Bexar County unanimously approved a $110,000 measure Tuesday allowing Haven for Hope to expand its homeless outreach operations to Leon Valley and Balcones Heights.
Haven for Hope — the region’s largest homeless shelter and resource hub located in San Antonio’s near West Side — will use the county funding, plus $40,000 from Leon Valley, to hire two specialized workers to reach out to people experiencing homelessness in the two suburban cities.
While the City of San Antonio, which includes much of Bexar County, has enhanced its outreach efforts over the past few years, suburban municipalities and unincorporated areas haven’t kept up with the slowly growing homeless population.
A one-night survey in January found a nearly 7% countywide increase in people experiencing homelessness compared to last year.
While that point-in-time count also found a 7% decrease in unsheltered homelessness within San Antonio’s city limits, there was an increase in the unincorporated areas of Bexar County, said Kim Jeffries, president and CEO of Haven for Hope. “This is fortuitous that we’re doing [the pilot] now as that population is growing.”
Last year, Leon Valley passed an ordinance banning camping or sleeping in public spaces between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. and sleeping in a vehicle parked on a city street for 24 hours or more, effectively making it illegal to be homeless within its city limits. That rule goes beyond the City of San Antonio’s 2005 ordinance, which bans camping in public places.
In response to Leon Valley’s ordinance, which many advocates said unnecessarily criminalized unhoused individuals and did not address underlying causes, Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai and Commissioner Justin Rodriguez (Pct. 2) worked with Haven officials to establish a pilot outreach program approved Tuesday.
County funding comes from its allocation of federal coronavirus recovery funds, but Sakai said he wants the pilot to become a permanent program and expand to other areas of incorporated Bexar County.
“Our partnerships with our suburban cities are necessary to make the biggest public health and public safety impact,” Sakai said.
Since 2019, unsheltered homelessness has decreased by 25%, thanks to several initiatives, including adding more shelter beds and permanent supportive housing to the homeless response system, Jeffries noted. But more services are required to address the diverse needs of the community, she added.
For example, those who have serious mental or addiction issues have few treatment options as inpatient psychiatric beds in the county are already at capacity, Jeffries said.
“When the Nix hospital closed [in 2019], we lost 130 psych beds, so those people who … needed that level of care were pushed to the streets,” she said.
Agencies across the network, such as Corazón Ministries and Christian Assistance Ministry, are looking into possible pilots involving street medicine and psychiatric care, Jeffries said.
“We’re all talking about what some of those pilots could be,” she said. “And we’re working on developing those pilots now that could be incorporated into the work that we’re doing in Leon Valley.”
