Critics of Asheville and Buncombe County’s Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness were recently handed ammunition when the North Carolina Interagency Council on Coordinating Homeless Programs awarded it $4000 to collect data. In addition, the National and North Carolina Alliances to End Homelessness are paying for Asheville’s Homeless Initiative Coordinator Amy Sawyer to attend the National Conference on Family Homelessness in sunny San Diego. There, Sawyer will learn about the Serial Inebriate Program (SIP) that provides wraparound services for the chronic homeless, rather than the proverbial revolving door discharging to zero.
Also in the news, the Ten-Year Plan recently received recognition for being a “model of homelessness data collection.†Since 1996, point-in-time counts of the homeless population in Asheville have tallied about 600. Four years into the Ten-Year Plan, the count still hovers around 600.
One reason rough homelessness counts may be stagnant during the housing credit crisis and adverts of Asheville’s amazingly good treatment of its homeless population is the Asheville-Buncombe Community Christian Ministry’s Vet’s Place. ABCCM purchased a condemned motel that had been trashed and bashed and soiled. They spruced it up and now provide 148 beds for vets. Veterans are allowed to stay up to two years while receiving training for the workforce, money management, and addiction recovery. They are then graduated back to society with six months of training wheels. Word has it that the program is working.
