Settling in at Lincoln Place

When Don Gault was homeless, he heard “you can’t” a lot. You can’t lie here. You can’t use the restroom.

“Even if you’re in the bushes somewhere where nobody can see you, they come down there and look for you,” he said. “You can’t be here. You can’t do this. You can’t do that.”

After five years of intermittent homelessness, he finally heard “you can.” You can have a home. Gault was the third person to move into Lincoln Place, a 30-unit apartment complex in downtown Vancouver for the chronically homeless that’s been open for about six months.

“I could’ve more than likely been dead by now,” said Gault, who’s 62. “You walk in with a backpack and you end up in an apartment with everything you need. You can’t ask for anything more. I’m just extremely happy I got this. I don’t know where I would be without this.”

Lincoln Place is Vancouver’s first Housing First, or “wet housing,” complex, though homeless service provider Share has used the Housing First model in scattered sites around the county. It means that people don’t have to be clean and sober before getting housed. While a lot of time, effort and about $6 million was put into building Lincoln Place, once it opened it was different from what Amy Reynolds thought it would be.

“It’s been an exciting, challenging learning experience,” said Reynolds, deputy director of Share.

The building wasn’t fully leased until early June. Potential tenants were assessed using a “vulnerability assessment” tool that determined how likely they were to die on the streets. To offer people a chance at a place to live, Share had to find them and convince them to live in Lincoln Place.

“That was the process that took a long time,” Reynolds said.

Not everybody accepted the offer, and not everyone could be found.

Once people starting moving in, Share found they had to make changes. A different alarm was installed on the back door, and security cameras were added to the outside of the building. A surprise was discovering just how much help people needed with learning basic life skills. Some people recently did laundry themselves for the first time, Reynolds said.

Katherine Garrett, Share’s Housing First program director, works out of an office on the first floor of Lincoln Place. Given Share’s 24/7 presence at the facility, she’s seen more behavioral issues than she has at the scattered Housing First sites.

“I think that some of them aren’t used to having what they think is authority all the time over them. We aren’t trying to be that authoritarian, but they look at it that way. So, we’ve really had to work with them,” Garrett said.

Some people had trouble moving through the process of applying to live at Lincoln Place. At first, people were required to have identification and Social Security cards, but the requirements were eased to accommodate the future tenants.

Average rent is less than $200, Garrett said. Tenants pay one-third of their income in rent, with some people paying $0.

Easing burden

Before it opened, Lincoln Place was hailed as a solution to the burden homeless people place on emergency services. Having people housed was said to decrease the need for police and medical attention.

Officer Tyler Chavers is the Neighborhood Police Officer for Vancouver west of Interstate 5 and knows many people staying at Lincoln Place.

“Our calls for services, because they’re actually housed, are significantly lower,” he said.

Police and other emergency responders often act as caretakers for those living on the streets with mental health issues and addictions, Chavers said; it generates a lot of calls to 911 that cost a lot of money.

So far, Lincoln Place has generated fewer than 80 calls for emergency service since February. Chavers said the number of calls is not out of the ordinary for a place its size; other apartment complexes in Vancouver generate more calls. There haven’t been any major incidents, and some calls are prompted by people who aren’t residents. A nonresident damaged a window, Chavers said.

Guests who visit or stay overnight generate issues, too. One resident fell asleep while cooking, which created a lot of smoke but no damage to the unit, Garrett said. Tenants sometimes steal from one another and may call 911 on each other.

“There’s been a different culture that we’ve discovered. Even though we move people in and we give them locks to their doors, they don’t necessarily want to use them,” Reynolds said. “That’s difficult. And, for those of us who are housed, that’s not a cultural norm we’re used to.”

It requires education and patience as people get used to being housed. Another issue is tenants calling 911 for minor medical issues.

“When they live on the streets that’s all they have in order to get some medical (attention),” Garrett said. “Their culture is to call 911 instead of saying, ‘Staff, I might need to go to the emergency room or my doctor’s office.’ We just are trying to teach them that you don’t have call 911 for every cough or cut on your finger that looks infected.”

“Or when your neighbor is pesky,” Reynolds added. “Conflict-resolution skills are a big deal, and something that we are constantly working with people on.”

University of Portland medical students arriving next month should be able to help people determine whether an ailment is a big deal or not.

Mental health and substance abuse counseling provider Community Services Northwest serves about one-third of the tenants.

“We can’t support a facility, and that’s always been the challenge,” said Bunk Moren, Community Services Northwest’s executive director. “The way that the funding works and the insurance coverage works: Someone here has to agree to be served by us, engage with our folks, have Medicaid in place, and then we can do certain things that we can prove are medically necessary. That doesn’t put us in a great position to just help the facility do well. It puts us in a position to help a percentage of the tenants do well.”

Moren aims to figure out what his agency can do to proactively help Lincoln Place. Molina Healthcare has offered to help bridge that gap between Medicaid and non-Medicaid patients, and those who accept they have issues and those who don’t.

Transitions

Gault has lived in Clark County for more than 30 years. He used to work and lived off Fourth Plain and Grand boulevards, so transitioning to being housed wasn’t hard for him.

“More than likely, a lot of the people that live here have been on the streets so many years that they don’t know how to live in a house anymore. It’s rough,” Gault said. “That’s rough on them and it’s rough on the staff here.”

Being around other people who all have their own problems is the hard part, he said, but having his own place means he isn’t forced to live with that drama.

“On the streets, you have to live with it wherever you’re camped out, whatever’s going on around you. You can pick up camp, but where do you go? There’s no place to go. You’ve got to put up with it,” he said. “Here, you don’t. You go to your own room.”

No longer grappling with homelessness, Gault said he’s mainly working on his health. He’s got diabetes and heart issues that require him to get a defibrillator, and he needs dentures. He’s also working on legal issues. After getting divorced and into a bad relationship with a woman he met on the streets, rifts built in his family and he went to jail; each problem built on the other.

He’s tackling his issues day by day, he said, which reflects how he perceives Lincoln Place.

“The whole idea of this place is a great idea, but it doesn’t just come overnight,” Gault said. “They’re working all that out and they’re doing it expediently and doing it the right way. Nobody gets hurt here. Nobody gets kicked out and back on the streets and everything. They’ve just got to work things through.”

Gault has adapted to being at Lincoln Place, where he plans to live until he dies. In his small studio apartment, he’s got a cushy sofa and recliner, a green-checkered quilt neatly spread on his bed in front of the window and pictures of his grandchildren. He goes to bingo and movie nights, he cleans his apartment well enough to earn an “excellent condition” report during the last inspection and wears his house keys on a lanyard around his neck.

“This is me,” he said.