New Billings shelter seeks to serve most difficult people to house (2024)

In 2006, the Montana Council on Homelessness selected Billings for a pilot project to create a plan to end chronic homelessness, which then could be replicated across the state. Eighteen years later, Billings hasn’t quite figured it out.

A new shelter, Off The Streets, is hoping to change that, with an approach that challenges the principles underlying Billings’ existing approach to homelessness.

“The system is broken and needs to be creatively solved,” said Craig Barthel, the founder of OTS and previous site manager of the city’s COVID shelter. OTS is currently sheltering about 70 people, with hopes to expand to have room for 400.

“We’ve got to figure it out, to benefit everybody: businesses, safety, the community,” said Melanie Schwartz, the organization’s lead fundraiser. “It’s still a solvable problem, but that window is closing.”

'Enabling someone to stay alive'

The primary shelter option in Billings is the Montana Rescue Mission, an organization that “combines God’s grace with accountability” and is “here to give a hand up, not a handout.” MRM also operates an emergency shelter, capped at 14 days per year for those not participating in programming for the “mind, body, and spirit,” which requires sobriety and entails mental health treatment, addiction recovery, education and job training.

OTS, on the other hand, wants to establish a “true low-barrier shelter,” where people are offered shelter without sobriety or other requirements. The OTS team sees this as a complement to MRM, targeted towards people who are difficult to house and have been homeless for a long time.

“Some people can’t make it through a very rigorous program, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth anything,” said Ken Koerber, the organization's executive director.

The chronically homeless population is, by definition, unlikely to be able to do so.

“Federal policy has increasingly recognized people experiencing chronic homelessness as a vulnerable population of adults with disabilities,” according to a report by the Center for Evidence-Based Solutions to Homelessness. “Disability has been included in the definition from the outset…because research shows that nearly all people experiencing chronic homelessness have documented disabilities which may create barriers to exit.”

Serious mental illness falls under this definition of disabilities. The city and county have focused onsubstance use disorder treatment as a method to get people off the street, through both the Homeless Outreach Team and the Motivated Alternatives to Addiction Program,but people with serious mental illness cannot be treated at substance use disorder treatment programs.

Barthel estimates that the percentage of current OTS residents with disabilities is in the “high 90s.” He said that about one-third of residents receive disability payments from the federal government. But at $943 per month, even people without significant mental and physical health challenges would have a tough time remaining housed in Billings.

The people OTS serves have been homeless for so long that some are more comfortable outside than inside, Barthel said. Additional requirements for housing further harm their ability to become housed.

“There’s an idea that giving people things hurts them, but shelter isn’t one of those things,” he said.

“Enabling happens at the very beginning,” Koerber said. “Without enabling you’re telling them to stay outside.”

“Enabling someone to stay alive is a good thing,” Koerber continued.

Dena Bishopp, operations manager of the shelter, said that housing someone can jumpstart the recovery process.

“People need to have a warm place to sleep, to shower. Then they start to feel more normal,” she said. “The way we’re doing things now doesn’t seem to work.”

Barthel echoed this.

“The streets make you crazy,” he said. “Within 90 days on the street, it starts playing with your head.”

This can make it difficult, if not impossible, for people to deal with the problems that may be contributing to their situation.

“People end up this way and lose motivation to help themselves,” Koerber said.

Furthermore, many chronically unhoused people have had negative experiences with local community providers and are distrustful of the people who are supposedly going to help them.

“They push our buttons just to see if we’re like everybody else,” Barthel said. “They curse us, insult us.”

The shelter has had to ask people to leave.

“It’s not a ‘Be gone forever,’ it’s a ‘take some time off and come back,’” he said.

Many unhoused people not only face significant physical and behavioral health obstacles to employment and shelter, but also logistical barriers including lack of identification or a social security card. OTS can help them acquire these documents and navigate the job process.

Jobs held by residents include working at Hardee’s or St. Vincent de Paul, collecting signatures for ballot initiatives, housekeeping or putting together emergency supply packages for AMS. Even some residents who are unable to read or write have been able to find work, with the help of the OTS team.

With income, residents can move out of the shared emergency shelter rooms into their own transitional housing rooms.

“Pride is powerful,” Barthel said. “They feel value in paying for their rooms.”

The organization seeks to act as a “cheerleader and coach” to residents and to promote their autonomy.

“We ask them for three goals when they move in and start working on it right away,” Barthel said.

Money or principles?

Though the accountability and requirements for shelter might satisfy people worried about enabling or handouts, the 2007 report by Billings’ original coalition to end homelessness found that there is an economic incentive to get people into shelter.

The group, called Welcome Home Billings, reported that, at the time, an ambulance cost $900 per ride; an emergency room visit cost $1,500; a day in a psychiatric hospital cost $2,200; a day in jail cost $60; and a day in a shelter cost $38.

“During the course of a year, a chronically homeless individual often cycles through public systems including shelters, jail, addiction/mental health treatment facilities, and emergency medical centers,” the report said.

Philip Mangano, the executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness under President George W. Bush, called this the “random ricochet,” which, at great cost, fails to address the problem.

In 2014, public and private organizations in Billings spent $8.5 million on emergency services, health care and law enforcement for the homeless, according to a document announcing the launch of a downtown homeless program.

By 2020, $10.3 million was spent on emergency and law enforcement services provided to 93 "downtown Billings chronic high utilizers,"across 5,601 encounters with the Billings Police Department, 863 visits to St. Vincent’s, and 1,247 visits to Billings Clinic,according to a study commissioned by the city.

Katie Harrison, founder of SustainaBillings, wrote in an email to City Council that every day she sees the same unhoused man "sucked up (i.e. arrested, or taken by ambulance) and literally spit back out onto the street."

Officer Nicholas Fonte, a downtown officer with the Billings Police Department, said that he once witnessed the same unhoused man transported to the hospital 10 times in 24 hours.

Billings residents have demonstrated their frugality through the recent failures of the parks levy and the school safety levy. This frugality has yet to be applied to addressing homelessness.

“It is less expensive to house the homeless than to leave them on the streets,” the 2007 Welcome Home Billings report said.

OTS hopes to be particularly cost-effective in that it does not plan to provide any medical, mental health or addiction services, which can be found elsewhere in the community.

“We don’t want to be the solution, we want to house them so they can find the solution,” Koerber said.