Lane County is seeking nearly $12 million to build a 50 unit housing complex for at risk and chronically homeless people in the area.
The project’s goal is to tackle chronic homelessness in the community by providing individuals with shelter quickly as a first step to finding more stability. Director of Health and Human Services Karen Gaffney says some units will be specifically available to participants in the county’s FUSE project - a partnership with Trillium local hospitals and law enforcement to identify people who are frequent users of those facilities.
“For those people, when they’re afforded housing as a first step, their use of those other systems decreases significantly," says Gaffney. "We’ll target a lot of our units at those frequent users because we know that we’ll have the best benefit both in terms of improving their situation individually and also saving the community resources.”
After providing permanent housing, the program will offer supportive resources to residents like job training and substance abuse treatment to help keep them off the streets. The project will likely be funded by a combination of federal low income tax credits, as well as state grant and local dollars. The county hopes begin construction on the apartments next summer and to start filling rooms during the summer of 2019.