Lack of affordable housing in Gillette leads to increase in homelessness, agency says

GILLETTE - A few years ago, life was good for Jacob Smith.

He had a construction business, two homes and "all the cars I needed." Now everything he owns fits into a storage container that sits in the hallway of the Way Station at the Council of Community Services.

Smith moved to Gillette when he was 16 years old, and he's lived here for 23 years. For the last year and a half, Smith has been homeless. He's bounced around, staying at a friend's house for a bit before going to another friend's home. He'll also stay at the Way Station shelter for a few weeks here and there.

Things went downhill during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. He lost his income, both of his homes and all of his vehicles.

"I just watched everything slip out of my fingers," he said.

He looks forward to lunch at the Soup Kitchen across the street.

"That one warm meal a day, that makes a difference in anybody's day," he said.

Smith, like most of the other people at the Way Station, has a job. He works at the Shell Food Mart while he figures out where to go from here.

Smith said it's been tough trying to find a permanent place to live, especially since he's been working 20 to 35 hours a week.

"It's pretty steep, a $700 apartment is more like $1500," he said, adding that on top of high rental rates, there are a lot of other costs that apartment complexes require, such as the deposit and first and last months' rent.

And on top of that, Smith's been dealing with depression and other issues.

"We've got mental issues, and you get stuck sometimes, stuck in a routine, in a cycle, and you keep doing them, and it's hard to get out," he said.

At the end of August and beginning of September, the Council of Community Services had a waiting list for its homeless shelter. It was the first time in the agency's history that it had to turn people away from the Way Station. The organization had to ask the Gillette Police Department and Campbell County Health to call ahead before dropping people off at the shelter.

"It's sad when you have to turn somebody away that needs a bed...but we were too full," said Tracy Obert, the housing manager for the agency.

While the waiting list is no more, the homelessness numbers through the first three quarters of 2023 have already surpassed all of last year. So far this year, the Way Station has served 271 people, compared to 259 in 2022.

Mikel Scott, executive director of the Council of Community Services, said it can be easy for people to look down on the homeless population, most of those who stay at the Way Station are from around here, and they don't want to be homeless.

"I hear people say, 'Gillette is such a great, giving community, we take care of our own,'" she said. "These are our own, and the way to take care of them is to get them places to live."

The shelter has had 26 families with children this year, up from 14 in 2022, and 30 people ages 18-24, up from 21 last year. There have been 43 people that are characterized as chronically homeless.

And 87 people who stayed at the shelter this year are experiencing homelessness for the first time in their lives.

The agency also has made contact with 51 homeless people that for whatever reason aren't at the homeless shelter, up from 15 in all of 2022. That 51 includes four families with children.

Scott said that she's heard some people point to the ending of the Emergency Rental Assistance Program as a reason why homelessness has increased.

"It's not because they received help and the help stopped," Scott said. "The whole situation changed."

While an individual's own issues play a role in their housing situation, the bigger issue at the heart of the problem, Scott and Obert said, is the lack of affordable housing in Campbell County.

Apartments are close to full, and housing prices are out of reach for many.

"The vacancy rate is so low that anybody can charge much higher rents," Scott said. "We saw rents go up anywhere from $200 to $500 a month. And we saw a lot more folks that were elderly couples, that never had to ask for help, coming in asking for help."

Obert said the agency has seen a decrease in federal funding because the priorities have changed.

"HUD decided not to focus on shelters anymore because they wanted to focus on rapid re-housing. But that doesn't make any sense to me," she said.

Rapid re-housing provides short-term rental assistance to help people find homes quickly. Obert said while this may work in a metropolitan area, it's not the best solution for a community like Gillette.

For the most part, the people at the Way Station are from Gillette, or from other communities in northeast Wyoming, Obert said. They can stay at the shelter for 30 days, and they have a chance at a 30-day extension. But that's only available to people from Wyoming.

"People that are from out of state that have no reason to be here are only given seven days at our shelter," she said.

Much has been made about the mental health crisis, Obert said, but it's hard for people to improve their mental health when they're worried about finding a place to sleep for the night.

"If you get most people housed, you're wiping a ton of your issues off the map right away, then you can focus on mental health," Obert said.

"For them to get into housing is always cheaper than having someone be homeless," Scott said. "It's less traumatic for people. The less trauma for people, the better off they're going to be in society."

Smith said there are some homeless people who take advantage of the services they're offered, but that's the exception to the rule.

"There probably are some out there that want to be [homeless], just don't want to do anything," he said. "But most of the people I meet, they want to get better and become valuable to society."

"At some point, it's not just an individual's fault, it's our fault as a community to decide not to do anything about it," Scott said.

Obert said Gillette needs its own public housing authority. The state has one, and the Council relies on decisions made at the state level. If the state chooses not to apply for a certain type of funding that the Council believes would be beneficial, the Gillette organization can't do anything about it.

"There's more opportunity for us to decide our future...we can choose to apply for different things," she said. "We as a community, as Gillette, can make that choice, instead of relying on somebody else. We want to take control of our future."

It's not just about getting them housed, but checking in on them once they're in a home to make sure they're doing OK, Obert said.

"If you've been homeless, you're not thinking about the future," she said. "You're thinking about the next 24 hours."

Scott said she doesn't like asking for more funding, but things have gotten to the point where she feels like she has to so that the shelter can have more staff.

The agency can only afford to have one employee at the homeless shelter at a time. About 25% of the people staying in the shelter last year were fleeing a domestic violence situation, Scott said.

"We have to be very careful of making sure we know who's coming in and out all day long, who is there, who left, we have to stay on top of that," she said.

And with the high number of first time homeless people, "now you've got...a huge swath of people who are terrified, never been through this, they have kids with them and can't find a place to live," Scott added.

"We've had some conversations with folks from the county and the city, and they've been really nice and open to trying to figure out what it is we all need to do," she said.

But at the end of the day, "we all wish the problem would get solved at the top, instead of people ending up in the shelter," she added.

The Council has started having monthly meetings with other community organizations to discuss solutions for homelessness. Each month will focus on a particular topic. The next meeting, which is on Oct. 26 at the library, will focus on support services for veteran families.

Scott said there needs to be willingness from local leadership, as well as the state, to find proactive solutions to homelessness, and that starts with affordable housing.

"If we just did the right thing from the beginning, it would save a lot of time and money and heartache," she said.

Getting people into a permanent home has a ripple effect on the rest of their lives, as well as the community.

"If people are housed, and have access to their medications and food, if people are secure, it's going to release the pressure on all these social service agencies to try to piece together little things here and there," Scott said.

Smith said it doesn't take much for negativity to spread through the homeless shelter. All it takes is one person complaining for it to catch on. But Smith tries to stay positive.

"I don't have any complaints about the place, Gillette's fortunate to have it, and there's a lot of people that need it," he said.

As for people not understanding his plight, he gets it.

"I think it's people being blind," he said. "I used to be, when I was making $150,000 a year for 15 years. I didn't think about people with love and compassion, it was more like, 'what a bunch of lazy people.'

"That's not the truth."