Chris Sterndale of Cross Roads House offers perspective on the rising count of homeless people in the state and the particular challenges faced on the Seacoast

A recent annual survey conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Homeless, Housing and Transportation estimated the number of homeless people living in New Hampshire at 1,300, an increase of 56 individuals over last year. The “point in time” survey, a one-day snapshot of a 24-hour period on January 25 and 26, gathered information from city and town welfare offices, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, food pantries, outreach workers and other service providers across the state. The count excluded Manchester and Nashua, which conduct their own surveys and report their findings to the DHHS. People who remain unsheltered or do not report to aid agencies also remain unaccounted for.

Surveyors estimated that 282 of these homeless individuals live in Strafford and Rockingham counties. At some point, a good number of them will step foot in Cross Roads House emergency and transitional shelter in Portsmouth. Cross Roads opened its doors in 1982 to offer services 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It provides food, shelter and a transitional housing program that helps people find independent and sustainable housing.

During a recent interview with The Wire, executive director Chris Sterndale offered his thoughts on the rising count and the challenges of homelessness.

How many people are currently staying at the shelter?
Well, that changes every night, but I think last night we were in the low 80s. Lately that’s about average. We have 110 beds, total. We haven’t been that full in a while. A lot of that is driven by the size of the families.

Historically, February and March have been our busiest month, but we’re not straight-out packed right now like we have been in the past. It’s really been very stable, remarkably stable, almost oddly flat; 2005 and 2006 were very, very similar in terms of the numbers of people we served and how long they stayed.

What kinds of services does the Cross Roads House offer?
Well, first and foremost, we are the shelter. We are the place to get inside, get warm, get fed, a place to take a shower and get mail. Real basic human needs kind of things. The second part of our program is a transitional program, which is intended to help people work their way back to housing. Ideally, people that come through here, this is their last stop of homelessness, and they’re moving back to somewhere permanent when they leave here.

The program is kind of split in half, emergency and transitional. Everybody starts in the emergency shelter. People in the emergency shelter can apply to get into the transitional program if they are interested. They get more intensive case management help from us. And for everybody that goes through that, it’s a little bit different. Some people have medical or health needs. Some people have legal things they need to clean up. Some people need to find better paying work. Some people need to take advantage of certain benefits that might be available to them. Some people are waiting to get into public housing. So there’s a whole lot of things that go on during that time in the transitional program, but the outcome, ideally, for all of them, is that they move from here to an apartment and don’t need to come back.

What are the demographics of the people you see at Cross Roads House? How many have families and what levels of education do you see?
About 40 percent of the people here are part of a family, whether a parent or a child. About 60 percent are individual adults. There are not many universal demographic characteristics to them. There’s a very broad range, a very diverse bunch of people. We have newborn kids who come here with their mothers, we have 60-year-old folks here on Social Security, and everybody in between. There are plenty of sub-populations that you can identify pretty easily, families being one of them, the mentally ill being another one—probably 30 percent of our individual adult people coming in report some kind of mental illness or emotional disorder. Substance abusers would be another cluster that you could identify, either people actively using or in some stage of recovery that have a history of substance abuse of some sort. That would be the third largest identifiable cluster of folks. But it’s hard. They are a very diverse bunch.

How do most people become homeless?
It’s usually a combination of problems. It’s almost never one thing that just completely wrecks somebody’s life to the point where they don’t have a place to stay. It’s usually at least two things. The big problems are mental illness, untreated mental illness in particular. People with mental illnesses can’t maintain relationships with their family, with their roommates, their employers, their landlords, and often times end up getting tossed out because of that. Economic problems, either job loss or your car dies. If your car dies and you drive 15 miles to work, if you lose your car, then you lose your job. If you lose your job, then you lose your apartment. Health concerns, you get sick, you get hurt, you can’t go to work, you can’t pay your rent and then you’re homeless. Those kinds of spirals are very real for people. That is usually how it happens. Things stack up on top of each other.

How accurate are the “snapshot” surveys?
They’re not. I mean, it’s a good faith effort. It’s a good exercise to go through because over time if you do it the same way every year then you can learn something from it, but it doesn’t count a lot of people that really don’t have a place to stay, people that are living with family in the garage or on the couch, that don’t go to a soup kitchen or something that may not be counted. There are a lot of people that are doing that.

In your opinion, what is the best way to reduce homelessness in New Hampshire?
We have a particular acute challenge in New Hampshire with the cost of housing. There just isn’t low-cost housing anywhere. We have a voracious demand for low-cost labor. We are a tourism-driven, shopping-driven, retail services-driven economy here. Those types of businesses need low-cost labor, but there is no place for those low-cost workers to live here. That is the underlying problem. We need to do something about the availability of low-cost housing for people that work here. There are plenty of people that have recognized that, but the solutions don’t seem to be coming too fast.

Is there any factor that makes homelessness on the Seacoast different from homelessness in the rest of the state?
There are two things that are different here compared to other places—the cost of housing and transportation. When people in the business talk about high housing costs, it’s not just the sticker price of the rent, but it’s the rent versus what people earn here. That is one thing that’s particularly bad in this part of the state. And transportation is a challenge here. There are great distances between where a lot of the jobs are and where a lot of the housing is. That transportation cost is another layer of problems. We don’t oftentimes have people leave here and move to private apartments in Portsmouth. They’re leaving here and they’re going to Rochester and Somersworth and Seabrook. They are going far away, but they work here, so they have a transportation burden. There is really not enough public transportation.

Have you seen a lot of veterans in the past?
Typically we’ve had 30 or 40 of our 600 a year. Thirty, 40, 50, something in that range, and that hasn’t changed dramatically in the last five or six years. We’ve had two guys that have done tours in Iraq come through here in the last couple of years. No great increase, but 10 years from now I think we’ll see a big jump as those guys come home and their injuries either get worse or rear their ugly head. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a big jump later, fortunately not yet.