FRESNO (KMJ) — The Mayor of Fresno has announced an update to help the city’s homeless, as part of Ashley Swearengin’s ’10 Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness’.
Over the next three years, the effort will involve increasing the number of permanent supportive housing beds, raising money to support rapid re-housing, and continued funding for the outreach teams.
“Economists have studied the impact of homelessness, in the County of Fresno, and determined that doing nothing about this problem costs public systems $80 million a year”, announced Mayor Swearengin.
“Emergency room visits, ambulance visits, 911 calls, all sorts of resources – county and otherwise – are going into just leaving things exactly the way they are”.
She says it’ll address, confront, and resolve the issue of homelessness in the city. The plan was unveiled within Chukchansi Park, as the Fresno Grizzlies will be supporting the city’s Fresno First Steps Home as part of its ‘Good Karma Day’ – set to take place on June 24th. Those wanting to see that day’s game against Albuquerque and take part in the promotion, will have to pay either in-person before the game or the day of the game itself, with funds being raised to support the non-profit homeless housing organization.
“Over the last eight years as we’ve been implementing this plan we’ve seen a 48% reduction in total homeless in Fresno”, continued the Mayor.
There are four key areas being focused on to combat the issue of homelessness.
- Housing, including increasing availability
- Coordination of service providers
- Outreach
- Prevention
“We’ll end chronic homelessness for veterans by the end of this calendar year 2016, we’ll end chronic homelessness for the most vulnerable in our community by the year 2017, and we’ll end chronic homelessness for the less vulnerable in our community by 2018”.
The goal is to get to what the Mayor calls “functional zero”.
“But getting to functional zero means, when somebody finds themselves in a situation where they are now homeless, they have the resources available to quickly house them”.
It’s expected the money to support the efforts that will support the last three years of the ’10 Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness’ will come from Federal and city funds, as well as private donations.
Hear the report from KMJ’s Dominic McAndrew as it aired:
