Solution to homeless and housing in Mobile? Stimpson says, look at Miami

For the second time in a month, people living in Azalea Point Apartments off Azalea Road have no running water.

And they’re getting no answers from their owner, Millenia Housing in Cleveland, Ohio.

“If you call millennia house in Cleveland, soon as you say, I live in Azalea Pointe, they hang up in your face,” says one resident.

No water, no trash pickup and no future, as Millenia’s maintenance here is so bad, says HUD, it no longer receives their subsidies, and residents have been told to look for housing somewhere else.

Until then…

“They are treating us like crap,” says another tenant, “and like it’s like, it’s no help, no hope.”

It’s a problem the City of Mobile has faced before with Millenia.

So, we asked outgoing Mayor Sandy Stimpson-

“What can be done in the remaining days of your administration to do something for these people?”

“Well,” he responds, “first of all we don’t want to shut anything off when people are living in there.”

The city often finds itself in the middle, caught between federal agencies, like HUD, and apartment complex owners who readily sop up the federal dollars they appropriate, but fail to reinvest in their properties… and, often, just walk away.

Stimpson, as he prepares to vacate the mayor’s office, offers some cautionary advice:

“HUD is obviously gonna have a different look to it going forward, and cities will have to figure out, you know, how to adjust.”

During his tenure, Stimpson put affordable housing high on his to do list, often touting the creation or preservation of more than two thousand affordable housing units during his tenure.

But it’s the one place he tells me, that he feels he came up short during his stay at Government Plaza.

“That’s one regret that I have if I could go back and look at it differently now. But that is such a complicated system, working with HUD and trying to get approval. But I can remember walking through the first housing or development project and saying, nobody should have to live here.”

Yet in the same breath, Stimpson suggests help could be on the way as local officials explore a solution in a city more than 700 miles to the south.

“There’ll be a judge coming up here in October, and he’ll explain how they’ve addressed the homeless situation and overpopulation in the jail in Miami; they’ve been working on this program for 20 years.”

It’s called the Chapman Partnership, named after the publisher of the Miami Herald, who spearheaded the project.

It began in the 90’s with a homeless shelter that offered medical services, head start for infants and toddlers and case management for its clients… and eventually expanded into mental health services, career training, a path to self-sufficiency.

“The numbers in the jail went from something like seven or eight thousand to four thousand,” says Stimpson, “and the homeless population was a bigger change than that.”

In fact, Miami’s Chapman Partnership boasts helping more than 145 thousand people pull themselves out of homelessness.

Stimpson says local leaders are already digging in.

“We’ve had our public safety director down there, Judge Pipes has been down there, the district attorney has been down there,” he says. “It will take a lot of collaborating, but those are some of the kinds of things we can do.”

The effort to create more affordable housing comes at a time the Trump administration is seeking a 43% reduction in the current rental assistance program operated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

You can learn more about Miami’s Chapman Partnership here.