A cold weather response plan that seeks to get the homeless off the streets and into shelter has been extended through this weekend in Springfield, Massachusetts. A program to help end homelessness launched by city officials a decade ago means fewer and fewer people are in danger.
Each night since Christmas Day when the emergency plan was activated, a team of social workers and police officers try to locate homeless people and encourage them to go to a shelter.
"They are finding very few people, " said Gerry McCafferty, the city of Springfield’s Director of Housing, who attributed the low numbers to a year round effort spearheaded by the city with the help of local social service agencies to sharply reduce the city’s homeless population.
" There has been a huge push to house people from the streets, so the number of people who live outdoors in Springfield is relatively low for a city of this size," McCafferty said. "We know who the homeless are and have been doing really intense outreach to them."
In November and December, McCafferty said housing was found for 25 people who were either living on the streets or had been staying for an extended period in a homeless shelter.
During the record-setting cold snap, homeless shelters in the city have not been strained beyond capacity, according to McCafferty.
"Because we have been housing so many people it has made room in the shelters," said McCafferty.
The largest shelter for homeless individuals in the region, Friends of the Homeless in Springfield, has been averaging 150 people staying there each night during the extremely cold weather, according to Bill Miller, who operates the shelter.
" We have the basic services of shelter and meals and a good sized day center so people can be out of the weather during the day as well, but we also have services to help people get back on their feet and get back into housing," explained Miller.
He said the shelter works with social service agencies and the city’s Department of Housing to help the chronically homeless utilizing a strategy known as “housing first.”
" We are targeting folks who are most disabled, who might have lived on the streets for years, but not any more," said Miller.
Friends of the Homeless is also a landlord with about 120 rent-subsidized apartments.
Because Springfield is a city with a high poverty rate, eliminating homelessness is not a realistic possibility according to McCafferty and Miller. But over the last decade, the total number of homeless people has not increased.
The annual homeless census tallied 63 for all of Hampden County last year. A decade ago there were more than 100 people counted living on the street just in Springfield.
More than 1,000 people are sheltered annually at Friends of the Homeless, but they are mostly new people each year, according to Miller.
" Credit to all the agencies we work with, the city, the first responders," said Miller. " Everybody is working hard to make sure there is no lose of life, and also that people don't have to keep being homeless year after year."
The efforts to combat homelessness in Springfield were spurred more than a decade ago by the very public death of a homeless man who slept out in the extreme cold on the steps of City Hall.
