Homelessness booms in Ames, IA. What are they doing to fix it?

Homelessness booms in Ames, IA. What are they doing to fix it?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
In Iowa, there are a few different counties that have
started to amp up their homelessness efforts, like kind of
identifying different things in ways that they can move forward
on trying to make their county not just give people
a place that they can have shelter, but also help
get them on their feet. Can you imagine how difficult

(00:20):
it would be if you didn't have a place to
live and you didn't have a home or a job.
How do you go about like even getting back into
the mix. And I bring this up because there's one
county in central Iowa that I was reading about their plan,
because they just this week unveiled a plan to address
homelessness in their area. And again, I'm okay with looking

(00:43):
at other places. I don't think the American culture is
completely infallible. I don't think we've get we don't think
we have everything right. I think our government system has
inspired a lot of people around the world to have
a similar representative style government. But our system isn't perfect.
A lot of things that kind of enable bad systems

(01:05):
within systems within a system, right, Like, so think about economically,
what's it like you really need if you're going to
survive and you're going to be able to live in
a nice place based on how much things are costing,
and based on how much money a typical job is
likely to pay somebody. How do you say that you
need two incomes? Though, Like you can't. Really, there's not

(01:27):
a lot of people who can live in a nice
place and be able to afford a nice place and
live there by themselves and pay for all of it themselves,
pay for all their food themselves, and still work just
the one job. Like things are just too expensive. Now,
I would say that's accurate, right.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Well, a lot of factors, a lot of factors of
how you live your life, what kind of bills you
have to pay, where you live, small town versus big city,
total different price market there. But yeah, yeah, I mean
we live in you know world nowadays where I mean,
I don't know. I mean people make it work. People

(02:06):
raise families on just one income. Yeah, plenty people do
It's It is not impossible by any means or any
stretch of the imagination, but the circumstances have to be right,
and there are a lot of lower entry jobs out there. Look,
if you're making twelve bucks an hour, you're not gonna
be able to raise a family on that you're you.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
Can maybe keep yourself alive and pay the rent.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, maybe circumstances are going to be have to be
just right for you to be able to support yourself
without a roommate. Yeah, that's why. I look, that's part
of the equation of why a lot of kids these
days are not moving out of their parents' house as
quickly as they used.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
To great point, great point because sometimes and I know
this is a generational thing, and I know I'm going
to be hearing from people who were you know, were
raised in the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties,
when things were not that expensive and a job that
was you know, ten bucks an hour really could go
a lot farther than it does now. And this isn't
to say that it's better or worse. Again, I don't

(03:07):
want to be comparing eras as somehow like our generation
or the generation younger than us, has it worse than
they did. But it's a fact that things are more
expensive than they ever have been before, and that's inflation,
and that's just kind of how the economy works and
the minimum wage and also what jobs are generally tending
to offer, and our society just hasn't caught up at

(03:30):
the exact same rate. Right now. That's not to say
you can't get jobs that pay better and you can't
position yourself to be doing work that will pay you well,
but it's such a delicate balance between the two things
that it's pretty clear entry level, especially, you're not going
to be able to find an exact perfect setup that
is going to allow a twenty three to twenty four

(03:52):
year old who has a degree in something they think
they weren't really interested in and they want to be
passionate about the line of work they go into and
they get out into the workforce, and between student loans,
between having car payments, between having their housing and being
able to pay rent wherever they live, whether it's a
city or something rule, you have all of those factors involved,

(04:13):
plus you know, just grocery prices and food and even
trying to do anything socially and have a social life
that can give you some you know, good mental health.
This is why, to the tune of like fourteen or
fifteen hundred dollars a month on average, fifty percent of
millennial and Gen Z parents still say that they are
sending or or helping support through bills and helping pay

(04:35):
bills their kids up to fifteen hundred dollars a month,
their adult children, because you don't want them to fail.
It's a difficult it's a difficult balance that has to
be made in the parents, at least in those cases
are stepping up and saying, look, I understand you don't
you need a little bit of help, and they have
means that they can help those kids.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
Well, it's a multifaceted conversation too. There's a lot of
things different about our society today now. Are things more expensive? Absolutely?
Are you gonna go out there and get yourself a
blue collar job and be able to buy yourself a nice, tidy,
little two bedroom house in a mid level community. No,
you're not gonna be able to do that anymore these days,
not right away, not by yourself. You're gonna have to

(05:18):
have your parents co sign on that you're gonna have
to have help. But also, I think that I'll bring
up social media. I think that we also live in
an environment in this world where there's a whole lot
of glamour to things that are out of our reach.
These days, on your phone, you can watch other people
put out the best version of their lives that are
unattainable for you and your NonStop deluge of expectations of

(05:42):
what your life should be, all kinds of new gadgets,
inventions and price points that somebody fifty years ago wouldn't
even be dreaming about spending or wasting their money or
time on that we're being deluged by from the moment
we're old enough to hold a phone or an iPad.
And so I think that that just creates an environ
of unrealistic expectations, and it creates a difficult environment to

(06:04):
grow up in.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
It's really well said, because I do think I mean,
and like you said, people in a lot of cases
just posting the best parts of everything they got going on.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
Right nobody. Yeah, very few people out there on social
media are going to put an honest portrayal of the
peaks and valleys of their life.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:21):
Mostly they're just going to post the highlights and make
it seem like, look how cool I am.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
It's like well, or you know, maybe they're just looking
for validation of their own kind, you know, and people,
you know, you can find corners where people are there
to help support people who may not be doing as well.
But generally, I think people don't like that kind of
negativity and I certainly don't think people revel in it.
But I want to circle this back to the homelessness thing.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
Story.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
County is the county I'm speaking of in Central Iowa
that I was seeing their plan, and this is a
strategic plan over three fiscal years, and when I come back,
I'll tell you exactly kind of what the plan is.
And I wonder, and I know that there are people
working on this in Omaha and around the area, and
we've talked to this, but I think we as citizens,
I think can help remove some of the stigma about
homelessness and people that aren't having trouble getting back into

(07:08):
society for one reason or another. And it's not a
one size fits all situation, but it is an interesting
study into what maybe can be done over time to
help mitigate some of the people that we're seeing laying
down in Old Market on busy Saturday afternoons just hoping
somebody gives them a few bucks. How can we get

(07:30):
towards a solution to that. I'll tell you what this
community is going to do in Central Iowa and see
if that's something that can register with us as citizens.
When we come back on news radio eleven ten kfab.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
Emerysung on news Radio eleven ten kfab.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
This is about homelessness in their community. It's Story County.
This is where Ames is, where Iowa Sate University is located,
and they have noticed a twenty percent increase in their
county of homeless people since twenty twenty began. That's kind
of crazy, right, So let's just say that you're wandering
around in downtown Ames and you're seeing five Let's say

(08:07):
you see five people who are homeless in twenty twenty, Well,
odds are based on their studies that they've done in
that county, there's now six people in that same amount
of space. And this is while it's pretty large for
Iowa and Nebraska size, especially when you get outside the
major metropolitan areas, it is still not a like this

(08:27):
is a this is a community that should be small
enough to where this shouldn't be a noticeable problem, should
not be something that a lot of people are seeing
when they're going through town. It's like, wow, there's a
growing homeless population here in this city. So this is
what their plan is in their first fiscal year, they
want to support on the ground service provider partnership, so
people who are actually willing to kind of step up

(08:49):
and help out people that just don't have shelter or food.
They want to build a peer navigator program, expand partnership
with a mobile workforce center job fares well. In the
first year, they're going to expand the access for people
who would be staying in these shelters with these providers
and give them access to job fares that makes sense.

(09:10):
And then the people who are coming to the job
fair right, the people that have the jobs, they're going
to know who the person like, who they're talking to,
and they'll have jobs that are appropriate for the people
that would be there and they're looking to get back
on their feet. They're looking to expand emergency shelter capacity,
which is another thing that I think we overestimate how
many people can fit into these things when you have

(09:32):
a legitimate and especially in a place like Omaha where
we have five hundred thousand people in this city, there's
a finite amount of space in these emergency shelters. Especially
when it's bad weather, it's super cold outside, you might
be getting into an area of time where it's ten
degrees out and people don't have the necessary coat hat
ways to keep themselves warm. There's not a ton of

(09:53):
space to try to keep everybody in a place where
they can be warm in a safe environment. And they
also want to help provide robust case management services across
the entirety of the county, so if there is a
case that pops up, or if there is some sort
of conflict with someone, they're able to have the resources
to help. In the second year, they want to create
a task force to help figure out the cause of

(10:14):
homelessness in the area and why there are more homeless
people there than they were five years ago, support developing
efforts to provide an all weather, daytime refuge, so for
people who just really need somewhere to be during the day,
even if they're not going to be staying there, somewhere
that they can go for resources. That's important. And they
also want to align with or supplement local funding for

(10:36):
the emergency housing as well. And then by the third
fiscal year they want to plan and fund a permanent
support of housing situation. So all in all, and this
is available on the Cityoames dot org website. And again
this is a couple hours away from here, but I
just noticed how concise the plan was and what the
idea is. They want to have immediate solutions to try

(10:58):
to help people at least have the ability to have
a job or get a job and be able to
pay some bills, but they also want to do over
the next few years figure out how to try to
eradicate the problem overall in general. I don't know if
that's a thing that you can actually completely solve, but
I admire any city, especially of the size that we're
talking about, of being able to try to at least

(11:19):
have that conversation. We'll have another hour for you coming
up here on Thursday on news radio eleven to ten
kfab