LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) - Subzero weather and a federal program change are behind what officials say may be a misleading drop in the number of homeless people in Lincoln.
There’s been a 12.4 percent drop - 119 people - over the past year, the Lincoln Journal Star (https://bit.ly/1kC5fzy ) said. The data come from a federally mandated report compiled by the Center on Children, Families and the Law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Officials cited reasons to believe otherwise, however. This year’s count of unsheltered people was done Jan. 22, when the temperature was minus 3 and the wind chill was minus 18.
The colder it is, the number of people sleeping outside drops, said Jeff Chambers, project director for the Center on Children, Families and the Law.
Those who counted - Lincoln police, Matt Talbot Kitchen for homeless people, outreach workers, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs - tallied 46 people unsheltered that chilly night. That’s 57 fewer than the year before.
Those who work with the homeless hope the number still will be down a year from now.
“Hopefully it won’t be up to 103 again,” said Chambers referring to the 2013 count.
This year’s overall single-day count in all categories showed 5 percent of the people unsheltered, 40 percent living in emergency shelters and 54 percent living in transitional housing programs.
There was a drop of about 50 in the number of people living in transitional housing programs, credited to a change in federal programming. Local officials said the U.S. Housing and Urban Development shifted money from transitional services to permanent housing services and also to a new program called Rapid Rehousing.
People in transitional housing are counted as homeless. People in permanent or Rapid Rehousing programs are not.
Under transitional housing, people get support services for a time and are expected to move out and into another place when the services end. Dennis Hoffman, of the social services organization CenterPointe, said that the permanent housing program gives people similar supportive services, but they can stay in the same apartment or house when those services end.
Under the new Rapid Rehousing program, people generally are moved off the streets or from shelters into housing, with financial aid and other services.
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Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, https://www.journalstar.com
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