EDITORIAL

At 53, Mary Forys has fallen through the holes in the society’s safety net. She’s landed hard on the streets of Passaic, where she hustles money for food. At night, she curls up behind a garbage can to sleep, a throwaway person in a disposable culture.

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Tags: City of Passaic, Ending Homelessness, Mary-Forys, Passaic-County

The NJCDC Birch Street Apartment project is a permanent, affordable and supportive housing development sponsored by New Jersey Community Development Corporation. When completed at the end of January 2008, the site will provide fifteen (15) permanent, affordable and supportive units for very low income individuals who are homeless with a mental illness. Every unit will have it’s own living area, as well as a kitchen and bathroom.

Read the rest of this entry »