by Hugh McQuaid
At least 1,000 people are unsheltered in Connecticut, advocates and lawmakers said during a Wednesday press conference where they called for additional state investments to combat homelessness as temperatures drop around the state.
“We have a thousand people who, today, are outside. They’re cold; they’re scared; lives are at risk. Together, we can save lives,” Sarah Fox, CEO of the Coalition to End Homelessness, said during a morning press conference in the Legislative Office Building in Hartford.
Fox and other advocates discussed the strain placed on Connecticut’s social safety net caused by an ongoing shortage of affordable housing as well as difficulties recruiting and retaining staff for the state’s shelters.
Although she said it would take about $300 million to solve homelessness in Connecticut, she said advocates would be seeking $20 million in ongoing state funding during the legislative session that begins in February.
The press conference took place shortly before another event at the state Capitol, where Gov. Ned Lamont and legislative leaders celebrated tax cuts going into effect next month as well as the fiscal health of the state.
Lawmakers at the homelessness news conference called for more money to be spent on ensuring that no Connecticut residents endure the coming winter in tents or in their cars.
Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, a West Hartford Democrat who co-chairs the legislature’s Human Services Committee, rejected the notion that Connecticut was fiscally healthy if the state was not adequately supporting its unhoused population.
“We are not doing great as a state when there are a thousand people homeless,” Gilchrest said. “We are not in a good financial state when 70 people have died over the last year from homelessness. Connecticut is not in a good financial state when a baby has to be born in a shelter.”
In recent years, annual tallies of unhoused people, called “point-in-time” counts, have recorded increasing numbers of residents without shelter. This year’s count, conducted on a night in January, recorded 3,015 people experiencing homelessness, a 2.9% increase over the previous year.
Advocates said Wednesday that their difficulties staffing support facilities like shelters were due both to a shortage of funding and uncertainty over how much funding they would receive.
“Winter comes every year and we need annualized funding to be able to deal with this crisis,” Melanie Alvarez, program director for Friendship Service Center in New Britain, said. “We need to prevent people from succumbing to the elements.”
Rep. Jay Case, R-Winstead, said that dozens of people in the northwestern section of the state were living in tents in the woods, a condition he called “inhumane.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Bobby Sanchez, a New Britain Democrat who runs a shelter in Meriden, argued that additional funding could not wait until lawmakers reconvened in February. Sanchez said this week he encountered an empty New Britain parking lot, where residents had set up five tents.
“What’s going on here?” Sanchez said. “We can do better. We’re talking about every year, we go through this and every year they have to beg for the funding to help people– individuals that are homeless, to get them sheltered.”
Sen. Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, called Connecticut’s homelessness problem a “moral failure.”
“Till we humanize our fellow humans, we will be asking about priorities,” Anwar said. “We will be having press conferences about how our economy is good and our budgets are beautiful and rating agencies love us — talk to the people that are homeless. They don’t care about the rating agencies. They care about getting a solution for them.”