What's happening to address homelessness in Fort Wayne?

"Currently we don’t have enough beds for the people (who) are living in encampments." - Amanda Fall, Fort Wayne's first Manager of Homeless Services

Hey Locals,

We love dropping into your inbox each week and providing timely, plain-language updates on complicated local issues. With some topics, we feel like we can get our hands around most of the important talking points to share with you quickly and easily. Today’s newsletter is not on one of those topics. 

Today’s topic is housing and homelessness. And, to be honest, there are so many complexities here that we’re only beginning to scratch the surface ourselves. And like many complex issues, it triggers a lot of different emotions for different people. 

At last week’s City Council meeting, two prevailing ways of thinking about homelessness came head-to-head in an exchange between Council President Russ Jehl and grassroots advocate Sally Segerson of Street Reach for the Homeless.

• Jehl has been one of two City Council members (along with Rep. Scott Myers) bringing homelessness and specifically Downtown encampments to the forefront of local conversations. He and Myers have called for the city to consider strategies for clearing encampments, and he sees “enabling” encampments with resources as “toxic and morally repugnant.”
• Segerson has been handing out blankets and supplies to homeless people Downtown since 2012 and regularly provides updates to City Council about the state of homelessness locally. She says council members and others who care to be part of the solution should be on the front lines serving rather than making decisions without meeting homeless individuals firsthand. Instead of enabling, she sees her work as “keeping someone alive long enough to get a different chapter in their life story.”

These perspectives stake out two ends of a broad spectrum of opinions. We’ve been reporting about these topics for a few weeks now, and to help you make sense of things, we thought we’d try to answer a few big-picture questions based on our notes and interviews:

• What do we know about homelessness in Fort Wayne? 
• How does it impact Downtown? 
• And what’s being done to improve the situation going forward?