Health & Fitness
Tackling the issue of Homelessness in Fredericksburg
A new perspective on dealing with homelessness in Fredericksburg and the surrounding region.
Dan Telvock released another article today detailing the rising concern over the homeless issue in Fredericksburg. Dan kindly cited several quotes both from a conversation I had with him the night of the March 13th Council meeting and from an email I subsequently sent. I've provided some more thoughts here. The bottom line is that City residents, business owners, and our local homeless population are all rightfully concerned with the homelessness issue facing Fredericksburg and the surrounding region. But let's not lose ourselves looking for band-aids. Let's observe and implement best practices for ending homelessness and thus eliminating the symptoms seen on our streets, felt in our budget, and most importantly impacting the lives of our citizens.
At the March 13, 2012 Fredericksburg City Council meeting Councilman Brad Ellis called for a city task force to address growing problems and ongoing citizen concerns with Fredericksburg's homeless population. While I commend Councilman Ellis for his interest in addressing the Fredericksburg homeless issue, I believe we are again setting ourselves up to miss an opportunity to postively and permanently change our City.
A task force as described by Mr. Ellis is in fact mandated by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and currently exists in the city. The Fredericksburg Regional Continuum of Care Task Force, also known as the CoC , is a regional network of public and private interests tasked with ending homelessness in the Fredericksburg region. The city's Planning Department is the lead agency of the CoC, so I therefore believe an additional, similarly tasked task force will only add an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy and replicate efforts instead of delivering the solutions Mr. Ellis and the rest of us all seek. There are other immediate actions the city can take now to further address both continued and new problems that have been identified by local businesses, residents and area homeless persons. Our City Council and city staff can themselves focus on best practices, conduct in-house research to find these best practices and then bring them to the CoC and City Council for implementation. For example, Norfolk has been lauded as one of the most successful cities in combatting homelessness by the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH). In fact, the NAEH website (www.endhomelessness.org) offers a wealth of knowledge that includes municipal initiatives that have been implemented elsewhere with remarkable success. The Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness (VCEH) at www.vceh.org is another free resource from which we can ask our city staff and CoC task force to draft actionable initiatives.
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The focus of any task force must be action, not further analysis. And that action must be rooted in objectivity. We have no further to look than Charlottesville and Norfolk for examples of sister cities that are successfully ending homelessness, and in turn alleviating the symptoms that concern us all; citizen safety, business interests, healthy living accommodations for children and families experiencing homelessness, etc.
I encourage Mr. Ellis and his colleagues to resist the urge to form more committees to analyze the problem. The most successful cities to date, in terms of alleviating the symptoms of homelessness, have been those acting proactively to end homelessness. Let's tap into the successes of these other localities and implement what has worked there both here in Fredericksburg and in the surrounding region which shares this moral responsibility. Homelessness is a significant issue in our City, one affecting all of us, and I am grateful to Councilman Ellis for championing the cause. When elected to City Council, I will join him in voting to advance best practices in Fredericksburg and join him in engaging our regional partners to implement other tangible solutions we identify.
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Paul Quinn