On this West Virginia Morning, a new camping ban went into effect in Wheeling this month. But as Chris Schulz reports, advocates for the unhoused community are pushing back.
On this West Virginia Morning, a new camping ban went into effect in Wheeling this month. But as Chris Schulz reports, advocates for the unhoused community are pushing back.
Also, in this show, in our latest episode of The Legislature Today, Emily Rice sat down with Del. Amy Summers, R-Taylor, and Sen. Charles Trump, R-Morgan, to discuss why the Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) was broken up into three separate agencies and how it is going.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University.
Eric Douglas produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
SB 239 would have behavioral health providers, treatment specialists, statewide government leaders and community stakeholders assess a breakdown of homeless demographics.
A bill continues to advance that mandates a statewide homeless survey, intended to see if West Virginia’s health and human services facilities are being overtapped.
Senate Bill 239 would have behavioral health providers, treatment specialists, statewide government leaders and community stakeholders assess a breakdown of homeless demographics.
On Tuesday, the House Committee on the Prevention and Treatment of Substance Abuse passed the bill and sent it on to the House Health Committee.
The study would determine where homelessness is most concentrated around the state, if policies cause homeless relocation to certain areas and who is coming in from other states using West Virginia services.
Del. Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, believes the survey will assess public health root causes.
“A lot of it has to do with mental illness and substance use disorder, and I would be willing to bet that it’s not the services that are provided,” Puskin said.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Mike Azinger, R-Wood, has said that better understanding the state’s unhoused population is important to ensure the best use of the state’s resources.
“The study is basically just to know where the homeless folks are in West Virginia, why they are migrating from one part of the state to the other and how many of these homeless people are from out of state,” Azinger said. “We’re getting tons of out-of-state people that come to West Virginia, to the drug rehab places, because we have a lot of beds in one county: Cabell, but also, because we have benefits. We give away all kinds of freebies, and the word gets out on the street, cross-country, ‘Hey go to West Virginia.’ And that’s what’s happening. We want to truncate that, staunch the bleeding, put a stop to it, and make it reasonable. We’re not kicking anybody out of beds, we don’t want to do that, we want people that want help to get help.”
The homeless survey is due to be completed by July 1, 2024.
Issues of housing and homelessness can be very complex. A group called Humans of Morgantown is using art created by unhoused citizens to bring a humanizing perspective to the discussion.Chris Schulz spoke with Corbin Mills and Jordan Stosic about the group’s “Neighbors Beyond Neighborhoods” exhibit.
Issues of housing and homelessness can be very complex. A group called Humans of Morgantown is using art created by unhoused citizens to bring a humanizing perspective to the discussion.
Chris Schulz spoke with Corbin Mills and Jordan Stosic about the group’s “Neighbors Beyond Neighborhoods” exhibit.
Schulz: What is the Humans of Morgantown Project?
Mills: Humans of Morgantown is a partnership between Morton Hall Agency, the WVU College of Media and the Morgantown City committee on unsheltered homelessness. We have a bunch of backers and fantastic partners we’re working with.
What we’re doing with Humans of Morgantown is really just trying to tell the story of our unsheltered neighbors, and then maybe shed light and create a conversation.
We have an exhibit set up in Morgantown Art Party on Walnut Street. It is every Saturday and Sunday until April 21, which is our closing exhibit on Thursday night.
One thing that’s a pretty common misconception is that people don’t sometimes look at their unsheltered neighbors, like people who have passions and hobbies and goals and dreams. A lot of our unsheltered neighbors are fantastic artists. This is a place where we could really show off the talent, what they have, and what they bring to the community.
Schulz: Jordan, do you have anything to add to that?
Stosic: Humans of Morgantown is a space and it’s a way for our community members to meet each other, learn about who our neighbors are, and sort of work to understand the experiences of our neighbors experiencing homelessness and create some sort of a destigmatizing notion.
Schulz: Jordan, can you explain to me how this project came to be?
Stosic: Over the last four months, our Humans of Morgantown team has been developing this concept for an exhibit where we really settled on creating a space where our community can meet, learn, and understand the experiences of our neighbors
Mills: I think our favorite thing has just been getting to know everyone in the community that we wouldn’t have had otherwise the chance to meet. Whether that’s the unsheltered artists that we’re featuring in our exhibit, whether that’s the people at Friendship House, who are doing fantastic social work, like recovery coaches, and peer support specialists.
It’s been really great to see it all come together, and to really create those connections and build those relationships with people that we may have otherwise not been able to do.
Stosic: Definitely. And that’s something he mentioned, the Friendship House. That connection was absolutely huge for us. With the help of everyone at the Friendship House, we were able to feature a lot of great work.
On our opening day we had a couple of musicians come by and play on the keyboard, play some guitar. We had so many artists produce paintings, mixed media work, we had sculptures. There’s a whole plethora of things
Alexandria Holsclaw
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
A sculpture on display at the “Neighbors Beyond Neighborhoods” art exhibit at the Morgantown Art Party.
Schulz: So Jordan, can you tell me a little bit about the focus on the unhoused population? Why choose art as the way to communicate your message?
Stosic: Housing status is not expressive of morality, value, humanity. So creating a space that’s fun and creative was sort of our idea where we can show the value and the fun and the life and humanity through art, and their own forms of expression.
Schulz: Corbin, what can you add to that?
Mills: A person is so much more than their housing situation. And I think there might be a misconception that some people have that a person’s housing situation kind of defines who they are. And what we discovered is that that’s just absolutely not true.
Art is a great way for us to tell these stories, because it’s kind of a universal medium, right? Everybody understands photos, everybody understands paintings, everybody gets their own little take away from it. So being able to use something as universal as art to tell those stories that people may not have otherwise been hearing has been successful. For us, it’s been a really rewarding part of the process.
Schulz: What do you think is the importance of this type of project right now?
Mills: I think what a lot of people realized over COVID is that community is everything, especially when you may not have the chance to see people in person or spend time with people socially, like you may have before.
Your relationships, whether it’s with friends or family or even people that you live next to where you see them every day in your daily life, all that stuff is really, really important. It’s crucial to having a happy and successful life. And we wanted to just remind people that that level of community can be extended to everybody, and everybody benefits from that level of community. Everybody benefits from those like, you know, good vibes and positive friendships and relationships.
Stosic: Which is why we did choose to title the exhibit “Neighbors Beyond Neighborhoods,” because we really wanted to challenge people’s idea of what it means to be a neighbor.
Is that someone you just see at the store or constantly see at the park down the street? Is it someone that sends their kids off on the same school bus? You know, what really does constitute a neighbor?
Schulz: Corbin what’s been the biggest standout to you?
Mills: At the end of our exhibit, after walking through, you get a chance to write your thoughts down and your reflections on a post it note. So by the end of Saturday at like 4 p.m., when everyone had left and the exhibit was kind of winding down, we as a team went over and had the chance to take a look at what people were saying after they’d gone to the exhibit.
It was really powerful to see what people had written down. You had people saying, “Wow, you know, I never knew that the people around me that I see every day were this talented. I’ve never considered the circumstances of the things that I saw today, in today’s exhibit.”
Schulz: Jordan, what was the standout for you?
Stosic: The standout for me I think would have to be getting to see how this exhibit was sort of intended to do meet my neighbors. Actually getting to now walk down the street and be like, “I know Doug, I know Dana, I know April.” It’s honestly so nice as well, because that is a friendly face, someone you can wave to.
The exhibit featuring their stories is something that I hope gives everyone else that same sort of feeling of, “Wow, I now know a couple more people in my community and have some friendly faces to smile at.”
Mills: Yeah, I actually have something to add now that I was thinking about as Jordan was talking.
The standout moment for me was seeing the people whose art we featured coming to the exhibit and see themselves and their work being celebrated by everyone in a way that they really had not been able to experience before. And to see them see other people appreciating and loving what they were creating was really, really rewarding.
There were more than 580,000 people experiencing homelessness in the United States in 2020. That estimate exists because each year, the federal government requires all states, including West Virginia, to count the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night.
The night of January 26 was one of the coldest of the year so far at just 16 degrees. In Morgantown, volunteers met around 9 p.m. outside the Morgantown Public Library to conduct the annual Point in Time Count, a survey of all homeless and unhouse people in the country.
Annie McVay describes who exactly she’s looking for.
“Homeless… meaning they have like nowhere else to go, they can’t safely couch hop, they wouldn’t be able to just crash with a friend for the night. Like they’ve literally nowhere else to go other than the street,” she said.
McVay is a case manager with Bartlett Housing Solutions, a nonprofit that strives to provide permanent housing, as well as emergency shelter, in Morgantown.
Volunteers broke up into three teams, each covering a section of downtown Morgantown from Sunnyside to South High Street.
To provide the Department of Housing and Urban Development with an accurate count of people experiencing homelessness, volunteers conduct short surveys. They collect demographic information, such as race and gender, names, ages, and most importantly where the person plans to sleep that night.
The data directly influences the funding organizations like Bartlett House receive.
West Virginia’s counts have been trending down from a high of about 2,400 unhoused individuals in 2012 to 1,300 in 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a normal count aided by volunteers was not carried out in 2021, so this year’s count will provide better numbers.
However, single-digit temperatures made the already difficult task of finding people that often don’t want to be found that much harder. McVay saw nobody.
“I think I was a little surprised by how many people I didn’t see. I thought I would definitely see at least one person out. And I mean, I went under the bridges. We went under the bridges and didn’t see anyone there,” McVay said.
“So that was pretty surprising because in the summers when I’ve gone out, they are packed full. In the winter, obviously people are going to try to get inside as much as they can. But I did not realize that many people will be getting in and out of the cold.”
Housing advocates say winter is not the best time to count. They end up finding fewer people and that results in an under-allocation of resources.
“It’s a national count and so we have the same date as California does as Arkansas does. And that’s not something that we control, that’s not something that is really, honestly beneficial for us in this state,” said West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness Community Relations Director Ellie Johnson.
The West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness organizes the count in 44 of West Virginia’s 55 counties, covering most of the state except the areas around Charleston, Huntington, and Wheeling.
Johnson says a winter count does take a snapshot of those who are chronically homeless, but it doesn’t accurately count those who go back and forth between secure housing.
“We all have that southern hospitality in certain parts of the state, right? So someone’s gonna say ‘It’s cold outside, Jimmy. Come in, you can sleep on my couch,’ you know, for this night. But if you’re over the age of 24, sleeping on someone’s couch doesn’t make you eligible as homeless according to HUD standards. So it really does take away our ability to really count them as homeless for that night,” Johnson said.
The pandemic has further complicated the count, and therefore estimates of homelessness across the country.
Back outside the public library at 10:30pm, the Morgantown volunteers do a quick debrief. The temperature had dropped to 11 degrees, and would continue to fall as low as 2 by morning. Almost all of the volunteers that came out in Morgantown work in some capacity to shelter or otherwise help the unhoused access resources.
West Virginia University nursing student Carley LaPole was part of the group that managed to survey six individuals in downtown Morgantown.
“It was very eye opening. My feet are frozen, and I’ve been out here for less than two hours. So my heart just breaks because some of them have been out here for years, months. And they don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said.
Working alongside Carly was Michael McCawley, a clinical associate professor at WVU’s School of Public Health.
“The most unfortunate thing was it’s just Wednesday. It’s another night. It’s not unlike any other night you might be out here. You’ll see people out in weather, it’s very cold. And they’re very unsheltered,” McCawley said.
“The lucky ones have some cardboard to put over them. The unlucky ones are going to keep walking until the sun comes up. And there are places where they can go inside, get a cup of coffee, get warm for a while.”
It may be another night, as McCawley said, but the information he helped collect will give advocates for the unhoused the funds and data to provide housing and healthcare for some of West Virginia’s most vulnerable.
Homelessness is one of the things that divides us in America. It’s an Us & Them issue that can spring from, and inform our views on other social topics.
The number of homeless people nationally has dropped in the past decade, but there was an increase between 2017 and 2018. A West Virginia man saw a need and is trying to help. He owns and supports a homeless encampment that gives people a place to live. At the same time, he balances the reaction from local residents who worry about homeless people who are now, their neighbors.
For more from WVPB on the topic of homelessness, see these stories:
Kyle Vass, co-produced this report. This episode of Us & Them is presented with support from the CRC Foundation and the West Virginia Humanities Council.
Subscribe to Us & Them on Apple Podcasts, NPR One, RadioPublic, Spotify, Stitcher and beyond. You also can listen to Us & Them on WVPB Radio – Tune in on the fourth Thursday of every month at 8 PM, with an encore presentation on the fourth Saturday at 3 PM.
The low rumble of industrial fans fills the Catholic Action Center in Lexington, a shelter that provides meals and other services for homeless people.
It’s mid-morning on a hot July day and dozens of people sit camped on couches in the entryway, or slouch at tables nearby. Despite the fans the air is stale from too many bodies too close together — ideal conditions for the spread of disease. The region’s Hepatitis A outbreak is approaching 2,000 confirmed cases in the Ohio Valley, with the bulk of them in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia. Health officials say the number of undiagnosed infections is likely far higher.
The homeless are among the hardest hit. Shelter co-founder Ginny Ramsey is determined to keep Hepatitis A out.
Just days after learning of the first case of Hep A case in her in county, Ramsey secured a $5,000 donation to vaccinate all of the shelter’s clients.
“We realized that we were going to make some efforts to make sure people were immunized,” Ramsey said.
From now on, clients staying overnight at Catholic Action Center will need to get a Hep A vaccine.
Ramsey is also putting extra focus on hygiene. The virus can linger on an unsanitized surface for months.
Each week clients volunteer to do a chore to contribute to the community. One of the jobs added in March is sanitizing every shared surface.
Client Erick Mauricio puts on gloves and starts spraying. He carries a bucket with three spray bottles and some paper towels.
He moves across the building wiping, chairs, door knobs, anything someone might idly touch while walking down a hall.
The center was built for 130 people so it is a big job and can take up to three hours.
“I don’t mind,” Mauricio said. “I just want to make sure that nobody will catch nothing and I don’t catch nothing.”.
Hepatitis A often makes the news when there is an outbreak associated with a restaurant or the food supply. Health officials have said the outbreak that has now spread across the Ohio Valley is more concentrated among the homeless and those addicted to drugs.
Ramsey is quick to point out that food service work and homelessness are not mutually exclusive.
“We do have a lot of people who do that, about 40 percent of our clients have full-time jobs,” she said.
Food Fears
The region’s outbreak has been concentrated in Louisville which has confirmed 540 cases. Since last fall Hep A has moved across Kentucky and into neighboring states. Ohio has had 137 infections and there have been 626 cases in West Virginia.
Credit Alexandra Kanik / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Kentucky health officials say food workers make up fewer than 4 percent of the cases. But the risk of food-borne transmission gets attention. The recent infection of food preparation workers in Boyd County, Kentucky, prompted health officials there to mandate vaccination of all food service employees in the county.
Jace Stickdorn is managing director of the Platinum Corral, a franchise owner of several Golden Corral restaurants in the Ohio Valley. Like Ramsey, his restaurant company decided to be proactive.
“The thought was, as a company, let’s get out in front of this,” he said.
Credit Aaron Payne / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
A team meeting on sanitation for staff at a Golden Corral restaurant in Ohio.
Stickdorn said all employees at 11 restaurants in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia have been vaccinated and new policies are reviewed daily.
Recently employees at a Golden Corral in Lancaster, Ohio, got their daily reminder from a manager to wash hands and surfaces often.
“Drown the germs,” she said. “Wash your hands with soap and water up to the wrist.”
Stickdorn said these preventative measures make business sense. He knows of another company’s restaurant that lost 70 percent of its customers after a Hep A infection was linked to the business.
Credit Alexandra Kanik / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Stacy Roof, president of the Kentucky Restaurant Association, said more businesses are offering Hep A vaccine to employees by working with local health departments to bring the vaccine into the restaurant. In some cases, the vaccine is available at a subsidized cost to the businesses. Roof said that makes the access easy and encourages participation.
Stickdorn said all of his employees from now on will need to be vaccinated.
“If you are going to work in the foodservice industry, it’s going to be a trend,” he said.
Credit Mary Meehan / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Catholic Action Center in Lexington opened last year with 134 beds. It is already over capacity.
Class Lines
Dr. Matthew Zahn is an infectious disease specialist based in California where he watched a Hep A outbreak flair in 2016 before fading this spring. Now, he said, the same strain of the disease has traveled into seven other states.
“You just have to recognize when you have hundreds of people who are developing Hepatitis A, the world doesn’t fit neatly into cylinders that way,” he said.
The virus doesn’t care about social class or state lines, Zahn said. That is likely to become more apparent as the numbers of infections continue to rise across the Ohio Valley.
