Housing Division Worked To Locate Homeless After Floods

A homeless tent encampment on the edge of MacArthur Square. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Flooding last week devastated homes across southeastern Wisconsin, but not everyone who lost something had a home.

Many Milwaukee County residents who are homeless had to contend with, or were displaced, by the unprecedented 1,000-year storm that hit more than a week ago. That posed a unique problem for Milwaukee County’s Housing Division.

The agency provides supportive housing for thousands of individuals across the county who have experienced street homelessness or housing insecurity. It also has outreach teams that regularly make contact with persons who are currently homeless, living on the street, in a parkway or near a river. The goal is to move these individuals into housing once a unit becomes available.

“The rain was obviously something — like the rest of the community — that our outreach team hasn’t experienced before,” Eric Collins-Dyke, Housing Services Deputy Administrator, told Urban Milwaukee.

When the storms hit a week ago, approximately 30 or more individuals the Housing Division was working with were displaced by the floods and lost some of their belongings or camping gear, said Collins-Dyke. Outreach teams worked long hours last week to try to find the displaced persons and make contact with them to prevent a disruption in the process to find them housing, he said.

“The first few days, tracking down some individuals was tough just due to them having to leave their camp so quickly,” he said.

The county’s model for responding to and addressing street homelessness is called Housing First. It aims to provide a person with stable, supportive housing before addressing the underlying issues that may have led to their situation, whether it’s a loss of employment, mental health challenges or substance abuse. The underlying idea is that those issues are less difficult to address when someone has housing.

Homeless individuals will sometimes camp in natural areas or along rivers in Milwaukee County. Outreach teams spent last week “triaging” the sites they knew of closer to the river, assessing the level of displacement. While these camps may be set up for weeks, that doesn’t mean the individuals aren’t trying to access housing, or that active housing work isn’t going on, Collins-Dyke said.

“We just continue to need more permanent housing options for individuals on the street, because they will take them,” he said. “They want it, you know, they want their own housing, they want their own stability, they want their own peace, just like all of us.”

None of the thousands of persons that the county had already placed in permanent or supportive housing lost their home or were displaced by the floods, Collins-Dyke said. There were fewer than five that saw some water damage, but nothing that would force them out of their home, he said.

“So, overall, pretty lucky,” he said. “Could have been a lot worse.”