photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A memorial for Crystal White, who died at an unsanctioned camp in North Lawrence on Feb. 22, 2024.

While deaths among people experiencing homelessness are mounting in Lawrence, some strategies for getting people into safe and stable housing are still months — or even years — from fruition.

It’s a challenging dichotomy that leaders with the City of Lawrence and Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center explained to the Journal-World Thursday, the day after the latest in a recent string of homicides involving a victim who was experiencing homelessness — a shooting across the street from the Lawrence Public Library that left 39-year-old Vincent Lee Walker dead.

Walker’s death is among the more than half dozen deaths of homeless people the Journal-World has reported in less than two years in Lawrence, some of which have been criminal in nature. Others have been related to drugs or alcohol, or due to dangerously cold weather conditions.

“One thing I think that is important for people to understand — and this is not meant to in any way diminish the fatalities that have happened recently — (is) that this is not new,” Mathew Faulk, Bert Nash’s director of housing, told the Journal-World. “Every year, there are a number of people in the homeless community who pass away. This has been this way since I’ve worked in the field, and I’ve been working in this field for 20 years.”

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A memorial for Crystal White, who was fatally stabbed at an unsanctioned camp in North Lawrence on Feb. 22, 2024.

It’s a chronic issue that Faulk said hasn’t been properly addressed, not just here in Lawrence but across the country. He sees it every year when deaths among the homeless population tend to “clump up” between January and May, and also sees it reflected in an average life expectancy for people experiencing homelessness that’s 20 years shorter than the population at large.

But while agencies like Bert Nash are working with clients, and the City of Lawrence’s new “Homeless Solutions Division” is actively preparing to get involved with more direct social service work, even the smaller solutions take time and tend to be more future-facing.

Faulk described the actions he might take to assist a homeless household to illustrate that issue. That often starts with helping them fill out an application with the Lawrence-Douglas County Housing Authority and getting on a waitlist for a rent subsidy. He may work with them to determine whether they are capable of working full-time or whether they need to secure a form of identification. But those are all things that take a lot of time and legwork to complete.

“The picture that I’m painting is that the way we’re set up as a community and the way resources are allocated as a community is at the individual level, everything takes time,” Faulk said. “Everything takes a process that is drawn out over not a period and days and weeks but a period of months — in some cases, more than a year — to access those resources. When you have a situation like ours today where you have large numbers of people who are displaced, you have to go through that process with every one of them, and that’s all downstream.”

• • •

Faulk said in communities with a large homeless population like Lawrence, being forced to rely on a “downstream” approach — that is, reacting to an issue after it’s already occurred — is the result of something and not just an emergent issue. In his view, it’s that we don’t have the resources and structure it takes to get people out of homelessness and into a more stable situation, or perhaps that what resources Lawrence does have simply aren’t getting to the right places.

“What we’re left with is, unfortunately, we don’t have an immediate ‘Hey, we can step in and really start making really big changes and a huge difference in a short period of time,'” Faulk said. “… The resources that are necessary to do that are not allocated to the right parts of our community.”

The resource gap Faulk is talking about is a sizable one. Just look at the city and Douglas County’s collaborative “A Place for Everyone” plan to end homelessness, which calls for well over $100 million in spending in the next five years, much of which is associated with constructing and operating permanent affordable housing units.

Faulk said the housing in that plan isn’t just a recommendation but a necessity. Even with the 50 Pallet cabins that will soon be available at The Village and an increased nightly capacity at the Lawrence Community Shelter, Douglas County is still lacking the roughly 150 beds it’d take to accommodate even the lowest estimated count of people experiencing homelessness.

And that’s without addressing the fact that people who are experiencing homelessness have varying needs, Faulk said, and in an ideal situation would have access to multiple types of specialty emergency shelters geared toward specific groups like families or people with severe mental illnesses.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A memorial for Susan Ford, who was found dead in her tent in North Lawrence on Nov. 21, 2022.

Faulk compared the price tag in that situation to another significant project taking place right now: the $448 million renovation of David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium on the University of Kansas campus. As the Journal-World reported, that project alone involves nearly $250 million in private donations. While Faulk referenced numbers — both for the project’s total cost and donation total — that are higher than what has been reported, he noted that it’s an example of there being enough financial and material resources in the community to invest in a significant project that, comparatively, dwarfs the costs it’d take to make real progress on housing and homelessness.

“What we have is a situation which as a culture and as a community, we are taking the time and energy that we need or would be needed to make a big difference in this problem and we’re devoting it to other things,” Faulk said. “We’re not devoting them to helping people who are poor and have substance abuse problems and mental health problems, or just fallen on bad times and don’t have the resources as an individual household to address their needs.”

That leaves agencies like Bert Nash stuck with utilizing the comparatively thinner resources they do have at their disposal. Bert Nash as of the end of January was sitting on a $5.2 million year-to-date budget surplus, according to minutes from the governing board’s Jan. 30 meeting, but even that is just a fraction of the overall amount it’d take to fund the 24-unit supportive housing complex for people with serious mental illnesses the agency is working to build right now.

Faulk said even after raising $3.5 million for the project and purchasing the property at 530 Rockledge Drive, it’ll take another $12 million or so to construct those units. It’s another example of how much time and effort it takes to accomplish work in this space, Faulk said.

“When you think about the timeline in respect to the problem as it exists today, all of the agencies who are involved — including the county and city — are kind of approaching it from that perspective,” Faulk said. “All of this is forward-looking, right? It’s going to take two or three years for us to get this housing project built because we don’t have the resources today.”

• • •

Where does that leave the community when it comes to upstream solutions — addressing problems at their source? As Faulk described, it’s incredibly difficult to help people experiencing homelessness right away, especially as they’re dealing with their own difficult situations. The city leader heading the charge to address homelessness, Misty Bosch-Hastings, has one idea to make some more immediate progress on that front: creating a new multidisciplinary homeless outreach team that will work together with peers, law enforcement agencies and health care providers.

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Homeless Programs Coordinator Misty Bosch-Hastings speaks at the City of Lawrence and Lawrence Community Shelter’s “Welcoming Celebration” for The Village on Friday, Feb. 2, 2024. Lawrence Mayor Bart Littlejohn is at left.

“The biggest issue that I can see just coming in and having the background on this is I don’t feel like we’re properly meeting people where they’re at,” Bosch-Hastings, the city’s director of homeless solutions, told the Journal-World Thursday. “… A lot of that is access to care. Something that I’ve seen work in other areas is bringing the resources to where people are at, so that was the push behind a multidisciplinary outreach team for me.”

Helping people directly requires people from different backgrounds of expertise, Bosch-Hastings said, including in areas like substance abuse, behavioral health and other kinds of physical health care. She’s basing that resource off of a model she saw while previously working in Topeka — a “mobile access partnership” — that includes a mobile clinic aboard a bus where patients are treated and can receive prescriptions or connect with other types of care.

Bosch-Hastings said the goal is to deploy the Lawrence team by the end of April or early May, but this is another example of work in this space that doesn’t happen overnight. She said she’s been planning for the new homeless outreach team since last year, shortly after she began working for the City of Lawrence in summer 2023 and became responsible for various contracts between the city and local service providers. Bosch-Hastings said she wanted to quickly determine how the city’s contract with an agency like Bert Nash might overlap with another funder like Douglas County.

“That’s kind of where I started that conversation: How can we leverage both of our dollars and try to get the best outcomes, break down the silos that we have and work together and really be intentional about our funding and what we’re getting for it?” Bosch-Hastings said.

Another example of that sort of collaboration could come out of conversations between some local nonprofits and homelessness advocates, Bosch-Hastings said. Those groups have been discussing the formation of a homeless task force. Bosch-Hastings was the chair of such a group in Topeka before joining the City of Lawrence, and the Lawrence group could work toward goals like closing encampments and getting people moved into shelter.

When done properly, that’s another way to “break down silos” in the homelessness prevention space, Bosch-Hastings said. She’s hoping to have both a “highly functional” outreach team and strong task force ready to go by May.

It’ll take both types of work — continuing to react to emergencies and other issues that have already occurred, and aiming to prevent the root causes of homelessness before an individual becomes homeless — to put a stop to the violence that Lawrence has seen recently, Faulk said.

“We can’t do the upstream work unless we’re also doing the downstream work with those individuals to try to rehabilitate them, to try to get them to a point which they understand that (violence is) not OK, it’s not an effective way to deal with your challenges,” Faulk told the Journal-World. “It’s a multi-faceted issue. … We as a community are at a deficit, and not just a financial deficit. We are in a moral deficit. We have a deficiency of cohesion as a community, and we have to do a lot of work to rebuild what has been damaged in respect to that.”

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A memorial for Ashley Sawyer, 36, who died at the city-supported campsite on March 21, 2023.

Numerous deaths in Lawrence

Numerous people experiencing homelessness have died in less than two years in Lawrence, which has seen explosive growth in its unhoused population.

• On Wednesday, March 6, 2024, Vincent Lee Walker, 39, was fatally shot across the street from the Lawrence Public Library.

• On Feb. 22, 2024, Crystal White, 51, was found fatally stabbed in her tent at an unsanctioned homeless camp in North Lawrence.

• On Jan. 9, 2024, Samantha Boyles, 31, was found dead in a tent near Sandra J. Shaw Park in north-central Lawrence along with a dog that was also deceased. Police said that no signs of foul play had been found, but that officers reported a strong odor of propane near the tent.

• In October 2023, Eric Rundquist, 71, was found unresponsive in a tent in Centennial Park. He died of hypothermia, according to an autopsy report.

• In July 2023, the body of David Blaine Sullivan, 62, who had been homeless off and on, was found in the bushes on the northwest corner of the intersection of Sixth and Vermont streets, across the bridge from North Lawrence. Authorities said he had been bludgeoned to death, and they arrested Chadwick Elliott Potter, 34, who is now facing one count of second-degree murder, as the Journal-World has reported.

• On March 21, 2023, Ashley Sawyer, 36, died at the city-supported site from a mixture of drugs and alcohol, including fentanyl use, according to her autopsy report, as the Journal-World reported.

• Anthony Cipollaro, 26, was found dead at an unsanctioned camp less than 100 yards north of the city-run camp on Dec. 30, 2022. According to his autopsy report, Cipollaro died of a combination of fentanyl, methamphetamine and kratom intoxication.

• Susan Ford, 53, was found dead in her tent on Nov. 21, 2022, at the same city-supported site as Sawyer. Her autopsy report said that she had multiple prescription drugs and methamphetamine in her system and exhibited signs consistent with alcoholic ketoacidosis, a complication of alcohol abuse.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A memorial for Susan Ford, who was found dead in her tent in North Lawrence on Nov. 21, 2022.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A memorial for Anthony Cipollaro, 25, who was found dead at an unsanctioned camp less than 100 yards north of the city-run camp on Dec. 30, 2022.