Standing Room Only As Barnstable Town Council Grapples With Homelessness Problem

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Greg Bar, manager of the NOAH homeless shelter, talks about clients at the center, while Housing Assistance Corporation chief financial officer Michael Sweeney and HAC CEO and president Rick Presbrey listen.

HYANNIS – From a video showing young people injecting themselves with drugs on the Hyannis Village Green to a 75-year-old homeless man telling his long, sad story, last night’s meeting of the Barnstable Town Council focused on homelessness issues, what the situation is now and solutions for the future.

In front of a standing room only crowd, civic and business leaders announced a new name and model for a regional homeless shelter, after the manager of the NOAH homeless shelter said one resident had been living there for 26 years.

Instead of being named after the problem—the acronym NOAH stands for No Other Available Housing—the new center will represent solutions: The Transitional Living Center of Cape Cod.

There is no location for it yet, but the plan is for it to be located outside of the Hyannis business district, preferably in another Cape town.

Numbers of how many homeless people are in the Hyannis area came from the police department, the shelter and a recent homeless census count. All three estimated about 400 people, with the majority of those people saying they are from towns on Cape Cod.

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Barnstable Police Chief Paul MacDonald says dealing with the homeless costs his department a half million dollars a year.

Barnstable Police Chief Paul MacDonald said responding to the calls for service, arrests, and a special unit devoted to handling the homeless costs his department more than $500,000 a year annually.

Calls for service as a result of homeless individuals has ballooned from 500 calls in 2004 to 4,260 calls this year. Handling those calls has taken 7,706 man hours not including the three-officer Community Impact Unit, put in place to focus on the homeless, he said.

Chief MacDonald showed a video taken at the Hyannis Village Green at 4:20 in the afternoon on August 18. A group of five young people are clustered around a bench. One of them, a young man not wearing a shirt, wraps a tourniquet around his arm and injects himself with a substance.

A woman on the bench does the same thing.

MacDonald said the individuals in the video were subsequently identified and none of them were living at the NOAH shelter. Several were living in the camps off Old Colony Road.

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Barnstable Police Chief Paul MacDonald showed a map that he said indicates the number of social service agencies clustered in Hyannis center.

But MacDonald said there has been “a lot of positive momentum” in dealing with the issue, particularly through the Day Center Executive Committee.

“We’re all working closely together. We’re all now finally in agreement that the shelter is not the best solution,” he said.

Frederic Presbrey, president and CEO of Housing Assistance Corporation, the agency that runs the NOAH homeless shelter, said HAC wants to work closely with civic and business leaders to solve the problem.

Presbrey, who is also a member of the day center committee, agreed the NOAH shelter needs to be moved. “We don’t like the location or the building,” he said.

He said it was Town Councilor Paul Hebert who approached him back in 1984 and asked him to open up a homeless shelter to help address the problem of homeless people sleeping in abandoned buildings in Hyannis.

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Nate Robertson, who worked on a film about addiction called “What Happened Here,” speaks about the homelessness issue in front of the Barnstable Town Council. Robertson said he is in recovery and looking for housing himself. “I’m glad the issue is being talked about,” he said.

“We were a housing agency. I didn’t want to do it,” Presbrey said. But at Christmas time in 1986, the NOAH shelter opened its doors, first at the armory and then at its current Winter Street building.

Town councilors pressed Presbrey and HAC’s chief financial officer Michael Sweeney on their costs for delivering services and how they measure their success.

But it was the manager of the NOAH shelter, Greg Bar, who left the councilors with an image they will probably remember most. As they sought to determine the average length of stay at the shelter, Bar said that those who have been there a long time skew the numbers. One man, he said, has been there for 26 years.

Bar said he sat down with the 60-year-old man a couple of weeks ago. After refusing to get medical care  for years, the man finally agreed to talk about services, as the shelter is now requiring clients to talk to social workers about housing, employment and health.

Bar said he believed that was progress.

But several councilors said they were appalled by the story.

“I don’t think that’s success,” Town Councilor Sara Cushing said. “For 26 years. It’s unacceptable. It’s sad to me the staff hasn’t been held to a higher standard. I’m rendered speechless.”

“It’s not success. It’s forward motion,” Bar said.

Bar said the new requirement that NOAH clients be sober has also resulted in progress. He said some clients have gotten sober and their families have taken them back.

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Deborah Krau of the Greater Hyannis Civic Association, Paula Schnepp of the Regional Network to Address Homlessness and Elizabeth Wurfbain of the Hyannis Business Improvement District say a new kind of shelter is needed to replace the NOAH homeless shelter.

Elizabeth Wurfbain, executive director of the Hyannis Business Improvement District, Deborah Krau of the Greater Hyannis Civic Association, and Paula Schnepp, the network coordinator of the Regional Network on Homelessness, presented what they said was a new name, new model and new mission to address the region’s homeless problem.

The Transitional Living Center of Cape Cod would be for sober clients who want to achieve self-sufficiency. It would be primarily a day center for 64 clients plus 35 beds for people who need to stay overnight.

The NOAH shelter has 55 beds.

Krau admitted the new center was only accepting “the cream of the crop” of the homeless and would not be addressing the problem of homeless people living in the woods, drug addicts and the mentally ill.

Those problems need funds and solutions from the county, the state and the federal government, she said.

Councilors were enthusiastic about the idea.

“I think the approach you have is right on. I like the campus idea. I love the part that everybody’s involved in their own recovery, and that it’s no longer a mattress but now a ladder. That’s all very, very good stuff,” Town Councilor Jennifer Cullum said.

When it came time for public comment, a number of people spoke on behalf of the region’s homeless population.

One man, a 75-year-old homeless man named Bo Chu, told his own story by reading a letter that was written by someone he said is a new friend. Chu had been a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he had a ski accident that resulted in a head injury. That injury has left him mentally ill and that mental illness has resulted in homelessness. He volunteers at the garden at Hyannis Public Library.

“He still feels the need to belong,” Chu said of himself.

Several homeless advocates said the town council has to realize that homeless people are struggling to survive and are suffering. Decisions like closing the shelter could mean life or death for some people.

Tara Wallace said she works for the Homeless Prevention Council and was once homeless herself. She said being homeless is not a lifestyle choice.

“We need to help these people and put them in recovery. We need more housing and case management,” she said.

But others said the business owners and residents of Hyannis need relief.

Irene Aylmer and Peter Cross, Hyannis neighbors who live in the Old Colony Road area where homeless camps are, both said the town has to address the problem of the camps.

“This is town land. Don’t be the host any more,” Cross said.

By LAURA M. RECKFORD, CapeCod.com NewsCenter