This story is the first of three looking at Rock Hill's Rapid Rehousing Program.
Imagine for a moment that you’ve spent a year and a half living on the streets.
Forget what put you there, just think about what it would mean for you to actually be out there – scrimping money to buy motel rooms when you can, sleeping on a cot at a crowded shelter when you can’t afford a room, and sleeping outside in your coat when all the shelter cots are full.
Imagine, too, that you’ve been trying to get over a mental health disorder or a substance addiction while you’re out there.
Imagine that while you’re trying to figure it all out, you’re going to work sick; seeing doctors for treatment of serious conditions like cancer or receiving kidney dialysis.
And imagine that no one ever really taught you, directly or indirectly, about budgeting your money or setting up a bank account.
Then imagine that someone comes along with an opportunity for you to live in your own house, for a year. For the first three months, you pay nothing to live there. But you will need to show that you can pay a share of the rent after that, and that you can withstand the gradual increase in that share over time.
Imagine that your responsibilities increase in graduated steps, as you slowly learn or relearn how to live indoors while also learning how to manage your finances.
Would that be enough to reset you?
Rock Hill is certainly banking on yes. The city’s Rapid Rehousing Program (RRHP) provides that year of subsidized living costs to unsheltered residents who meet a set of criteria showing that they are sincere about getting off the streets.
Funding – roughly $625,000 this year – came through opioid settlement money that the City Council dedicated to Rapid Rehousing. Melissa Carlyle, executive director of the Catawba Area Coalition for the Homeless (CACH), which helps coordinate the city’s RRHP, said she hopes to continue getting opioid settlement funding for another 10 to 15 years.
The program itself provides for housing navigators who work with landlords and property managers to find good rental properties in the city, for assessing needs (like substance addiction issues or other pressing problems) to get prospective tenants into recovery and assistance programs through various partner agencies, and for housemate matching.
Most rapid rehousing programs provide three months off the streets. Providing help for a year is a kind of next-gen level of rapid rehousing.
The concept of rapid rehousing got off the ground in 2008 through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). HUD started two dozen pilot programs with $25 million, based on the principle of housing first – the idea that if housing issues are not stabilized, all other efforts aimed at helping someone get life in balance are moot.
By 2009, Congress put $1.5 billion towards rapid rehousing in the U.S.
The problem, as it eventually became evident, was that the rapid rehousing programs that sheltered people for three months have spotty success rates; the good intentions of the program dissipated under the reality that three months is often not enough time to get someone from a mindset of survival and trauma to someone capable of operating life in the unforgiving real world of bank accounts and credit scores.
“We felt that with a year, we could do good,” said Corrinne Sferrazza, executive director of the Housing Development Corp. of Rock Hill, which also helps coordinate the city’s RRHP.
Gerald Adams is one of four RRHP clients you will meet over the next few stories. He and his wife, Scarlett, are in the middle of their year in a house in Rock Hill. Neither has any wish, nor intention, to go back on the streets, considering it took Gerald 18 months to get off of them and took Scarlett about the same time to go from typical rental tenant to homeless because of her cancer treatments.
And if there is a ray of hope that Rock Hill’s RRHP is at least welcome to someone who doesn’t have to imagine all those things from the top of this story, it is that Gerald Adams is delighted to write some checks, because it feels exactly normal to do that.
“I get to pay bills again,” he said. “I get to actually experience money going [towards] a house.”
Imagine that.
