A growing concern

He said members of his family have mental health problems, so “we’re fully aware of the issues.”

He said he and his wife have no problem with Community Meal, and they know some of the homeless, but “there is a harder core element … that causes the majority of the problem.”

He said the situation appears to be better this year, “at least in our neighborhood.”

The homeless summit was attended by about 30 people, and featured experts who spoke from a variety of viewpoints before the group broke off into subgroups to discuss housing, mental illness and judicial aspects of homelessness. (See related story)

Moynahan said people are living in cars, even through the winter. “How do we care for them while at the same time maintaining standards for the people that live there?”

The Dalles Municipal Court Judge Tom Peachey said 10-20 percent of the defendants he sees in court are homeless. “That’s an extremely high percentage.”

The city has a mental health court, where qualified defendants work on obtaining stable housing, treatment and counseling.

Part of it includes issuing certificates, which Peachey initially thought was “silly.”

But then, “I quickly realized these are people that never got a certificate … it’s a big deal for these people.”

He said a focus on addressing the homeless problem was “long overdue.”

The Dalles Police Chief Jay Waterbury, who was attending one of his last meetings before retiring July 1, said the department protects everyone. “We respect the right of the homeless.”

But he added, “That doesn’t mean we let them sleep in your yard and do other things in your yard.”

Waterbury said the town had homeless when he arrived in 1975, but in the last five to seven years, it’s gotten much worse, and in the last one or two years, many are living in non-functioning motorhomes.

He said the reality of the matter with the motorhomes is “we are chasing people from one place in town to another place.”

He said when the splash park was built as part of the new outdoor swimming pool, “we had homeless taking showers with the kids, and that’s something we can’t have happen.”

He said some homeless will obey orders to leave a spot and also clean it up first. Others don’t.

Recently, the Union Pacific Railroad asked police to clear a longstanding camp on railroad property that had at least six motorhomes on it. They did, but the former residents “left years and years of accumulated garbage there.”

Waterbury said of the sharply increased homeless problem, “I don’t have any answer and the reason we don’t have any answers is because we don’t know what’s causing the problem.”

Barb Seatter, executive director of the Mid-Columbia Center for Living, noted that state mental institutions were required by law to release many patients into the community, but the communities weren’t given adequate funding to treat them, much less house them.

And often, the mentally ill homeless don’t want housing. It can take months, even years, to convince them to become housed, Seatter said.

A major barrier is that some people don’t want to be helped, she said. The public also doesn’t understand that just because someone is acting strangely it is not grounds for forcing them to accept care.

She said not only is it difficult to commit someone, but it is actually the Center for Living’s mission to not do that unless there is a serious, imminent risk of harm to self or others.

The Center for Living has 30 slots for rental assistance for the three counties it serves – Wasco, Sherman and Hood River. It was so hard to find housing for them that only recently was it able to fill all 30 slots.

Joyce Powell-Morin, chief culture officer at Mid-Columbia Medical Center, said homelessness “is not good for your health.”

The homeless can feel hopeless and depressed, be half sick and not clean, with decreased immunity and decreased energy.

“So many more patients come to the hospital that are struggling with such a wide variety of mental and emotional, spiritual and physical crises,” she said.

Aside from the homeless themselves, “there are so many members of the community that are on the edge [of homelessness] right now,” Powell-Morin said. “The littlest thing can push them into an unhealthy status.”

“There’s people that come to the hospital almost every day to ask the hospital for help in one way or another,” ranging from asking for gas money to medicine, she said.

She said another major factor in mental illness are veterans who are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She said they are “children who grew up here, went off to war, and the stress of that.”

Mike Kilkenny, chair of St. Vincent de Paul, said the local wintertime homeless shelter, the Warming Place, saw a huge increase in attendance last winter. Where a typical night used to have seven or eight people at the shelter, they had to cap it for the first time last winter at 19 people.

“This year has been by far the worst. I don’t know why it is,” Kilkenny said. “We’ve lost lots of volunteers because of the amount of the population.”

Jim Slusher, executive director of the Mid-Columbia Community Action Council, works in housing, and he said a major problem in the community is keeping people housed.

He said it is much cheaper to keep people in housing than to have them lose it, and face the prospect of lining up enough cash – first and last month’s rent, plus damage deposit -- to rent all over again.

It can take $2,500 to get a person into a home, he said.

The Oregon Legislature allocated another $10 million for rent assistance, but he doesn’t have an official number yet of how much his office will receive.

He regularly sees people with a total income of $700 who want to rent something that costs, say, $850. They say, “Why can’t you help me? [We reply] ‘Well, you don’t have household income.’”

His office got a grant to house veterans, and since word got out they’ve been “coming out of the woodwork” seeking assistance.

He said five veterans are housed at the former Hamilton Hotel, a housing complex on West Second Street. Putting someone in a house cuts costs in other ways, he said. “You find out these people didn’t go to the ER anymore because they had a warm place to live.”