By David Slone, Times-Union Staff Writer

There are three myths about homelessness in Kosciusko County.

Myth 1: Homelessness does not exist in Kosciusko County.

Myth 2: Most homeless in Kosciusko County are Hispanic.

Myth 3: The homeless people in Kosciusko County are "just passing through."

These statements were determined to be myths by a recent assessment conducted by the Salvation Army.

Kelly Haulk, a senior at Grace College, began interning with the Salvation Army in January. She is working toward a degree in social work.

According to Salvation Army Community Ministries Director Ken Locke, one of the first projects Haulk was assigned was an assessment on the county's homelessness.

"We've been serving on a committee through LifeQuest," said Locke. "We actually started out looking at housing ... but one thing that came out of that was that there was a number of homeless people in our county but the only thing we really had to go by was - we had a lot of stories but not a lot of hard data to work with to really know how many people were (homeless)."

When Haulk came on board, Locke took her to the LifeQuest meetings and one of the projects she took on was to put some actual numbers together.

Haulk said, "Because we have so many myths in this county about the numbers of homeless in this county - whether there's thousands or two - we wanted to have some quantitative data to show these are numbers, this is what we found."

She designed a survey and sent them out to various agencies in the area. The agencies sent them back to her on a weekly basis. The survey was conducted from Feb. 1 to March 29 and asked for names of the homeless, how many people were in the homeless household and the reason for homelessness.

For this study, "homeless" was defined as anyone who does not have control of the roof over his or her head.

Homeless persons/families reported lodging with family, at a friend's, hotel or motel, in a vehicle, at Beaman Home, at Mary's House or nowhere at all.

"It's not that we don't have homelessness in this county. It's just that people don't see them. They're kind of an invisible population. People just aren't aware," Haulk said.

"What we found over a two-month window was unemployment was the biggest reason for homelessness," she said.

Unemployment/underemployment accounted for 56 percent of the people who were homeless. Separation, divorce or domestic violence was the second reason for homelessness at 19 percent. Relocation to the area and those who recently were released from jail accounted for 7 percent each. Addictions and mental illness accounted only for 3 percent and other (disabled, disaster, health issues, hospital discharge) accounted for 8 percent of Kosciusko County's homeless.

There were 80 total homeless cases reported and of those, 22 are single-parent families.

A total of 155 known people are affected by homelessness in the county. Of those, 33 are single, 64 are single-parent families, 53 are families and five provided incomplete information.

For this study, a family is counted as at least two adults in the household. An additional one person was reported without any other information on the form. Families are the most underserved homeless population, Haulk said. Average size of a homeless family is approximately three persons.

Numbers reported are unduplicated, Locke said.

The idea that the county's homeless problem is due to relocation - people moving here looking for a job - became myth when the assessment showed it made up only 7 percent of the homeless.

"Five years ago, three years ago, that may have been different. But the way unemployment is in our county, that has changed," said Locke.

The survey was not broken up by race or gender. "We just wanted to see the number of people," said Haulk.

"One of the other myths, though, is that the homeless tend to be Hispanic. That's not true," said Locke.

Haulk said, "Out of the 80 cases, we probably had only two or three of Hispanic origin that we came in contact (with). They tend to value family very much. I'm saying that because they will take care of each other. Sometimes you'll have two or three generations living under the same roof. They will take care of each other before they come in and report."

"But one of the myths in this county, that's the second myth, is they're either coming here from another county or they're Hispanic. That's not true, at least from the data we collected," said Locke.

"The third myth was that we have this vague number that's always out there of how many homeless we actually have," he said, "which is a much higher number than this. But what this really quantifies is that we do have homelessness in this county. And I think, before, the myth was you'd hear numbers anywhere from 4,000 to we don't have any. That's the other myth - we don't have any. The fact is we do have a homeless population in Kosciusko County."

Haulk said, "That 155 people was only in two months."

"Kelly and I keep telling people, 'I can't take you and show you the homeless in Kosciusko County. We just know they are there. They are an invisible population,'" he said.

Now that an idea of the number of homeless is known in the county, Locke said, the next step is to find places for the county's homeless.

"That's part of what this committee is working on. We want to come up with some initiatives on how do we deal with this situation.

"Our Father's House, one thing that has come up in this committee, is her (Roz Morgan) plan is to have 16 beds for single men when she gets her facility done on Argonne (Road). So she's really looking at the single men, possibly the single women because she does have Mary's House in Pierceton. Obviously, there's the Beaman Home but that's ... not really addressing homelessness. That's addressing domestic violence but obviously some of those people are homeless because they've been thrown out of their houses or they left." Locke said.

Now, he said, LifeQuest has decided the Salvation Army will be the lead agency in addressing this problem. However, Locke said, he doesn't envision just one agency taking the task on.

The challenge, Locke and Haulk agreed, will be to get all the county's agencies to work together on addressing the homelessness issue in the county.

A meeting for community involvement and input will be May 21 from 7 to 9 p.m. at Warsaw Community Church, 103 Enterprise Drive, Warsaw. The public is invited to attend.

"We are going to come up with something to address this homeless issue. But this is the awareness phase of it. We want to make it become clear this is a problem," Locke said.

For more information, call Locke at 267-5361 or e-mail [email protected] [[In-content Ad]]