City Plan Commission - Regular Meeting

All right, I'll take your attention now. It looks like we have positive connection with our technology. So we had to re-enter our Zoom. It is being recorded. My name is Tamara Dickinson. I'm council president. One of my responsibilities is to plan city council meetings, and those are quarterly. And at this point, we are inviting all of you county supervisors. Welcome. We're trying to do it quarterly, but it doesn't always work out. So unknown when the next time will be, but I will be able to tell you that the next hosting event will be at the county facility. So you can plan on that. I just can't give you an exact date. Just a little rundown today. We have Brian Sampson here today. He is our... pathways home coordinator and Jim Dries. He is the county equivalent and then some. So those two will be giving their presentation and advancing the screens. Your best viewing is course close, but there are some farther away if you have really exceptional vision. So after they do their presentation, they will let you know when we're gonna do the question and answer. And all I'm gonna ask for that is that Tina Trigestad and I will walk around with the extra mics to make sure everybody can hear the question, and therefore we can wait for the answers, okay? Any questions or housekeeping that anyone would like to know? If you must leave early, there is no black marks on your record. You can slide out the side when you need to. I know this is approximately two hours, so we'll see how it goes. Oh, excuse me, City Council do need to stay. We need to keep quorum for it. So you aren't off the hook, but county supervisors had asked me those questions. So that's more directed to them.

Any questions?

Okay, get started. Thanks.

Perfect. Yeah, so thank you everyone for having us and allowing us to present on Pathways Home. Again, my name is Brian Sampson. I'm the Homeless Services Coordinator for the City of La Crosse, and this is Jim Dries, the Homelessness Response System Project Manager for La Crosse County. So we've been coming in front of you all about twice a year since we launched Pathways Home in January of 2024. I believe the last time we presented an update was back on January 5th of this year. And typically how it goes is we kind of share everything that's happening around Pathways Home, all the great work that all of our community partners are doing, the city's role, the county's role, kind of everything under the Pathways Home umbrella. We're going to do it a little bit differently tonight. So there will be things that we don't talk about that are happening under Pathways Home. There'll be things that we just lightly touch on that are happening under Pathways Home. So if any of you have any questions about any of that stuff or feel like there's something missing, feel free to reach out to Jim and or myself, and we'd be happy to have further discussions with you. Really tonight, what we wanted to focus on was a story that's kind of two sides of the same coin, but may feel like they are unrelated or telling conflicting stories. So part of what we're going to start out with tonight is just a real quick background on Pathways Home and how it came to be. We know there are some new county board members here tonight that weren't at previous meetings. And so we're just going to kind of do some level setting to begin. But then really what we're going to spend the majority of the evening going through is is kind of two different pieces of Pathways Home and the current situation our community is seeing. The first being the unsheltered population in our community, specifically in the downtown area of La Crosse, really just kind of talk about what that looks like, what we're doing to address the situations and some of the challenges that we're facing as it relates to that. And then the second part that we're going to touch on is overall our reduction or our numbers of people experiencing homelessness in La Crosse is going down and is at the lowest point that it's been since Pathways Home was launched. And so we're going to kind of show how those two stories really tell the entire picture of homelessness in La Crosse, even though we have maybe two stories that appear differently. So really starting out with that pathways home summary, If it changes, we have a delay. So Pathways Home is a five-year plan to end homelessness in La Crosse. Again, we launched it in January of 2024. So we're about halfway through the plan right now. It's led by the city of La Crosse and La Crosse County. That doesn't mean that we're coming in and taking over. There's a lot of community partners who are doing amazing work, have been doing amazing work. for a very long time. We're really just trying to play that role of coordinator, help get everybody rowing in the same direction, and help increase resources to those organizations that are doing great work and how can we really build that up. So that's really the role of the city and the county. We're also showing up differently in this space. How we've really divided Pathways Home is The city of La Crosse is focusing on adding housing stock in the community and not just housing for people experiencing homelessness, but housing for the entire community. And so we'll touch on some of the great work that the planning department has been able to do and really add housing at all income levels in our community. So with the city focused on actual housing as one of our primary roles, one of the county's primary roles is that supportive service aspect. how can they support, how can we support people who might have mental illnesses, who might be struggling with drug or alcohol addiction, who might need some extra job training, people who have fallen on hard times, how can we support them in not only finding housing, but once folks get into housing and helping them keep that. And that's really what Pathways Home is built on is helping people get into housing and then helping them with services that can support them. And that looks different for each and every human being. You know, we try in these presentations not to paint with broad brush. That can be very difficult. And so we're going to kind of intertwine some broad brush painting, but also try to get into those finer details tonight as well. So that's really city focused on housing, county focused on those supportive services as well. And with that long-term goal on sustainability, there's a lot of heavy lifting that needs to be done or has needed to be done right away, but eventually we want to get to a point where our community can just sustain the efforts without having to continue to pour a mass amount of resources into it. So some of those concrete goals with Pathways Home have an option for every household experiencing homelessness, making sure that there are zero individuals living on the street and reaching what's called functional zero. So what functional zero means is that there will still be homelessness in our community, but it'll be rare, it'll be brief, it'll be non-reoccurring, aka if somebody falls into homelessness, we're able to respond quickly, offer them a spot in housing, and help get them back on their feet. And we'll talk about a lot of the great progress we've already been able to make in that category. One of the biggest things that we're really proud of is the community partnerships that we have. This is not a city and a county plan. We just have one role in it. We really work with a lot of different organizations throughout the community who continue to do great work. And so we can't sing their praises enough, just all of the great work. This is not an exhaustive list. This is just, you know, who we're able to fit on the screen, honestly. And so this is just some of the partnerships that we are able to help coordinate and help work alongside when it comes to Pathways Home. So when we launched Pathways Home, one of the first things that we focused on was aligning the system. A lot of great work has been happening in our community around homelessness for a long time. We were just trying to get everybody rowing in the same direction again and be able to support one another in the work that we are all doing. After that first phase, then we've been focused on building the capacity. So looking at adding shelter beds in our community, adding more housing, specialized housing is what we call it, where we're frozen up there. So adding more specialized housing where there's housing options and also supportive services as well. So that's really the phase that we entered into 2025 and that we continue to be in right now. And then finally, phase three will be sustaining the gains as once we get closer to that functional zero target, how can we continue that trend in the right direction? So that's just a quick snapshot. Again, I know a lot of you have heard this piece of it before, but if there are ever any questions around, how Pathways Home was put together. We're happy to talk about that in more detail because there's a lot of community engagement, a lot of gathering thoughts and solutions from all parts of our community that went into this plan, but also then reaching out to other communities across the state, across the country, and looking at what's been successful elsewhere and how can we, instead of reinventing the wheel, replicate it here in La Crosse. And so that's a lot of what we've been able to accomplish so far. So we're first going to start just by talking about unsheltered homelessness, specifically around our downtown area in La Crosse. And so before we dive into that, just kind of homelessness, unsheltered, there's a lot of definitions, a lot of words are thrown around. And so for tonight's purpose, homelessness is kind of like that top broad category of anybody experiencing homelessness. So that could be like somebody who's living in their car, sleeping in the parks, the parking ramp, somebody who is in a shelter bed. That all is encompassed when we're talking about somebody experiencing homelessness. When we're talking about unsheltered homelessness, that's specifically people who are not in shelters like the Salvation Army or New Horizons or other places. So they might be outside sleeping somewhere. So when we talk about unsheltered homelessness, it's just kind of a subcategory of homelessness. So right now we know that In our downtown area, the concerns around parks and library in that downtown area are very real. People are experiencing serious crises, and that includes residents around the area, businesses, and people experiencing homelessness themselves, and they were all feeling the effects. And so we really wanted to just, who are we talking about specifically around the population of folks who are unsheltered in our downtown area? because they don't necessarily reflect the rest of the population of people experiencing homelessness. So you can see on this graph right here, the bar chart on the left is the downtown area. So that light blue category is people who we would say have intensive needs. So folks who might have a serious mental illness, people who might be battling alcohol or other drug addiction. And so you can see that group, when we're talking about folks in the downtown area, makes up more than half of that population. And then moderate needs is another big piece of that pie as well, with a very light sliver being folks with those lighter needs. So when we're talking about people in that downtown area, it's folks with those highest service needs, people with the longest histories of homelessness in our community. folks who have the most interactions and put the most stress on different systems like our emergency rooms, our justice systems, different things like that. Then when you pull that group out of the rest of folks experiencing homelessness, it's really an inverse of the rest of the population. That chart on the right, you can see almost half of that group is made up of folks who we would identify as having lighter needs. Then there's still a good chunk of folks with moderate, but then there's only about 15-20 percent of folks with intensive needs. When we're talking about who does maybe the typical person in our community think of when they think of somebody experiencing homelessness, they probably usually think of somebody in that left chart because that's who they see, who they interact with, who they have the most experience witnessing. or interacting with. And so we just want to kind of center on that piece of it. Because as we're talking about homelessness, sometimes we aren't able to connect or we're disconnected on maybe the definitions or what we're seeing or who we're talking about. And this is a great example of not painting with a broad brush. Because all of our perceptions are different when it when it comes to interacting with different human beings.

Good evening, everyone. Yeah, I just want to start out for those that kind of follow the pathways plan from the start. Part of this plan was always to have this temporary surge shelter. We knew we would take time to have housing that would be appropriate for folks. And that was it. And we spent a good chunk of time, a good year and a half looking at options for a temporary surge shelter. Lots of issues, lots of challenges. And then as that's happening, what's happening in the parks and communities building. building frustration, building concerns. So we did a pivot since we last talked to you, which was kind of late this spring, started something we call the coordinated campaign. From the start, there's always been a team that goes out for homeless outreach. So we call it the Homeless Outreach Team, hot team if you hear them referred to that way. It's a group of individuals that are going out. They meet at the library, kind of connect. We have reports from police, parks, other communities and agencies as to where people might be found. Really the goal with general outreach is to just connect with folks. We really want to start building trust and get them identified so we can start getting them on our by name list and into services on there. So that's kind of always been going on. What we started to do here is what we do is what we call is targeted outreach. and so we got a list from police from parks from other places of who are the folks that are unhoused in our community causing the most concern and as brian alluded to some of the stats um folks that are cycling in and out of jail are costing our community 35 40 45 000 a year Those that are cycling in and out of emergency rooms. And so imagine someone who's unsheltered who may be diabetic or something else where they really can't do core treatments. It gets worse and worse in terms of those things. And so there's a lot of studies that would say those that are unsheltered and left unsheltered cost the community $50,000 a year. So we know that the community is broadly incurring this cost. There's a lot of frustration, concerns, safety, police reports. So from police and parks, we've got a list of 80 individuals that were mentioned as folks. Hey, let's do a special focus on there. So of those 80 individuals, the first thing we did is started working through that list. So we partnered with Salvation Army to make the best use of the shelter we have. So they have 64 shelter beds on there. As they open up, we talk daily, and I say daily, it's Monday through Friday, with the Salvation Army to get a report on open shelter beds. We need to know if they're male or female, upper or lower bunk, because that matters as we're going out there. And then we go through the list. Our goal is everyone on this list and ultimately everyone on shelter gets a personal offer of a shelter bed. Otherwise, they would go and wait in line. Maybe they get in. Maybe they don't. Some folks won't do that, particularly if they have higher level mental health issues or substance use needs. So we've been going through that list of finding folks. And I'll show you in the next slide in a minute kind of the results of what we've learned so far about that. But very specific for them. to get a shelter bed offer on there. And again, some of the folks may not be eligible for shelter. Like any agency, they have rules for safety, for staff, for other members there. And so folks can be banned. We respect that. We have a really good relationship with Salvation Army to say, what about this person? And what would that look like? And what does that make sense? While we're doing that, we've worked also that the work to get folks housed doesn't stop. And so nine of those 80 have been housed. We all wish that number was way higher, but we're at nine of 80 folks on there. And we also ran into this thing and the numbers will show it out that for some people, particularly for higher level mental health and substance use needs, the shelters are really tough setting for them, very traumatic, hard for them to get along with others, those types of things. So there's some folks we have been identified as saying really their best path to housing is through some type of treatment program. So if that's substance use, it might remain going to the care center and to detox into residential treatment, into a sober living setting, and then transition into housing. So what's, you know, and for others, it could be mental health stabilization. For some, it could just be getting on meds that help them with what they need to, you know, to... to move forward towards housing on there. So then we've started this program of working, and it's not for everyone who's unsheltered. This is specific folks identified with higher level substance use or mental health needs. And it's the same discussion, which is going to someone, what if today I could take you to the care center? And you had a package that looked all the way through housing. And so what I want to tell you is what's different. Because if someone came to the county at any point asking for a treatment program that would be provided if they qualify county resident, Those types of things that would make them qualify for that. What's different is we're going to meet people where they are. We're telling them ahead of time, we have something like this coming. Might you be interested? If they're interested or say, tell me more, that issue is being worked with them. The same thing kind of happens with a shelter bed. There are folks that have had over five shelter bed offers. It's not a one and done. We know for some folks, depending on where they are in a cycle of mental health or substance use, that answer today, we don't mean that's their answer for all time. So we continue to go and build trust with them on there. And so the two things are, we're meeting people where they are saying, we could take you today to a bed, to the care center. We use the care center as a buffer till we can get them into residential treatment, which can take up to two weeks. to have an open bed on there. The other thing that we've heard from folks is I've tried detox, I've tried residential, and often people get released on their own before they're fully ready for that. And so we're trying to do is put a long tail on this is to say, what if we could move you into transitional housing and help you kind of continue with supportive services? And before I go further, what I want to just share a little bit about is also just understand that these county offered programs are voluntary. So a lot of this is building trust. We do motivational interviewing to help them see how this particular program might help them meet a goal that they care about on there. And what that means for our team, and it's kind of hard for our team a little bit too, is some people decline shelter. And we know they would be better in shelter, but that is their choice. Some people decline a treatment package. And again, neither one is a one and done offer. We're trying to build trust and connection for them. And honestly, as long as these folks aren't violating laws or ordinances, they can remain in public spaces. We know that causes a lot of frustration. So we're balancing kind of constitutional legal protections people have with service offerings. So I just want you to know from the service side and our team, They care about folks. They are out there. They know them by name. They're working them. And we're trying to get them into the right channel and the right lane to make progress towards their housing.

Go ahead, Brian.

So in a second, you'll see kind of a little bit of a snapshot of what we've learned so far. So 40 plus of those individuals have received shelter bed offers. And I kind of go through a little bit on the right and I know you probably can't see it, so I'll do them. Six individuals accepted shelter and have stayed there. That's what we hope for, that's good. We're trying to support them with services when they go into shelter. We've had 12 folks that have accepted shelter, gone into shelter. And either left or some of the common rule violations might be curfew or other issues on there. Again, that doesn't mean they don't get an offer later. It's just we are tracking this, that. 20 people have declined. A range of issues. Maybe they're connected or partnered with someone and they only want to go in if their partner can go in. Maybe they have a dog and they can't take a dog and they're concerned about that. Maybe they've got a bunch of gear and they're worried about that. Maybe they had a bad experience before. We're trying to work through. So when we understand a decline, it's tell us why. Help us understand so we can see is there another path or offer on there. 10 folks are banned. That's an open discussion. And I won't go into the complications there, but there's a period of time where folks may be banned and then they get another chance. And we've had good dialogue with Salvation Army. Frankly, we don't want to put people in the Salvation Army shelter who are going to be unsafe there for them or others on there. So we respect those rules on there. And also know that for a lot of folks, the shelter we have, and some of you may have seen it, some of you may not, like for the males, it's largely a large gymnasium of bunk beds. And that can be very traumatic if you have very high mental health issues in terms of triggers and other things. And that makes it hard for the other folks that are there. So we're really trying to partner with Salvation Army to say, how do we make the best use of this shelter with an ultimate goal that everyone has a person they know come up to them and say, hey, we have a shelter bed available for you. And, you know, we're with Salvation Army. They've got till two o'clock in the afternoon to get and take that bed or it gets given to someone else. And that's the way we work on there. Some you'll see no longer in lacrosse. Some are no longer in parks. So we're trying to look through this list and understand. As for the treatment to housing package offers, 20 individuals have received those offers. 20%, so, you know, really four of them have accepted the offer and treatment packages are in process with them. Another 20% started. And left on their own. And we, again, trying to record the reason, try to understand what's going on, how we can make the system better, what would work for them within what we can offer. And 60% have declined. And we record the reason. It may be, I don't have a problem with substance use. And so we have a working edge that we kind of work with on motivational interviewing and understand. Again, reiterating, these are voluntary programs for folks, but we're going out to meet folks with targeted outreach by name. for this high need list to really continue to work with them on offers.

So part of what our role is in Pathways Home is to look at the data, look at it from a systems lens or from a more macro perspective. However, these are real human beings that we're talking about as well. And everybody's story and situation is different. So I just wanted to take us through an example of somebody that we've worked with through this coordinated campaign and we will call him Jay. So Jay has been homeless in La Crosse maybe longer than most folks have. He's been experiencing homelessness around a decade in La Crosse and Jay has a severe addiction to alcohol. He drinks almost every day and drinks to the point where his behaviors really can cause issues for himself. and for others. Jay has been in and out of a lot of housing programs that our community has to offer, including our two most intensive programs that he was not able to make work long term. But to get to kind of know Jay and why some of those things haven't worked for him, we got to back it up a little bit on Jay. So when Jay was a child, he was a victim of abuse from his father, who was also an alcoholic at that time. And so that abuse that Jay suffered went on for years and years before anybody was able to intervene and help keep him safe. And so one of the main reasons that Jay drinks every day is to forget those things that happened to him when he was a kid. He was never able to learn healthy coping mechanisms. And so that is how he has learned to cope with the terrible things that have happened to him. And so that has caused a lot of issues in his life, obviously both when he was a victim of abuse, but now as he's been an adult and the behaviors and things like that that come with that level of drinking both for himself, but for his health as well and his friends and his family members. So about nine months ago, Jay lost his housing again and went back out onto the streets. At that time, there is a county social worker who began engaging with Jay. This county social worker and Jay didn't know each other at all before this. And because of the things that Jay has been through in his life, it's hard for him to build those relationships and build that trust and engagement with folks. So at first he wanted nothing to do with this county social worker. When the When the social worker was going out on outreach, Jay would walk away, wouldn't even say hi, wouldn't engage at all. After a little bit of showing up consistently, then Jay was able to take water and just say hello to this outreach social worker, just a little step at a time. A couple of weeks later, he would start engaging in more small talk and a little bit more conversation. And then as the months went on, Jay and the social worker were able to build more of a relationship together and really build that trust and engagement with each other. So through the coordinated campaign, the social worker was able to offer Jay a spot at the Salvation Army, which Jay initially declined a couple of times, but then he ended up taking that offer of the shelter bed. Unfortunately, he only went in for a week or so, and then he missed curfew. And so then he was discharged back into the streets or into the downtown area where this social worker continued to work with him. Even when he was in shelter, this social worker was partnering with Salvation Army to try to help Jay find housing. When he went back out onto the streets, the social worker continued to show up every single day to just, you know, little things at a time, whether it just be a water, just a talk, you know, just building up that relationship. Eventually, Jay got offered treatment to go and address his alcohol addiction. He had been through treatment several times in the past. And what has happened is sometimes he would successfully complete it. Sometimes he wouldn't. But every single time then he'd be discharged back into unsheltered homelessness or outside of And if you're outside, it's nearly impossible to maintain sobriety for any length of time. And so then he would always go back and relapse into his alcohol addiction. So this social worker, through this engagement and trust building, was able to say, hey, we have this new thing that we're doing where it's not just treatment, but then it's transitional housing. And then at the end of the road can be housing with services. So we're not going to let you fall through the cracks again. I'll be there with you every single step of the way to make sure that we can help get you right from treatment into permanent housing with supportive services. So again, this conversation happened over weeks and weeks. Finally, Jay agreed to go into treatment again and give it a try. The social worker went so far as picked him up, took him to the county building. They got him a cab to go to treatment. And then he was able to check in with Jay that very night and the next day and continue to check in with him. Unfortunately, Jay discharged himself from treatment and is back outside. And so this is a story that doesn't yet have a happy ending, but you know who was there talking to him again when he was discharged? That county social worker was again meeting with him and continues to meet with him to this day to explore different options of what can help Jay. And it might work the next time, it might not, but just showing up time and time again is really important. And so I think this is just a great example of the level of intensity that we are trying in coordination that not just county social workers, but nonprofit organizations and their staff have is really meeting people at that human level and trying to take it from just a number on a spreadsheet to this is a human being who has a family, who has a story himself. And how can they continue to show up time and time again, even if mistakes are made, even if things aren't perfect. And so that's really what this coordinated campaign is about is just continuing to show up and try to find those personal solutions for each person that is out there.

Yeah, so I want to share some data and learnings we've had in terms of what's going on. So as Brian kind of alluded to, we have a process to try to assess people's level of supportive needs to be successful in housing. We call it Pathways Adult Need and Strength Analysis. And it's a series of questions to understand living life skills, mental health, substance use type of thing. And people can fall into one of five categories. So at the most extreme level, we would find someone who just needs 24-7 care, potentially cannot take care of bodily functions, those types of things. So really our placement there is generally working with Medicaid, My Choice, Inclusa companies to try to get a placement into essentially nursing home or assisted living for folks. And what you're seeing on this chart, well, let me walk through that, then I'll walk through the chart on there. The next category is intensive. These are folks that really need daily interaction to be successful in housing. After that, there's moderate, that's weekly, and light is monthly. And then some are none, which is just probably a pure economic factor that they can, you know, just need a little help getting back and that's it. And so when we try to house folks, we start there to understand, okay, where they might be successful. I think early on in our system, there were sometimes placements that we could have predicted weren't going to work out real well just because of a mismatch of their need of support and what support they might have offered on there. So I'm gonna walk through this chart a little bit. I know it's kind of small, so I'll try to step through it. On the far left, what you're seeing on the line is kind of an overview of our population. So the first part is 1% of our population needs 24 seven care. And then we look back since January of 2025, so about 250 placements of households into housing, 1% of them were placed into an appropriate setting for 24 seven care. It's a long process, often takes months on there, but for many folks, that is the only place they can be cared for in terms of doing that. So that's sort of aligned. 1% of our population needs this. We were able to place 1%. That's sort of in balance. The next curve you look at is really 30% of our population has intensive support needs. More than 30% of our population's been unhoused for over a year. So we have a pretty, quite a large chronic homeless population. The longer someone is unhoused, the more likely they are to have mental health and substance use issues and co-inquiry in between them, which is why speed of getting people rehoused is so important. So 30% of our population has intensive support needs. When we look at the last roughly 18 to 20 months, it was only 10% of our placements were those folks. And we'll kind of come back to that. That is a real challenge in our system and a stuck point. We have folks that need this type of housing and we just don't have enough of those units. We'll talk about what we're trying to do to do that. So that, you know, it starts to come back to what we're seeing in the parks and what we're seeing going on. It's not that people aren't connecting with people. It's just really hard to get a housing placement that someone can afford that involves daily care. Then if you look at the next one, moderate, it's 33% of our population is assessed as having moderate. So again, they're needing a weekly check-in and 38% of our placements. So we're kind of moving that more. So that is a little easier placement. And then if you go to the next bar light, again, this is just folks that need a monthly touch based on our assessment tool. You know that's 35% of the population, but 48% of our placements that part of the system is is working and will kind of go into that part, as I feel like is good and. Then the last one on none you'll see it's 1% of our population 4% of our placements so often our team is helping folks apply to units that are appropriate. better your rental history, eviction history, all of that, the more likely you are to be selected. So there's no surprise our system is biased to the ability to rehouse folks with lighter needs. Don't dismiss that, though, because those folks need to be rehoused quickly. Because if we don't, we're just building more and more needs for us. So we've got to kind of work out through this. So this is kind of critical analysis for us to understand the system. And when we talked to you kind of a year ago about this is sort of the mix of housing, it was sort of laid out all even. Now we sort of know our system and essentially the light folks through our systems and programs can move towards functional zero. We have that capability and capacity in our system. Moderate needs a little boost to get there. Intensive is kind of stuck. And so we want to talk a little bit, how do we help with those with the highest needs get placed into housing? Go ahead. So just a little snapshot. So, you know, Pathways Home is set out as a five-year project. And I'll say as someone who's a project manager, you hope the world doesn't change, you know it will. You're always hopeful favorable things are helping you. You're getting tailwinds, not headwinds. And I'll just say, you know, this is just trying to explain we're getting some headwinds related to this. So the first curve has to do with evictions in La Crosse County. Some of that's probably a COVID impact and, you know, it's starting to level out a little bit. But the reality there is, you know, for folks that get evicted, some of them just find another place and it's all good. They don't automatically go into being homeless. They kind of figure that out. But it's an indicator of economic stress in our system. It's an indicator of housing instability that we're seeing rising evictions. Our goal is before an eviction happens to have them work with tenant landlord resource office at REACH Center, reach out to someone to kind of figure out how do we avoid an eviction and get someone rehoused before that gets on their record on their... The middle curve is really just around the Wisconsin homelessness count. And if you look again, it's just the same thing that's sort of showing there's economic stress on our system, economic factors are driving things. And when we looked at what was causing people to lose their housing, and it's often a number of factors, the number one, which two-thirds of people said was really low income. and that's it. You know, other things, loss of job and mental health and other things are there, but just know a lot of this starts economic, but it quickly becomes substance use and mental health for folks. What you're seeing is maybe a little hard to see on the right is sort of our total count. So I peaked right at 295. Right now we're just right at about 200 in terms of that count on there. For those that have heard me say this before, when we ran the math on this, we just needed to house six more people and become unhoused every month. So if four people became unhoused, we have to house 10. So we're just making a progress of six. The first 12 months, we were at about eight, feeling good. Some quick wins, some ARPA funds, some other things were giving us some nice tailwinds, which was always appreciated. Then it really stalled out earlier this year based on, you know, we just didn't have those new housing projects kind of coming in with openings. Starting to see a little progress again. Right now, we're right about five per month. So not quite on plan. I mean, we're just a little bit off there. The other thing I'll just say is we normally see a little fall uptick. on there on our list. So what's the sort of understanding seasonality related to that? And so what I'm trying to say is there's some macro factors in our state, in our country that are driving more folks becoming unhoused as we look at housing affordability. we are making steady progress, but not at the pace we'd like to be at on there. So the team wants, you know, we're not happy with that. We're just trying to drive that even further. So what's different about lacrosse? Maybe I would just take a minute on there. One is just look at this room. The community cares about this. They care about it for a whole spectrum of reasons, but at the end of the day, they care about doing something different. uh i think in a helpful way for our community and that can be helpful for our businesses or visitors or residents or those affected by this or those that want to use parks and all the way there it's a it's a key issue and we've heard that we know that we know from the listening sessions the mayor does about this is a top issue and i'm sure all of you particularly fear more and some parts of the city are hearing this frequently um and and we understand i just want to acknowledge that that We know this is an issue that the community cares about. We also know there's a range of perspectives on what the right approach is. So we just want to share what we are doing. The other thing we hear, and I'll just tell you, in the last several months, we've talked to Sheboygan, we've talked to Brown County, we've talked to other areas that are around in the Fox Valley. We regularly talk to Wausau and Eau Claire about issues and various things. One of the things, one of my most common questions when we talk about pathways with other communities, largely our size in many ways, is how did you get city and county to cooperate on this? And so that's one of the stories we do tell. People often ask us to kind of tell the story. And Brian knows it better because he was here when that was forming. I came in as a result of that collaboration on there. So I'd encourage this is kind of a challenging issue to keep that in mind. That is, if you look at success of midsize cities and addressing homelessness in a sustainable way, it is around a local government has a role. There's a lot of local governments that choose not to take a role. We have here. And it's around that collaboration. And I can just tell you at the team level, just like I feel with our nonprofits, there's a whole level of collaboration going on in our system.

And that collaboration obviously starts with you all, but like Jim was saying, it vibrates through the rest of the system. And it's really, when we talk to other communities, it's unparalleled in other communities. And so some of that stems from the coordination from the city and the county. Jim talked about the role that outreach plays in our community. Since January, we've upped outreach activities. We were going out once or twice a week. Now outreach is happening every single day, Monday through Friday, most days a couple times each day. And so that's really a big piece of it is getting to know folks on a human level who are outside or who are experiencing homelessness. We have a community shared by name list. So this is just something that the city and the county oversees, but we have a ton of agencies who are entering their clients into there, putting updates in there, and that really goes a long way for everybody. every single week we meet to discuss path what's called pathways conferencing where there's 12 to 15 agencies who are there on a regular basis and so that's where we talk about 30 specific households experiencing homelessness so 30 people and we walk through step by step what is happening with each person to help get them one step closer to housing and then we come back the next week and we say all right did that happen now what's next And it really takes that perspective instead of this is my client, I'm working with it. This is our neighbor, this is our client. We all have some shared level of responsibility. Doesn't mean that I will be going out and helping somebody apply for housing if that's not within my wheelhouse, but I might have another important role to play in that process. And so, you know, I think there's a ton of collaboration that's happening in that meeting. One good example happened about a month ago where there's a community health worker from a nonprofit who is trying desperately to get ahold of this gentleman, was calling him, was looking for him all over town. Just was not hearing back from this gentleman that he was working with. And so he was sharing that at Pathways conferencing. I keep calling him. I don't know where he is. I can't get a hold of him. I have a housing option to offer him. At that same meeting, the library, which are regular attendees in Pathways conferencing, said, He's at the library every single day. I know him. Let's go right after this meeting. And so right after Pathways conferencing, the library staff and the community health worker went over to the library. They were able to connect and they were able to get that guy into housing a week later. That's just something that probably would not have happened or may not have happened if that pathways conferencing wasn't happening. And it's not like those agencies have to be there, right? They're busy, they're working their butts off, but they show up because they're committed to being good partners and because it's a helpful process. In Pathways Conferencing, we found that if we can get somebody in there and keep them in that process, they can find housing within 80 days. And so that just to compare that to if you are on our list, but not in conferencing, it takes you 150 days before you can find housing. So we can cut that number in half just by that community collaboration and that process that takes place.

Yeah, and I just want to remind folks of the Pathways Specialized Unit team there, and then some new things we are using to enhance our service offerings for folks. So this Pathways Specialized Unit is made up of six social workers and three peer support specialists with lived experience, really dedicated to working with folks that are unhoused in our community, do a great job there. Some of the ones that are doing outreach, making connections, encouraging folks to get into appropriate programs that would be helpful for them, building trust and connection with folks. And I think I shared last time a little bit about a Medicaid program that started about a year and a half ago in Wisconsin, Medicaid Supportive Housing. And we because of what we were doing jumped right in we were one of the first counties in Wisconsin to be approved for that I think we have if you look at the success It's had we have eight to ten percent of the total folks approved in Wisconsin for this program are in La Crosse County so What this is, is it's just a low barrier way for people to get into a program. Some of our more established county programs require a third party medical evaluation or, you know, it's a longer process to get into those programs. Not that we can't help people while they're applying, but it's a longer process. This is really just a series, seven, eight questions of fairly, do you sometimes struggle with mental health? It's all we need to know. Do you sometimes struggle with substance use? And for us, it's just a very low barrier way. And I think one of the learnings we have is our State statutory programs that have fixed requirements for Medicaid are really hard to engage in when you're unhoused. Those programs expect some level of life stability to show up for appointments, do things that our unhoused, unsheltered community really is going to struggle with. So this program, we have well over 100 folks, more than half of our folks have said, yeah, I would like some help with this. That may not seem significant, but for our side, remember going back to this voluntary engagement, having someone said, let's talk about this, that's just a great entry point that our team will use on there. So what this provides through Medicaid funding is housing consultation to develop a person-centered plan. It is not a cut and paste as Brian kind of talked about. We really treat each person individually in terms of this plan. And then transitional support, including like helping them apply for units, and then sustaining support, such as conflict resolution, independent living skills on there. And then if they're coming from a shelter, They can't be qualified for relocation support of up to $2,000. And that can go towards security deposits, necessary health and safety furnishings, essential household furnishings. It doesn't pay any rent. I wish it did. But again, this is a great program. A lot of folks are kind of watching what we are doing and how we are trying to do that. Through that program, the county has built out a housing support services unit with folks that are basically dedicated in doing this. So that's a growing curve, you know, I think from the county. And we may have some local agencies join in providing this service as well. So what is really good is we just want a wide range of programs for people in a wide range of housing options. And this is just an easy entry point. And we really hope is, yeah, I can sign up for this one. That as they build trust over time, maybe they sign up for a program that, you know, provides a higher level of service and support. So really a great entry point for us. The other thing we've been trying to do is just leverage any resources we can to supplement what city and county are already doing. So active here. So we received a $350,000 Wisconsin Department of Justice deflection grant. It's something they've offered to a series of counties in there. And so what deflection means is someone's behavior might lead them to be arrested and brought to jail. And we do have a population of small number of folks that are cycling from jail to homelessness, back to jail and homelessness, and everybody's frustrated by that. That is pretty universal. So what can happen then, we've always had a crisis response where someone is in crisis, can be policed, and a crisis worker from the county can meet someone, but that's generally for people who are harmed to themselves or others. In terms of folks that are just getting rearrested for the same offense, and I've talked to the police about how frustrating it is for them and just for the whole system, it's an opportunity for police to go with a social worker funded by this program to say, okay, Here's an alternative, really looking, what are the behaviors or things that are leading to this cycling through jail? So we get to partner and learn from other counties that are doing this various program. Right now, we have about 25 individuals in the program working from them. Part of this includes $100,000 of this is for housing supports. So we can say, hey, rather than doing this cycling through jail, Can we help you get treatment for things and help you with housing support related to that? This program could be extended for a third year that would take the total up to a half million. We stay actively engaged with this. This is a growing area of justice response. We are not alone in having folks that their underlying issue is often mental health and that leads them to the justice system. And how do we work through that? The other thing is thank you for our city partners for city home ARP grant. We also know some of our high need folks, we need case managers with a small caseload. So this position is funded through those dollars to hire a dedicated social worker who's not restricted by program requirements, but can meet people where they are. And they're gonna be working with five folks that are those intensive folks that are saying no to treatment packages and no to shelter. to start working with them and trying to get engagement from them in other ways. And then five folks that are cycling through our justice system in terms of doing this. Again, it's a model that's important for us. And lastly, I just want to do a little bit of saying, some of you may have heard about RISE, which is the county's opioid response plan on their A lot of stuff going on there. There's housing dollars on there. What I want to highlight is funding two important positions that were gaps in our system. One is for jail, a reentry coordinator, and secondly, for a jail therapist. And so some of the treatment, you know, medical treatment, you know, is just in the process of being where it can be started in while you're incarcerated in terms of doing this with a plan for release. so um i can say we have a couple other grant applications out in terms of doing that right now trying to expand this area and we'll continue to do this to leverage this and honestly some of the ways that makes us more attractive is again city county collaboration our dashboard other things we are trying to do those are all helpful things as we pursue external funding Generally, you look at this whole thing, we just need a heavier lift for a few years, particularly going after, you know, the chronic homeless intensive population. As we get our system more in balance, really, we do have sustainable ways to keep a system in balance, stay in balance. And I think there's some indicators we're seeing that on the light side and other things. So we're still in the stage of just needing an extra level of resources and we're trying to secure anything we can in terms of grants and other funding outside of city and county.

So at the beginning, we talked about the city and the county's role or one of their primary roles in Pathways Home. That's where the county had the supportive services side, which Jim just ran through about how the county has been able to maximize and rearrange social workers to work with this population. Within the city, we have physical housing. And really... Those are separate, but then to make it successful, you have to marry them together. And so that's a lot of what our coordinating role does. And so specialized housing, we have a specialized housing plan update two to hand out at the end for folks. But really how we define specialized housing is housing that is affordable. And by affordable, we mean for this specific population where they are able to afford it based off of a limited income. So specialized housing is affordable housing with supportive services attached with each individual. And that looks different again, going back to like the light, moderate, intensive. And so how we look at it is different housing opportunities or projects in our community, we try to right match for folks based off of what that assessment says. So for example, the collective on 4th, which went up and moving started happening last year, we had 12 set aside units for people experiencing homelessness. Anytime you have a large building of any type, you don't want to necessarily concentrate a group of folks with very high needs. And that's not just homelessness, that's any population, right? And so for that type of unit, we really targeted folks with lighter needs who are working and engaged with case management, with various agencies across the community. So most of those move-ins happened last year. One year later, 11 of those 12 leases have been renewed for those individuals. So that's a group that there definitely are challenges when you're talking about a lot of people in one space, but that's a place where we've had good progress so far. The bottom left photo is Park Lane Studios or the old Hillview wing of the Hillview campus that the county put ARPA funding into that got 10 units. And that's more geared for folks with more moderate needs because they have on-site staff, both a peer support and a social worker who are on-site throughout the week. And really what they've been able to learn is that housing stability helps increase income for those residents and helps move them closer to sustainability of their own housing. And so that's really just two of examples of when we're talking about adding housing with supports. Those are two models that we found to be successful in our community. Just overall, the city has been able to add a lot of different housing projects. So shout out to the city planning department. They've done some really awesome work. And these are projects that obviously are not specific to people experiencing homelessness, but just to the general city. We have a lack of housing in La Crosse and so there have been a lot of housing developments that have already gone up and a lot that are are in the works and they've been able to do some really creative work to entice developers to build in our community and really get them to bring their projects here and so that's just a quick snapshot again it's not all inclusive of just everything that the different housing developments that have either come online or are coming online. And then that's where, as we continue to build options in our community, partnering with those supportive services is really important. Another really cool and exciting project that was approved by city council last year was Pathways Held Leases. And so this is where the city, we received funding from Mayo, for five leases where we signed five leases with private landlords. And then we are subleasing to people experiencing homelessness. So again, we're trying to right match each strategy for folks. And so this is a strategy that we have penned for folks with lighter needs. And so community agencies will send in referrals to me. I'll screen them and score them. And then what we do then is folks who are appropriate for it then we sign a sublease with them for one of the units. So we had our first two move-ins in the last two weeks. Tomorrow we'll have our third move-in. And then by the end of next week, we anticipate that we'll have all five units with people living in them. And so this is a really scalable model in our community that's based off of private funding that we want to continue to drive community investments into it. So the tenant, just some more background on this. So with the Mayo funding, we are able to pay for one-year leases where the city up front, we will pay for security deposit, utilities, monthly rent, all of that. And then the tenant will pay 30% of their income. So if they can afford the entire thing and just have an imperfect rental background or criminal background that prevents them from getting their own housing, then they would reimburse us for the full costs and then they would live there. They don't yet have income. That's part of what the case manager or the support worker works with them on is, all right, let's get you into housing. And then let's work on job training, on applying for disability, on getting a job, whatever the case may be. It looks different, but really using that, having a house as somebody's ability to become more steady and to be able to grow and build off of that as their foundation. The hope of this program is that we'll be able to get people in and then they will be able to use that as a positive landlord reference, either to take the lease on as we can pull out or or to get a landlord reference to a different unit that fits their needs, income level, all of that kind of thing. So it's really not meant to pay for somebody to live in there forever, but just as kind of a startup of how can we help you build some positive rental history, get you on your feet, and then you can go and take that next step without the city having to have a lease. And so that's really, I think a big part of a program that we are excited about and, and What's attached to that as well is this homes for 100 which will be coming up here in a second. Maybe Oh, all right. Oh, come on. So we partnered with the La Crosse Area Community Foundation to establish this Pathways Held Lease and Rent Support Fund. And we launched this earlier in the summer where we are trying to drive community funding to help pay for more leases for that Pathways Held Lease program. um both lacrosse county and city of lacrosse employees did an internal campaign earlier in the summer as well and it's really a great way for our community to come alongside us and partner on this trip because we know the city and the county um can't fund everything on its own and we're trying to through pathways home is be able to be able to fuse different funding streams so they complement each other and can build off of each other so this is a great way uh to kind of show how can we all partner together to achieve our goal of functional zero.

So we promised kind of to the whole community and all of you of just trying to understand what is our homeless population and what would it take to house them? What are the unit needs and gaps on there? And so last year we did our first pass at that based on a lot of assumptions that The truth is we have a lot more data than we did a year ago in terms of doing this, and we've been able to demonstrate just as steady what's called negative inflow, meaning we've got a system operating now for a year and a half plus that is consistently able to house more than become unhoused. In a sense, if you can imagine everyone is unsheltered, magically suddenly got housed, we would be at functional zero. We just have a lot to go through on there. So what we've done is re-looked at all the data from there and understanding of there and kind of broke it again down. So on the intensive side, so I don't go into 24-7 because that's a separate placement. We have a process for that, that there's really probably nothing different we need to do. We have a system that's working if we find folks that need that level of care that we can get them housed in that level of care. We said a year ago that we needed 60 intensive units. We're still at that 60 number. We're all saddened by Karuna not being around for that. That was a big need in our community, but it also demonstrates the substantial financial challenge of operating that way for the place that needs daily care or even 24-7 oversight at some level in terms of doing that. On the moderate side, remember I showed you the chart about moderate placements higher than our percent folks with moderate. That continues to move, and we've got some good things there, and our assessment is we're 70 units short there. On the light side, you know, we were from 103 down to 80 and I would say what I'll pass out later on this is kind of go there's an asterisk there is that there's hundreds of units coming into the city in terms of doing that. We don't need pathways to focus anything around light-type units that are out there. The city has a process. They're driving affordable housing. The city and county both have housing plans and zoning and other things kind of going on. What we really need is some rent support, which is related to the Homes for 100. That really is... If someone got evicted, odds are good they were two months behind or more on rent or those types of things. And that sometimes has to be cleared up before they can get rent again. Really hard to get employment if you don't have housing. So you kind of start that cycle. And I'll tell you from Park Lane or early learnings with getting people housed in an appropriate environment. We went, you know, from one or two that having income to six or seven having income within four months. But be realistic around what income levels will be for folks on there, too, if you look at that. For most folks, it's either they can do some type of earned income or some type of disability, and that takes time to get either of those kind of going on, and really, hopefully, with ongoing support, continuing that. to develop, you know, in terms of income, because that's ultimately needed for sustainability. The system does not work in terms of forever rent support. That's never going to be sustainable. But also know if we can use our system well in terms of transition, you know, into public housing can be as little as $50 a month. So we just have to make sure the right population is doing that. We're putting people in the appropriate level of housing. And part of that is also what their ability to pay on rent is. And so what are thoughts around this so on the moderate side, I see we have any here cooley CAP, I mean just really kind of collaborate on that space there's our funding projects that are going on with cooley CAP. HUD permanent supportive housing, which is under transition and everything else of just sort of leveraging that type of housing. And just also grow our moderate support services needs for those that are in individual units. A lot of communities are finding success. So if you put folks of higher need together in the same building, same unit, let's just say shared living space, you generally need a level of staff oversight. One of the insights from Milwaukee County on their success had been is that's really expensive. Sometimes it's the right option for people, depending on what their challenges and needs are. But overall, it's expensive. And so you'll hear it for both moderate and intensive of starting to look at how do we place someone scattered in an individual unit. In the case of moderate, really with weekly level support, just always checking in on how things are going with that. Those are important areas in terms of driving a moderate unit. And again, as we get better at that, we can use tools like pathway cell leases and homes for 100 for those that have a little higher level of need because we know we've got the right support matching them. On the intensive gap, this is the crux of a takeaway for this meeting. You know, and I think the team feels really challenged by, you know, ways we can address this. So like we do at Pathways Conferencing, Brian also challenged, you got a big problem. How do we shrink it down? So this is just like, how do we shrink it down? So a little bit of thinking about those treatment to housing packages. That's one way to shrink. A lot of people may say no, but if five or 10 people say yes, we've made progress. So that's kind of how that fits in. So I talked about that home ARP funded. So our community support program or CSP is our highest level of support. It can include medication, it can include daily visits to folks. So we really have a grant that we're trying to pilot five units related to doing that activity. Won't be for everyone, but again, for some folks, if they have daily care and medication, can do all right in that unit. And so we will look at that. The other thing we'll look at is there's adult group home settings and other residential settings for folks with high needs that have availability throughout Wisconsin. So often we're kind of maximizing what's local, and a lot of the folks want to stay local, but we also want to look at where are placements that make sense for folks and say, hey, we can't get you in here, but there's an opening wherever around the state. So we'll leverage that too. And then, as I said, really, we have folks that are probably in the intensive category that are unhoused that are probably progressing towards a 24-7 category if they remained unhoused on there. So I think wherever we can, we will work with Medicaid and those providers in terms of assisted living. And they have to do their assessments, but we sort of know people we're concerned about that their health is getting worse are the things. So Those are some of the placements. It is not a here is this ready to execute plan for us. I think we're just identifying like this is the challenge here. Our intensive housing units were sort of stuck. I can come and say we can make progress with those on light and be functional zero for those at light that are coming into it. Our system can respond, rehouse, support that. I think we're making really good progress on moderate and that will come with a little bit more time. And right now, my fear is a little bit with the intensive side is it's going to be handfuls here and there's with these pilots on there. And I'll tell you, we will give everything we had to make that work. So sometimes we don't have perfect options for people, but we do have options. We try to figure out how can we make that option work on there. So hopefully, you know, if the Milwaukee model works, that opens things up in terms of daily support for folks in individual units. That's probably our biggest potential to move this needle in terms of doing that. That still leaves for some folks, particularly with more intensive needs, probably less ability in terms of earned income type of thing, but just kind of working through that system. And again, just reminding folks, doing nothing has a cost, has a cost to our community, to our hospitals, to our police, to our government in terms of doing that. That's kind of the challenge. We tried to just kind of just do a one pager handout here. We'll get that out for folks that tries to summarize this in terms of people say, what does it take to reach functional zero? This is what the numbers are telling us in terms of doing this and doing this in a sustainable way. So as we're looking at services, I feel there's a lot of sustainable service things and we're using grants and other things to kind of do a lift for a few years in terms of this area. The housing challenge kind of comes like this is we have a system that's working for those with like needs. Our community can manage that support that, you know, that's good. That's good because that means we're trying to keep people from ever going into moderate or intensive category. but that's also a longer journey. So just being honest with all of you about like, this is what we are seeing in the numbers, hopefully between treatment packages, individual units, some group home placements, other things, we just shrink that problem down. We do know talking to police that, you know, there's certain dynamics that lead to more problems on there. So sometimes even, you know, getting different solutions for a handful of folks can have a more noticeable impact on there. So our team will continue to be, in the park daily in terms of interacting with folks, giving them a range of treatments. If they decline, understand why, and then also kind of work on that, which is help them see how if they have a goal, almost all of them have a goal to be housed. We have to work on what changes need to make to make that kind of a reality.

Perfect. I think you actually said everything we needed to in here as well. So I don't know that there's more that I want to add. I think Jim summarized it nicely as far as struggling with folks specifically with those higher intensive needs, folks who have been experiencing homelessness for the longest periods of time. It's really concentrated right now in that downtown area for various reasons. County has added positions to both work with that specific population and others experiencing homelessness, the city we've continued to add housing. And so overall, we've seen that reduction in homelessness, like Jim alluded to are just stuck right now and continuing to, you know, show up. and try different ways to come up with creative solutions that have worked across the country that have worked in lacrosse that have worked in our state. And that's really, you know, the point that we're at with pathways home right now is we've made good progress halfway through, and there's still more work to be done. So with that, we will open it up for questions.

All right, I have my first question.

Hi, Lisa Weston from City Council. In the last two weeks or so, the City Council in Eau Claire passed a resolution asking Attorney General Josh Kral to really dive into how many unsheltered folks in Eau Claire were being transported into the county and what we're going to do about that. You won't be surprised to know, right, that elicited lots of conversation about La Crosse residents, about how often that's happening here. I'm really, I tend to believe it's probably much less than people talk about, but I'm curious if we know what those numbers might be. Like how many of our unsheltered folks are actually not La Crosse residents or were not initially La Crosse residents?

Great question. So yeah, we have a couple of different ways to measure that. And so before I answer that, I'll start out by saying, similar to what we were talking about with the downtown population being a group of folks with higher needs, with longer histories of homelessness, that's also the area that we see most folks who do come into our community from other areas end up and then they interact with the justice system at disproportionate rates with the emergency room cause stress in our community in general at disproportionate rates. And so that's really, I think, my answer has been our community enters data into pathways to housing list of, and the question is, where did somebody last have housing, right? Because we can't track where everybody is from, where all the communities that they came from. And so we asked the question, where did you last have housing? It might be an imperfect way, but what we're trying to get at with that question is, did you come to La Crosse, to be homeless, to hang out in our parks or whatever, or were you somewhere else, maybe you came here and you had permanent housing and then you lost your permanent housing and now you're homeless in La Crosse. So our data with that question shows 83% of people on our pathways to housing list last had housing in lacrosse so that 83 would not count if you came from another community and went to salvation army we would track that as the other community because salvation army is not housing in lacrosse so that wouldn't count as your your where you last had housing and and how we get to that how and i should say we is in our community because it's not something that jim or i go and input um but it's through a series of questions and just conversations getting to know people i talked about Jay before. So it's not the social worker having a one-time conversation with Jay and then entering that in there. It's through months and years of rapport building, you know, talking about where were you, like, tell me about your history. So it's a lot of collaborative conversations that way. That's how we get to that. So Long way to say our data from our specific pathways of housing list shows sometimes people do get dropped off here. We can't, that's undeniable. People come here from all, you know, from different communities. We track that. We know that is true. And the majority of folks experiencing homelessness in La Crosse right now last had housing in La Crosse. The balance of state also tracks that data. And so it's another measure, even though it's an imperfect measure where, so the balance of state makes up a lot of different coalitions in this state. And so when you come to our coalition, which is like lacrosse, Vernon Monroe Crawford counties, you get put on our coalition list. And then if you go to another area, then you go on their list. And so they can track movement from coalition to coalition. Obviously, if you go out of state, they can't track that. But for the last four years, they've shown that more people have moved out of our coalition area to other communities than folks who have come from other coalitions to our community. So that's another data point that we have on that as well.

To add in, it's a very common question we get. We've had more recent team discussions about what series of questions might we ask to provide more clarity. There are, you know, kind of some realities. We do talk to Eau Claire and it's hard to say that for any urban area that's resource rich is going to be attracting places that don't. And so in general, most of the counties are supportive of what can be done, which I don't know enough to tell you what, legally can be done in terms of do this, we do look for patterns and don't particularly see patterns. I think at one point there was a pattern from one county and I think the police chief called and said what's going on, so we try to do is try to understand hey what's what's going on, so we'll continue to look at this, we know it's a. kind of a significant topic for a lot in the Community on there, I will also say we do know we have folks that drop off our list that didn't get housing, they just left the area. um and so that's sort of sort of that side stuff but i think more than anything just sort of looking for patterns and maybe we'll keep trying to figure out how we ask that question better for folks that may not be leaseholders and may have had you know a complicated living history uh thank you uh david pierce lacrosse county board um first of all thank you for the presentation i appreciated the

The candor with which you have let us know that the last two thirds is going to be hard in terms of the moderate and intensive needs. I guess, and I know the jail reentry person, the person who's been hired to fill that role is relatively new. But I guess I'd be interested, you know, the next time we're here hearing from you, what should we expect to hear when we're talking about the intensive needs population and the jail reentry coordinator and how those two things will overlap? I guess, has any thought gone into that yet at this point? I'm sure some has, but I don't know if that's anything you're in a position to share.

Yeah, I think we... So you know we have our website that has sort of the public general dashboard on there we kind of showed tonight is a little bit here's the specific shelter offer situation and we've kind of discussed about whether we just make that a public dashboard or not I think we're open to feedback on on that it. It takes maybe a little bit of explaining what it is. And we're trying to do the same on these treatment packages. I think the same thing related to intensive of, you know, who was offered. So treatment packages started. Who was offered? What's their progress? We're trying to track. kerosene or residential treatment or detox or sober living. So we're going to look at like long-term success rates related to that. Same thing as we look at placements of this category to other adult home settings around Wisconsin. So I think we look at these categories. We tried to look at placements. It's going to tell us a couple of things. One is where are we seeing progress and two, where are we seeing effective results on there? So I think what we what we probably do, what we do internally is we take that intensive and break it into smaller groups. There's intensive substance use that might be alcohol. It might be other substances. There's mental health. There's co-occurring both. You know, there's other trauma or other issues. So I think as we try to continue to break down this intensive population. And so part of this as we shrink that is trying to say, what's that? by chart of those intensive folks, what are we trying? What's working? What is the cost to do that? What's the effectiveness?

Peg Isola, also on the La Crosse County Board. You mentioned the temporary surge shelter was needed, but you chose not to do it and you pivoted to a coordinated campaign with targeted outreach. Was that because it was simply too expensive to build? Is that something that still would be an ideal situation if it was available?

Yeah. So really finding a suitable site that could meet zoning and be supported by an agency and then be funded. So it was kind of a lot of all of that activities in terms of doing that. I think what I felt is we had hit enough roadblocks that as pathways we couldn't move on there. If the most recent thing was trying to add 18 shelter beds to the Salvation Army, which ran into an issue related to fire code, which we certainly have to respect in terms of doing this. So we still are turning people away from shelter who would want shelter. And so, yes, we would take more shelter beds. I would also say in an ideal world, having shelter for those that have higher needs, not a large congregate setting. If we had 10 beds sitting there, we could say, do you have shelter for that? But I would just caveat with this. The goal is not shelter. Shelter is the tool to get there. When shelter becomes too complicated and too expensive, we started focusing on housing. If there was a short path towards more shelter, I think you'd find support from us because it's really hard to tell people you don't have a shelter bed tonight that want it.

Aaron Newberry, La Crosse City Council. Thank you guys for being here. Very much appreciate the work that you guys do and appreciate everybody for coming here and for caring about this. So thank everybody for being here tonight. But my question is, maybe a little complicated. And it's that there's this whole group of people that are in housing now. And Jim, I loved how you framed it as headwinds and tailwinds. And there are more headwinds coming with people that are going to get taken off of SNAP benefits that are going to be in Medicaid restrictions. They're going to lose their health care, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the country, et cetera, et cetera. So that, I think, is going to maybe lead to more kind of light, low intensity folks. And if we have a way to manage that inflow, I think that that's really good. But I also understand that you guys work for the government and you can't do lobbying and you can't do things like that, but we're elected and we can do stuff like that. So is there anything at the state level, advocacy, we're going through an election season, things like that. Is there anything in particular that would be great if one of us really tried to push for, or a group of us tried to push for?

Yeah, so I would say, just starting at the most basic, any type of funding dedicated toward homelessness or an increase in funding would be great. And I think we can work around where that gets allocated toward. In a perfect world, you're talking about what we would call prevention. The best way to address homelessness is to stop it from ever happening. That's way cheaper, way more effective, way better for every single person, every part of our community. That's part of our plan where we didn't touch on it at all tonight, but that is a big part of our plan. And so from that vein, I think if there's funding from the state that can go toward flexible rent support for folks, that would be a big piece of it. go towards supportive services, other income supplementation, different things like that. I think that would be a great start. You know, in our role, what we try to do is just coordinate all the different funding streams that are available from the federal level, the state level, county, local, private, and just make them all work together. And so I think if there is more funding streams coming in from the state level to address prevention or address rent support, I think that would be a huge boost to pathways home in the work that we're doing because then we can continue to try to fill in the gaps and hopefully there's less of a gap to fill in if there's more dedicated funding toward even one specific part of the homelessness response system.

Yeah, just add in a dream and big here. You know, you look at public housing and for many folks, it's the one place sustainable, affordable, and that's just been capped at a number of units for too many decades while the problem has gotten worse. Section 8 vouchers in terms of rent support, tenant-based rental assistance, all of those would be helpful. Effectively, if they were scaled what we needed, we would need to do the Homes for 100 and rent support funds related to that. So that's a big ask. I think we tend to see... you know, right now with HUD some pressure towards less permanent supportive housing, more transitional housing, other types of things are going to be challenging on there. But a lot of it starts there on where those funding programs are. And just to reiterate what Brian said about prevention, that is, you know, we're kind of partnering that area with agencies that are doing it and participating and trying to figure out. Often it takes a little larger amount to keep people off the trajectory of becoming unhoused. There's a lot of studies that would say it takes a bigger amount of funding. If someone's two months behind on rent and do this, it's often in $3,000 to $4,000 range to really get someone off the path to being unhoused and then sustainably able to do that. And right now, at least through, you know, average giving that we can give folks through our TNT system is closer to $500. So I think we're trying to help people kind of go through that. And you'll see more of that this fall in terms of how we manage prevention. Remember my magic six number, one of the ways you move it is just reduce inflow. And I would tell you this from almost day one of this project, what will explode our plan is uncontrolled inflow. Very, you know, really tough for us to do in terms of doing this. And again, keeping someone from having a break in rental history is so much better for them in terms of job and rental income, better for our community, better for their mental health and wellness, you know, for the whole community.

Hi, this is Beth Piggush, La Crosse County Board, District 7 in the city. Kind of on the line of dreaming and taking note to your economic, like the indicator piece. Who do you think is missing from your table of community partners or what would be a dream entity as part of your conferences and being able to discuss and brainstorm and be part of the solution?

I don't know if I would have an answer for like conferencing. I think that maybe it's not a perfect group, but it's a very well-rounded group that has a lot of interactions. So I'm sure there's someone that I'm missing or an organization that I'm missing. I think from Pathways Home in general, I'm just going to, again, shoot for the stars and say community investors, private donors, other businesses is really something that when we're putting together Pathways Home, we had envisioned them playing a much bigger role and we're hoping for a much bigger role because when you talk about Homelessness in general, it's not just something that impacts city government, county government, police department. It impacts our entire community. It impacts human beings, but it's also an economic issue. And so I think just from Pathways Home shooting for the stars, it's really going to take our entire community getting fully on board with Pathways Home. Because I think that slide that Jim showed that if Pathways Home wasn't in place, our numbers would be trending with the rest of the state and going up. instead of the progress that we've made. And so if we want to continue to sustain that and to close that gap, I think it's really looking at how can our community as a whole show up differently in a way that'll help us continue the progress, but expedite it as well.

Too much more necessarily would add there because I'll just say we have a great group of agencies that are engaged and involved in doing this in terms of helping that. I think one of the discussion points we've had with some is just trying to figure out more housing, specialized housing coordination in our system of that and movement for folks. Ideally, if someone gets placed in intensive, that some percent can move to a moderate setting and how do we help navigate that move you know knowing there's leases and and tenant rights and all sorts of other stuff but how do we better coordinate you know those moves within our within our system especially as we have more transitional housing where there is a time frame and that is with some of our programs we have to really be thinking again what is that next spot and placement and move on there i think the other thing we do informally is just a lot of other counties and things have similar issues we run the same state programs we all work with hud we have similar agencies it's just continuing to have dialogue and learning from each other on that um and so you know and maybe is it can we say about next february and the coalition's hosted balance of states coming yeah so the balance of state is hosting their annual conference in in lacrosse um next february and i don't think that's you know um i think it's because there's been activity in terms of doing this so i think anytime we've interacted with others um you know there's been Good learning, and I'd say with Pathways Held Leases and that program in terms of connecting better with landlords and understanding their issues, protection they need, what we can do, and also what we can't do, what we can't prevent and what certain aspects are voluntary for people to do. So I think that aspect's there. But I think from a conferencing standpoint, there's just a great group of folks that really cover a lot of the issues that were really with agencies that are already here. And so maybe it's a long way of saying funders of that would be really helpful too.

Hi, Randy Erickson from the County Board. And I recently heard a song by Charlie Parr called Boarding House. And we don't have boarding houses anymore, do we? And is that... Would the city be reexamining that as part of its zoning overhaul? And do you think that could be, I mean, that used to be bridge housing, really. And would that be a realistic and good thing?

I can't speak to boarding houses, so I'll pivot a little bit on your question and say that some communities have looked at shared living as a way to maximize limited housing options. And so that model, I think, is very important. What's the word I want to use? You know, it's aimed at a particular group of people. You have to have the right folks living together, regardless of backgrounds. Otherwise, it doesn't work out right. Like if there are four of us living in a house that didn't get along, it wouldn't work out very well. And so I think that your living model is something that some communities have been moving toward. And how do you get that? How do you provide support in that type of model? So I know it's something that is on our radar as we've been at different conferences. Even I think like Eau Claire has a model like that, that they've been sharing a lot that would be worth looking into more. So boarding houses, I can't answer that part, but I definitely, you know, I think that there is a spot for a shared living model. And I think that's kind of that next step when we're talking about housing is continuing to get creative. That's where it's going to challenge not just the Pathways Home Team, but our entire community the most is how can we get creative with our housing solutions, even if it's five folks here, five folks there, you know, that's really that stuff can add up quickly. And so I definitely could have a role here in our plans in the future.

My name is Bill Weil, and I'm just a community member. The question I have is that kind of that model you're looking for people to donate for people to for housing for a year or whatever.

My question is, how much of that goes for administrative costs?

precisely, and will they have people that follow them along for the year then? Will there be guidance for their housing for that year?

Yeah, so for Pathways at Least, the city doesn't take any money for that program, nor does the county. Most of the money goes directly toward rent, utility, security, deposit, We hold renter's insurance. We do have a tenant manager that we work with. And so they get a fee for managing the unit, but the city doesn't have any administrative fees for that program. And what was the second part?

Yeah, so I just say, I think the administration,

Oh, yeah. Yep. Yeah. So then follow through for the year, then yes, that's part of the program is that the tenant needs to follow all these requirements, just like anybody else would have to. And they're going to, you know, work with the service provider that made the referral for the program. And so The city, we actually sign a one-year lease, but right away, we only do month-to-month with the tenant. That way, if it doesn't work out, we can just move on with hopefully no eviction process, nothing like that. And so after a few months of month-to-month, if it's working for both sides, then we'll look at, all right, maybe now we'll do a three-month or whatever the case may be. But the requirement is that they'll continue to work with somebody who can help them problem-solve if issues arise or help them with life skills or job training or whatever the case may be.

Hello, Lisa again from City Council. You all are so human-centric and very person-centric, and that's how it's effective, and I appreciate that. Part of what we often hear and then debate is location-centric. And so I'm curious if there's, and forgive me if this exists and I just don't know, I'm wondering if there's a heat map of sorts about where your staff are meeting folks who are unsheltered or are encountering them. Of course, we hear about the library and specific parks and things like that. But I don't think that's the whole story. And so I'm, I'm curious about what that geography looks like within the county area, aside from just the human piece.

ever changing. So that's part of what the outreach team does and why they have to go out so often and why it's a collaborative process with a lot of different agencies because Um, of different ordinances and things like that that are in place in our community. Um, there's no 1 spot where somebody can be and so folks are moving around all of the time. And so most folks are concentrated right now in our downtown area parks, libraries, that kind of thing. There are folks that will spread out at night and kind of just go wherever they can find a spot, whether that be outside. in a car, friends, whatever the case may be. And so that really changes. Sometimes, you know, in our community, we've had different hotspots throughout, and then it kind of gets to a point where too many folks get in one spot, causes too much, too many issues, attention, complaints come in, and then that has to be dispersed. And then folks will kind of spread back out, find a different spot. And so it really is just kind of ever changing. I think that's one of the more challenging issues in working with the population is you know, there's a process to getting a job, to getting housing, right? You have to have an ID. Then you have to submit an application. Maybe it's online. Maybe it's in paper. And then they have to have a way to get a hold of you. And so there's a lot of steps that go through that process as it relates to any of those things. And so finding folks when they're all spread out is challenging. Not saying that we're advocating for an encampment because that has its challenges too, right? The thing that the conclusion we've come to is anytime we're talking about human beings having to live outdoors, it's not a good answer. And that's why Pathways Home is helping people get indoors. But back to your question is, so yeah, right now it's just ever changing. The answer that I'd give you now would be different by the end of this week and next week.

I was wondering if you offer any showering services for people, whether that's people in that light spot where maybe they're living in a car and having access to a shower is something that can help them move into that moderate area or those people in the intense area that are you know, turning down the option of going to a shelter, but maybe might take the option for a good shower that can get them cleaned up. I know that's really important both to mental health, but also, again, if you're in that light category of just maintaining what job you might have, the mental health that you have, all those sorts of things.

Yeah, Catholic Charities offers a couple times a week showering and laundry services for folks where They can either sign up or they can go drop in on specific days and hours. And so that would be the most accessible option for folks who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness in our community.

Thank you, Chris Kayla district six Council is a missing piece of this getting more active faith community involved in this because I was just at a I don't I guess I call it a forum and civil discourse at the cathedral last week. But they talked about that they have helped 12 individuals who were severe kind of, you know, whether it was drug addiction or alcohol addiction and they've helped them and they really haven't needed any, you know, Any monetary support, but then volunteers, one of the people I had seen in huska i'd seen him in burns park, you know very well known person and and he is housed he is clean, he is. ushering at church on Sundays. So there are some remarkable success stories. But, you know, could we engage the faith community a little bit more and try to get some more help? Or has that happened? And is that still moving forward?

Yeah, I think great question on there. So part of Pathways' plan was igniting caring connections specifically directed towards faith community. So a lot of the prevention efforts comes from one congregation that has made a funding commitment this year. With Pathways, we meet with a group of faith leaders every month. We've been doing that for almost two years. But I, but again that's usually a dozen or so people and I think when we would count brought us faith communities areas is probably closer to 150 on there so I know we're not reaching everyone. Right now they're working on a program called baskets of belonging, which is when someone moves in from being unsheltered, you know, maybe they need towels or kitchen gear cleaning supplies or laundry detergent so. They're doing that with an offer for a caring connection in terms of ongoing connection on there. There's two other aspects that I think are part of that one. We're starting to talk some churches that have church owned properties that would be interested in being a low barrier supportive landlord on there. So that's just starting to evolve. We're kind of building that off the Pathways Held Lease model just so there's very just clear roles of how that might work. And lastly is just particularly fundraising. I'd be interested in hearing more about that group because Look, from a project standpoint, anything we don't have to build that's already working, we'd love to say, here's what we're doing and look for any synergy or overlap. We know there's a lot of community members that, you know, want to help. What we've heard from faith community is like, it's really hard for them to judge someone's level of need or support or whether they're working with five different organizations. So, you know, we're happy to be involved on referrals or, you know, that type of information. But yeah, I... Send me a little bit more about that. And then we'll because yeah, I would love that. Because I think, you know, we're trying to say is we've got this backbone and how can we get the community kind of contribute there. And I know there's opportunities there and those scattered sites and carrying connections make a huge difference. I mean, one of the reasons those that get housed become evicted again is because they bring their unhoused friends over. You know, and that's very human in terms of doing this. And how do you tell, you know, it's like, it's not fair because I got a place and they're still outside. So how do we kind of work through that? And again, their community is broken when they become from being unhoused to community forms. And that gets kind of broken. So part of this is just sort of rebuilding that community. And as you may have heard in some of the, you know, videos and other stuff that we've kind of put out by folks, often there's a sense that the community doesn't want them around. So then they don't necessarily engage because they don't think the community wants to engage with them. So I think part of that, there's such a great opportunity for faith community leverage. And we'd be very, very open to that.

I forgot to say last time, but Crystal Bedford, City Council. Sort of on the other end of that, I know that sometimes faith communities will also have requirements for support, like attending a church service or things like that, which can inversely create a barrier for some people.

How do you

balance that reaching out and getting the large faith supports, but then still having pathways for people that that would, again, be maybe something of a turnoff for.

Yeah, really, we look at our role as creating a menu of options for people. And it's kind of like an a la carte where we're not saying, you know, Jim talked about the voluntary nature of services and things that we're offering. And so that's kind of what we look at it is here's everything we can offer, you can choose what interests you what you don't want to do whatnot. And so that would be a great example of that. And for some people, it's a great option. And we fully support that. If it's not something that interests you, we fully support that as well. And so I think You know, that's really just kind of what we're trying to build overall is just how can we find something that meets everybody's wants and needs and interests.

I'm not seeing any other questions. Last call. Yes. False alarm. Okay. Okay. All right, I wanna thank everyone for coming. Really good turnout. I really appreciate that members of the community came to be interested. I wanna say thank you, Jim and Brian. I think that was great. So I appreciate your preparation. There is something to hand out here that people could pick up on the way out. I would like people to consider The Homes for 100 making a private contribution to that. That's anonymous. And we can see where it goes. We see it started. And that would be something that you could also contribute to.

So meeting adjourned. Thank you.