While it once took three to six months for a person living in Clara Martin Center’s Safe Haven shelter to find permanent housing and move on, it now takes at least three times as long due to the dearth of affordable housing across the region, according to officials at the community mental health center, which serves towns in Orange County and northern Windsor County.
The delay — exacerbated by a cut in federal funding in 2014, which reduced available beds at the temporary shelter in Randolph — means fewer people are able to stay there, leaving people waiting in “precarious” situations, said Christie Everett, Clara Martin’s director of acute care services and program development.
In part to shrink the waiting list for beds at Safe Haven, Clara Martin is now poised to open four new apartments in a neighboring late 19th-century building on South Main Street, within walking distance of downtown Randolph and Gifford Medical Center.
“Housing is such a key to health care and well-being in general,” Everett said.
The 4,400-square-foot building, which after a $1.86 million renovation is expected to begin welcoming residents next month, will offer permanent housing for individual adults who have been homeless and live with mental illness. Through subsidies provided by the Vermont Department of Mental Health, residents will pay 30% of their income in rent.
The apartments are considered “independent living,” but residents will have ready access to counseling, case management and other services Clara Martin provides. In addition to sitting next to the building that is home to Safe Haven and two short-term stabilization beds known as Chris’ Place, the new apartments are next to another Clara Martin building where providers offer outpatient treatment. The newly renovated, now-blue building also has an office and a conference room.
Current Safe Haven resident Crystal Springer toured the new apartments, which all include one bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen and living room space, during a ribbon-cutting and open house Clara Martin hosted Thursday. A shared laundry room sits near the conference room and office.
Springer said she’s been living at Safe Haven for three months, after spending five years living with her mother in Sharon. She said she has a mental illness, which she declined to describe, as well as some orthopedic problems.
She would like to move into one of the new apartments if she can, she said. She appreciates the care she’s receiving at Clara Martin while at Safe Haven.
“They’ve been really good,” Springer said, while sitting in the kitchen in one of the new apartments. It’s “a community. Everybody gathers around you.”
The project fits in with a national movement known as “housing first,” which aims to address homelessness by getting people into affordable residences and then supporting them by providing services such as mental health treatment to help them stay housed, said Brian Smith, housing program administrator for the Vermont Department of Mental Health.
Though “it takes an awful lot of funding to come up with something that will work well,” Smith said, providing services in this way will help the state save money, by keeping people from getting sicker and requiring higher levels of care such as hospital stays.
In part because of those savings and the way such developments help relieve demand for beds at the state psychiatric hospital, Smith said he is currently working on a similar project in southern Vermont.
“It’s an investment for the state in the individuals that has dividends,” Smith said.
A couple of other projects elsewhere in the Upper Valley have taken a similar approach.
The 18-unit Parkhurst Community Housing in downtown Lebanon opened last year, and 17 of the original residents, who were chronically homeless and had very low income, are still living there, according to Andrew Winter, director of Twin Pines Housing, the White River Junction-based nonprofit housing developer that owns and renovated the building. One resident has moved on to another appropriate housing option, he said.
“For that population to really be able to find stability in this way is significant,” Winter said. “Once people are housed, they can begin to address both physical and mental health issues that may have been ignored for years.”
To help support residents, Twin Pines is working with the Upper Valley Haven which provides staff time to check in with residents and help them find resources they may need.
Most of Parkhurst’s residents came directly from the Haven’s Hixon House Adult Center, which opened up beds there. But those beds have since been refilled, signifying that 18 units helps but it certainly doesn’t meet all of the region’s needs, Winter said.
The Claremont Learning Partnership also is working to address a need for supported housing by creating a temporary shelter for teen parents and their families. Renovations have already begun on the building located at 169 Main St., which previously was home to Hope for New Hampshire Recovery and still is home to a child care center and some other social service groups. But the Learning Partnership hopes to raise money to buy the building from Crews Holding and finish the construction, which will create a six-bedroom, four-bathroom facility.
Ideally the shelter would be open by next winter, but more likely it will be sometime next year, said Cathy Pellerin, co-director of the Learning Partnership.
“If we open tomorrow, we definitely have four (teens) that could go right in … that we know of,” Pellerin said.
As planned, the shelter will have supportive services for the teens and their families, including assistance in planning their futures and completing their education, as well as support with health care, especially mental health, given that many have been through various traumatic experiences, Pellerin said.
Pellerin said she has already seen that teens are more receptive to mental health treatment when it is provided in a space they are comfortable in such as One-4-All, a child care center and teen homework space operated by SAU 6 that is also located in the Main Street building slated to become the teen shelter.
“We have found that the best way for us is to provide the service where the teens are,” said Pellerin, who also works for SAU 6 as the early childhood families in transition coordinator.
In addition to creating housing for adults who have struggled to find homes, the Clara Martin project also helped fix up an old building in a walkable neighborhood. Clara Martin has owned the building at 28 South Main St. since the 1980s. It once served as a treatment space but was left vacant when Clara Martin moved its offices to North Main Street about 15 years ago.
It has taken about five years of work to raise funds and renovate the building, Everett said. The list of partners is long and, in addition to the Department of Mental Health, includes the Barre, Vt.-based nonprofit housing developer Downstreet Housing & Community Development, Gossens Bachman Architecture, Naylor & Breen Builders, the Vermont Division of Historic Preservation and 3E Thermal.
A mix of funding was needed to renovate the building, including support from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, the National Housing Trust Fund, the Vermont Community Development Program, the Randolph Area Community Development Corporation and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston.
“This is not a project that we just did ourselves,” Everett said. There are “so many people that came together on this project. They helped make this vision happen.”
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
