To read Dan's opinion piece, go here.
The following transcript was generated using automated transcription software for the accessibility and convenience of our audience. While we strive for accuracy, the automated process may introduce errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. This transcript is intended as a helpful companion to the original audio and should not be considered a verbatim record. For the most accurate representation, please refer to the audio recording.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I'm Michael Dunne. Funding is the lifeblood of any program which provides social services. No amount of goodwill or good intentions can replace money to pay for services. And historically, funding and subsidies from the federal government are an absolute pillar towards providing shelter and ultimately housing to people in need. But the Trump administration is changing the funding model based on data that many experts say is false and misleading. The bottom line, say these experts, is that this new model will definitely hurt not help those who need it most. Today on the show, you'll hear from a local expert and leader of square one villages about this switch and what it may mean for many people in our community. Then at the end of the show, you'll meet one of KLC C's newest reporters. Dan Bryant, the director of public advocacy for Square One villages, welcome to the show.
DAN BRYANT: Thank you. Good to be here.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Why don't we start with this? Just remind our listeners what Square One villages is.
DAN BRYANT: Square One village began as a real grassroots effort to provide an alternative shelter for our unhoused neighbors, and we started with opportunity village, which was a collection of 30 tiny structures, just sleeping cabins. But you know, every person had an individual structure. They were about 64 square feet, or some of the Conestoga huts you see around town. But the main point is, you got a secure place that's dry, you got a door you can lock, and then you have a little village setting where they work together to semi self-manage their living situation, to help take care of it.
MICHAEL DUNNE: And it really is an outgrowth on certainly, a subject that's near and dear to your heart. We don't have enough housing in in our community, and I understand that that's a problem throughout the state and the nation?
DAN BRYANT: Yeah, it's both housing and shelter. And so, I'd served as the pastor at First Christian Church in the heart of Eugene for 29 years, and I was dealing with unhoused people constantly, and just saw the need grow and grow and grow over time. And so that's what got me motivated to get involved in this effort, starting in 2011 to figure out a new way to create shelter. And then, as a result of doing this shelter, then realized that there wasn't enough house, as we worked with our folks at opportunity village and tried to get them housed, and really then dove deep into the housing issue and came to the realization that there just was a hugely inadequate supply of affordable housing for low income individuals, and that's why square one now has morphed into an affordable housing agency, having created four villages of different sizes, from our smallest is six units in Springfield to our largest, 70 units in the River Road area, another project in Cottage Grove, and we have a new project that will start construction here very shortly, on Roosevelt Boulevard, with another 50 plus units. So and of course, housing is the ultimate solution to homelessness. Shelter is not a solution. Shelter is a band aid, but because we have so many unhoused people in our community, we have to do something to provide shelter for those folks, until we can create enough housing.
MICHAEL DUNNE: So, I read your piece. You submitted an opinion piece to the Eugene weekly A while back, but, but it's great that we're talking about it now, and you know the title is Trump's coming war on the homelessness. Just give listeners who maybe didn't have an opportunity to read that piece to talk about what the point you're trying to make.
DAN BRYANT: Well, the HUD provides the primary you know, HUD stands for Housing and Urban Development, provides funding for a variety of services for unsheltered people. It's a very significant program and generates about seven and a half million dollars in funding for programs in Lane County and. About 20 years ago, when I was serving on the food and shelter board of FEMA for Blaine County, I learned through that that HUD was making this huge shift away from funding shelter into housing, what we now call Housing First. And they did this because of studies that revealed that housing first was the most effective method to deal with chronic homelessness and so we shifted programs and begin funding more housing first programs here, and about 75% of that grant that we receive from HUD goes into those kinds of programs. Well, the administration has now determined that the best way to address homelessness is to deal with mental health and addiction that that they think is the primary cause. We know from a lot of studies that is simply not true, and in my feeling, basically, the administration is driven by ideology, not by facts. They had a preconceived notion that this was the cause of homelessness, therefore we want to shift our funding to programs that address this cause. And they went out and searched for some data that they could find to back up that ideology. And they found a study out of a group called the California Policy Lab that seemed to suggest that the only problem was and when I read it, unfortunately, in what this funding comes through what's called the continuum of care. Oregon is divided into eight regions of continuum of care, organizations, and in Lane County, it is the continuum of care is Lane County. So every year, HUD produces a, what's called a NOFO Notice of Funding Opportunity for the continuum of care grants. And Lane County puts together, you know, their proposal for how to use that money. And in the new NOFO for this coming year, they said only 30% of the funds for continuum of care can be used for permanent supportive housing programs. That would be a huge reduction. The county staff estimated it would be a loss of about $3.7 million to funding for those programs in Lane County, which would mean that, basically, those programs would have to shift away from their current model, or they would have to find some other funding source. And of course, there are no major funding sources besides the federal government and the state government, and the state government is pretty maxed out, so it would be just a huge shift and link. County staff estimated it would probably mean a loss of 170 units of housing for these individuals. So that's why I refer to it as the coming war on the homeless. It basically means that we will be putting people out onto the street who no longer qualify under the new guidelines for the support that they currently receive, and it will result in increased numbers of homeless people in Lane County without question.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Yeah. I mean, cherry picking data is always problematic, no matter where it comes from. But you know, as you talked about, you know is this, have you seen other instances where you know, when you talked about movement more from ideology versus science and data, is that something that happens fairly regularly? Have you seen something like that before, with regard to home?
DAN BRYANT: Well, sure, I think, I think you know, I would say, in general, in among the service providers, and particularly here in Lane County, we are very much data driven. And you know, we follow best practices. And I think that's true in a lot of communities, that they really strive hard to follow the best practices, to look at the data, but, yeah, I mean, there are those places that still hold on to this particular notion that they have to fix the individual in order to address the problem of homelessness, rather than to look. At the systemic issues. And this is a systemic issue. It's not an individual. And the best example that I can give, or the best data is by a couple of authors, sociologists, Coburn and Aldern who published a book called housing or No, homelessness is a housing problem. Came out a couple of years ago, and we actually had one of the authors come to Eugene to make a presentation, and they looked, did a deep dive into the data to say so, if you begin with that presumption that, as this HUD report does, that that homelessness is caused by addiction and mental health issues untreated, then it would stand to reason. In those areas where addiction and untreated homelessness, untreated mental illness is high, homelessness is going to be high, right? And they looked at all the data and discovered there's no correlation between rates of addiction and homelessness. They looked at poverty rates. You look at those states where poverty is the highest, states like Alabama, Mississippi and again, no correlation. Turns out that in those states, because housing is so cheap that people that do have issues with substance abuse or mental health can still afford their housing. They have the some of the lowest rates of homelessness in places where poverty is the highest right. I mean, it just defies what you would think, and what they revealed in their study is that the number one cause of homelessness, one and two are the cost of housing and vacancy rates. And they showed that where the cost of housing is high and vacancy rates are low, homelessness increases, and they use the analogy of musical chairs. You know, we all played the game as kids who loses. Well, the kid with a broken leg is going to lose every time, right? Or the kid who's overweight and slow and so what's the solution? Well, you fix that person's broken leg, or you put that kid on a diet, get them in shape. How many people lose a chair in the next round? The same number. It doesn't matter what you do, and that's exactly the situation we have. So we can increase our funding for services that treat substance abuse and mental health, and as we should. I mean, that's needed, sure, but that does nothing to change the number of unhoused people. It just means the next most vulnerable person will lose their housing because there's not an adequate supply of housing that people can afford, and especially those very low income.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I want to pull the thread a little bit more about myth busting about homelessness. I mean, you just did a great job explaining that. Do we still operate, maybe as a community here, but also just as society in general, on these pervasive myths.
DAN BRYANT: Oh, without question. I mean, Michael, I've done a lot of speaking in a lot of other communities, and it used to be in person, prior to the pandemic. Now it's more by zoom but, and I mean, I've literally have been in over 20 states and probably 4050 different communities, and almost every time I get asked some variation of the same question, if we do this, like if we follow your model, and we create this kind of shelter or new style of housing, aren't we just going to attract the homeless? And that's one of the huge myths that we attract the homeless. Well, fortunately, one of the best practices now is to ask the question, Where were you Where did you live when you became when you lost your housing. We started this with a point in time count after Hurricane Katrina, because HUD wanted to know where those people displaced in New Orleans ended up. And so, I think that was the first time we asked that question, and we now ask it on a regular basis. I mean, through our data collection, through this, what's called the Homeless Management Information System, when people fill out questionnaires, you know, they're asked that question, Where were you when you lost your housing? Turns out that nearly 80% of the unhoused were. From Lane County, and this is true in almost every community, and this has now been done in lots of other places that by and large, most of the unhoused remain in the community when they lose their housing. Now maybe they didn't come from here originally. Maybe they moved this area of hopes of finding a job, or maybe they moved here because they had a relative, a family member, you know, there was some reason they came here, but they were housed when they came here and things fell through and they lost their housing. I think the myth comes because there are a small number, you know, particularly some panhandlers that you know spend a lot of time traveling, moving up and down the West Coast, and so people see those, they're more visible, and they make then they jump to the conclusion, oh, that's typical of most of the unhoused and it's not, and it stands to reason, if you Lose your housing, you're going to remain in that community where you have at least some connections, where you know the services, you know and you know the community. And furthermore, when you're unhoused, you don't have the resources to pick up and move in most cases. So yeah, vast majority of people remain in their community. So that's one of the big myths that continues, and I still encounter it to this day. Yeah, you know, I could probably do a show a week about how cuts at the federal level have decimated a lot of the various fabrics of our society, from national parks to what you're talking about here.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Do you have concerns that things are going to get even worse because of again, again, the ideological stance coming out of Washington?
DAN BRYANT: Oh, yeah, without a doubt, I have a lot of concerns. A lot of things are going to get worse in a lot of different ways. I mean, I just think that there's a coming disaster, particularly as it relates to homelessness. The only thing we can do is do our best to maintain the safety nets and work like crazy to try to bring down the cost of housing, to create more opportunities across the board. And this is not just, you know, for unhoused people, but just low-income people in general, the cost of housing is not sustainable. We have to do more, implement policies to lower that cost. And fortunately, I think there is in this community a high commitment to do that and to do the hard work. And we've seen some early steps in that direction. Still more that has to be done.
MICHAEL DUNNE: He's Dan Bryant, director of public advocacy for Square One villages. Dan, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.
DAN BRYANT: Appreciate very much the opportunity.
MICHAEL DUNNE: We're going to finish out the show by introducing you to one of the newest voices at KLCC, Macy Moore, they are the KLCC public radio foundation fellow. Welcome aboard.
MACY MOORE: Hello.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Why don't you tell our listeners, sort of your background, where you came from, what got you interested in journalism, the whole the whole gambit.
MACY MOORE: Great. That sounds great. Um, so I went to Oregon State University. I just graduated in June five. Thank you. And I was actually a biochemistry and molecular biology major, really, which surprises a lot of people, interesting, interesting, yeah. And I kind of did the very classic college thing where I, like, liked my major, okay, and tried a lot of minors out. So I was, like a music minor for a second, and then I was a chemistry minor, and I did a bunch of different stuff. And then my junior year, I picked up the journalism minor, because I worked, as in, I it was kind of an internship, kind of a class under Julia Rosen, who used to be the science writer at the LA Times. She taught like 10 of us how to write a magazine feature story about science. So that was just kind of like science communication, writing me related, and I really liked it. So, I was like, All right, the only way you can do journalism at OSU currently is to pick up the minor in the applied journalism program I see, and it fit really well with my other background at OSU, which was, I was a college radio DJ at our station, KBVR, FM, starting my freshman year, and had been doing that as like a little side hobby. Okay, so those two things kind of felt like they were similar. So, I picked up the minor really liked it right when I was picking that up us at the time broadcast advisor, Now overall, student media advisor, Steven Sandberg, asked if I wanted to be the station manager for our student radio station. Wow. And it really surprised me, because I had just been a volunteer, and that's not. Super typical pathway, like, usually you will work on staff in some other way before they're like, Hey, you want to run the place. So, I was really surprised, and it kind of derailed my plans a little bit, because I was still thinking about going into some sort of laboratory science work, but it sounded too fun to not at least interview to try and do. And I got the job, and was the station manager of KBVR last year, and that is sort of what pushed me in this direction. When there's too many forces in your life saying to do one thing instead of the other, you just gotta go.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I imagine, too, you know, developing that kind of sphere of knowledge in the sciences and certainly in journalism, you know, and it's often preached that become an expert in something and then you can learn the rest. It sounds like that that sort of fits with what you're you've kind of gone through.
MACY MOORE: Yeah, totally. I would love to write and do journalism about science, because I think it's so fun, and I love communicating about it, and I have a good background in it. And I just found, like, I really enjoyed getting my degree. It was really hard, but I enjoyed it a lot. But I was very I'm a little too social, a little too chatty and hyper to be in a lab all the time. And the minute I started taking these journalism classes and actually working for the radio station. I was like, wow, this is a space I could really engage with. And it just felt like too many signs in the right direction. So I was inspired to start looking for jobs in journalism.
MICHAEL DUNNE Science’s loss is journalism's gain. Macy Moore, they are our new KLCC public radio foundation fellow. Macy, thanks so much for coming in and chatting.
MACY MOORE: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for talking to me. That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon On The Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. With Venezuela being a huge topic right now, we thought we'd bring you an expert on its history and the conditions that have helped lead up to the removal of that nation's leader. Monday, a history professor and expert on Venezuela from the U of O joins the show. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon, On The Record. Thanks for listening.
