Lepera, Arkoosh discuss closure of Montgomery County homeless shelter

NORRISTOWN — The closure of the Coordinated Homeless Outreach Center in Norristown has people talking.

CHOC, located on the grounds of the Norristown State Hospital along Sterigere Street, is the 50-bed facility and  is the largest and only homeless space for single adults ages 18 years and older in Montgomery County.

The organization is placed within a 68-acre parcel of land that is slated to be conveyed from the state back to the Municipality of Norristown. The agreement was initially reached back in 2017, according to Norristown Municipal Administrator Crandall Jones. An agreement of sale was unanimously approved by council five years later during a work session in February.

Ahead of the facility’s impending closure, a rally took place Wednesday morning where around 80 attendees gathered on the steps of the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown.

CHOC had effectively closed its doors on Thursday, but a procedural oversight resulted in an extension to Aug. 14, according to Resources for Human Development Regional Director Owen Camuso. The Philadelphia-based organization oversees the Coordinated Homeless Outreach Center.

Camuso clarified to MediaNews Group on Thursday that “CHOC’s lease agreement with the State of Pennsylvania outlines that written notification of the termination of the lease needed to be provided at least 90 days from when we needed to vacate the property. Initially, that timeframe was shortened, but because we received official notification from the state in May, we informed them that the 90-day period would actually end on Aug. 14, and thus we had official permission to occupy the space until that time.”

From an “operational standpoint, as of (Thursday), all residents will be moving out of the CHOC,” according to Camuso, who said the remaining time is expected to be used to vacate the property of its belongings.

Norristown council president pens op-ed

Norristown Municipal Council President Thomas Lepera had something to say about the matter. He penned an opinion piece that ran on June 18 in The Times Herald.

“(I) just wanted them to know our story, to know that there was five years, and that it was in my opinion a complete failure on the county’s part,” Lepera said in an interview with MediaNews Group on June 23.

Lepera said that 21 social service agencies are located within the municipality’s geographic boundaries, which consists of 3.6 square miles.

“These social services have to be spread out evenly,” Lepera said.

He defended municipality’s position of the land acquisition, and propositioned that county officials do more to tackle the issues surrounding housing and homelessness.

“But at the same time, there’s a problem that threatens all this momentum: A county-wide affordable housing shortage that has reached the crisis level,” he said in his op-ed published last month. “If you need proof, just look for the ‘tent cities’ popping up all over Norristown. The tents — provided by the county to people who have no place to live — are compelling evidence of the critical need for a county-wide plan to address the lack of affordable housing in most Montgomery communities, which has reached a crisis stage.”

“We call on the county to lead the development of a county-wide solution to the affordable housing crisis that addresses this longstanding problem, and to do so in a way that does not undermine the great progress that Norristown is making in rebuilding its own future,” Lepera said in the op-ed.

“In response to Mr. Lepera, also first and foremost, we do have a strategic plan for countywide affordable housing plan, and that’s ‘Homes for All,’ and … Norristown council was a part of it,” Montgomery County Office of Housing and Community Development Administrator Kayleigh Silver told MediaNews Group on Thursday, noting that Jones and the “Borough of Norristown” were credited in the report’s acknowledgments.

Lepera told MediaNews Group in an interview following the op-ed publication that he’s been thinking about giving his perspective on the issue for more than five years.

When asked about feedback that the piece received, he said he’s heard both positive and negative responses from area residents, advocates and businesses.

“I’ve had people reach out from the business world that are saying thank you because they feel the county and their policies have been hurting business in Norristown,” he said. “And I’ve had people reach out from the CHOC, and people that volunteer there basically saying that I don’t understand, and that these kinds of social safety networks need to be here because of mass transportation and the (Norristown) transportation center being here.”

“In which I pushed back on because there’s a transportation center in Lower Gwynedd, there’s transportation in Lansdale, there’s transportation all over the county with SEPTA, and if the transportation was such a big part of social safety networks then something like the community college would surely be in Norristown, and not Blue Bell, where there’s absolutely no public transportation,” Lepera continued.

Montgomery County Commissioners chairwoman responds

Montgomery County Commissioners’ Chairwoman Val Arkoosh also spoke with MediaNews Group in an interview Thursday in response to Lepera’s opinion piece published in the newspaper.

“You know I took a quick look at it,” Arkoosh said on Thursday. “I think what’s really striking to those of us … is this county has been deeply invested in … making homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring in Montgomery County.”Your Way Home has acted as a “unified and coordinated housing crisis response system,” providing a myriad of services with the ultimate goal of reducing homelessness, since its launch in 2014, according to the county website. Your Way Home continues to make strides in solving homelessness by embracing a “housing first” approach.

The public-private partnership has helped 3,291 people in 1,872 households “exit homelessness into housing,” according to Montgomery County Communications Director Kelly Cofrancisco. Another 6,002 households “have been diverted from experiencing homelessness” through the organization’s “prevention programs and pilots.”

“If you look at the data, it’s very clear that the municipality with the highest number of individuals who are experiencing eviction, threat of eviction, who list their last permanent address as Norristown, students who become homeless during the school year, those numbers are for the most part, not every one of them, but most of them, Norristown is either first of second in these metrics that we track,” Arkoosh said.

There were 363 evictions recorded in the “first six months of 2019” in Norristown, according to county data.Additionally, county data showed that 29 percent of “unsheltered clients” taking part in the Your Way Home Street Outreach Program had Norristown recorded as their “last permanent address.

Twenty-nine percent of people seeking homelessness services by calling Your Way Home at 211 “were from people in Norristown,” according to county data.

“So the county, we have stepped up,” Arkoosh said. “We have worked very hard to invest in Norristown, and help Norristown residents. I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Lepera has not been a willing partner in that work, and some of this actually predates his time on municipal council where Norristown has not always been a partner, even though they’ve always had a seat at the table with the work that your way home is doing. They have actually declined opportunities to build more affordable housing in Norristown.”

“There’s been a couple of very successful projects here like Montgomery Park, Arbor Mews and some of those other projects … but there is an imbalance between where the need is and kind of where the response has been from this municipality,” she continued. “So as a consequence, as a county, we have worked very hard to find housing for everybody. In fact, 92 percent of the affordable housing that has been built in this county since 1995 has been outside of Norristown.”

Cost of living, pandemic & Ida contribute to area’s homelessness

Acknowledging the lack of affordable housing stock and increased cost of living in Montgomery County, Silver noted that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the remnants of Hurricane Ida have contributed to an increase in the area’s homeless population.

Arkoosh relayed several initiatives designed to assist area residents in need. Since September 2020, $14 million has been designated in county COVID-19 rental and utility relief dollars to those renting in Norristown, according to a county spokesperson.

The September 2021 storm brought historic flooding levels and an EF-2 tornado to the county, displacing numerous residents. Montgomery County has spent more than $3.5 million on “emergency housing and support services to victims of Hurricane Ida” as the one-year mark approaches, according to a county spokesperson.

There were 115 storm victims staying in hotels paid by the county as of January, according to a county spokesperson, who noted that “31 percent were displaced residents of Norristown.”

County officials recently released the findings of the annual Point-In-Time Count, which revealed 568 people were experiencing homelessness locally.

The count took place on Jan. 25 as more than 100 volunteers surveyed areas in and around Abington, Ambler, Ardmore, Bridgeport, Cheltenham, King of Prussia, Lansdale, Lower Merion, Norristown, Pottstown, Souderton, and Willow Grove, according to Silver, who noted the count is required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

“They just did a Point-In-Time count with 568 people … and we only have 50 beds,” Lepera said. “That’s a problem. That’s a problem on a countywide level.”

Arkoosh acknowledged that the issue of homelessness “is a countywide problem.”

“People in every municipality in this county experience homelessness for a whole variety of reasons,” she said. “These are our friends, our family, our neighbors, and we have worked to create opportunities in every municipality, and we do believe firmly that every municipality should have their fair share, should participate in helping every individual in this county have a safe and affordable place to live, and I think this is an example of Mr. Lepera not doing his homework. If you just look at where we have invested across this county as I mentioned 92 percent of those housing units are outside of Norristown.”

County data revealed that $48 million has been infused to construct 1,669 units at 28 different low income housing sites, according to findings from the Montgomery County Office of Housing and Community Development.

What happens next? Land conveyance timeline

More than a dozen organizations rallied together to form the Regional Advocacy Coalition for the Responsible Continuation of Social Safety Net Services. Representatives on behalf of the coalition sent a letter in April to government and community leaders calling for the extension of leases for CHOC and Residential Treatment Facility for Adults facilities. Their request was denied by the municipality in an April 7 letter.

“Well the reason why the lease wasn’t extended, one of the biggest reasons, is because the property and the 68 acres is finally an opportunity, once in a lifetime, to reposition Norristown in the regional marketplace,” Lepera said.

Lepera stressed in his op-ed that agencies utilizing space on the state hospital grounds had five years to find other accommodations.

“The county has had five years to address the problem in a meaningful way, and its failure to do so has stalled momentum for the redevelopment of this acreage in a way that generates jobs for our residents, tax revenues for our municipality, and hope for our future,” he said in the opinion piece.

While “two of those programs already relocated very successfully to another site,” Arkoosh noted that the situation related to the homeless shelter was a bit more complex.

“This is a very vulnerable population, and our goal has been to transition these individuals in the most trauma-informed way so that we don’t add additional trauma to lives that have already been extraordinarily difficult, and so we had hoped that we might be able to transition these individuals to a new facility so there was just one move involved,” Arkoosh said. “Unfortunately, because of the sort of two-year hiatus with COVID, that really left us unable to really move a lot of these things forward…”

Members of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners had unanimously authorized a $2 million contract back in February that financially backed a “property acquisition” for Philadelphia-based Resources for Human Development.

“We have an agreement of sale and we are going through our due diligence process right now with that facility,” Camuso said in a June 2 interview, referencing a facility located in Lower Providence Township.

“RHD is still working out some zoning issues and things like that with the municipality,” Arkoosh said. “So hopefully that will come to a positive conclusion and be able to get to work refitting that building.”

CHOC previously stopped accepting new clients on May 1, according to Executive Director Christina Jordan. In the meantime, advocates have been actively working to connect the nearly 40 individuals using services at the facility in Norristown with housing.

“There is a plan for all remaining residents to be safely housed until permanent housing options have been secured,” Camuso said in a statement on Thursday.

Silver stressed that “we will have that safety net of a hotel to ensure that no one is leaving the CHOC to the street.” While the hotel’s location was not made available, she did confirm it is in Montgomery County.

“We do not have anything 100 percent finalized for this midterm temporary solution, but we continue to work diligently with RHD and particularly with the state,” Silver said, in the hopes of identifying state-owned land that could host a “temporary structure until we can get the permanent structure open.”

Lepera suggested using county-owned land as a possible solution.

“I think there’s other options to this,” he said. “They own property, they own the Montgomery County Correctional Facility, and all the land up there where they’re actually moving some of the county archives, the county coroner’s office onto that property. It wouldn’t be a burden on anybody to build a new homeless shelter on that property.”

Lepera on land conveyance: ‘It’s a huge thing’; Arkoosh says ‘we support that’

Arkoosh maintained her support of the municipality that also serves as the county seat, noting a number of big-ticket investment initiatives that have resulted in “multimillion investment in Norristown,” including Lafayette Street extension and the Montgomery County Justice Center projects.

“We are also very excited … about the opportunity the Municipality of Norristown will have with the conveyance of this parcel to the municipality and we fully support that,” Arkoosh said.

While the land is slated to be conveyed to the municipality, the actual agreement was listed between the state and Montgomery County‘s Redevelopment Authority.

“At the end of the day, it comes down to our residents and protecting them, and when we lose out on $2.5 million a year in tax revenue and face a $2 million every year, something’s got to give,” Lepera said.

The Norristown Zoning Hearing Board approved a request for a variance to subdivide the property during a meeting Tuesday evening.

“We have an opportunity to bring in some kind of a facility that’s going to take our youth off the street, that’s going to create jobs that’s going to create tax revenue for Norristown so we don’t have to see a budget deficit, so that we don’t have to have the highest unemployment rate in the county. This is an opportunity to change a lot of things,” Lepera said. “So I’m excited about it. It’s a huge thing.”

When asked about his vision, Lepera said he’d love it if a “major youth sports complex” was constructed on the parcel.

“That’s my perfect world goal,” he said. “To see some kind of facility that the youth can utilize, that’s going to create jobs, it’s going to spur tourism, and more business into town.”

‘We need everybody coming to the table’

When asked about how best to solve homelessness in Montgomery County, advocates and elected officials agreed on the “it takes a village” mentality for the county’s 62 boroughs, municipalities and townships.

“I think that all 62 have to get to the table,” Lepera said, emphasizing that “it shouldn’t just be Norristown and Pottstown trying to figure out all the world’s problems.” He stressed that “having the county drive that conversation would be key.”

“I agree with Mr. Lepera that all 62 municipalities need to step up and be part of the solution and figure out how to invest in and care for their unsheltered and housing unstable residents and neighbors. That includes Norristown,” Silver said.

“We’re here. We’re here to listen, but we need you to take action as well, and we need not just Lower Merion to take action, we need Abington to take action, we need Conshohocken, Upper Providence and Lower Providence, Marlborough Township, New Hanover township. We need everybody coming to the table. We’re begging.”

Montgomery County Community College offers public transportation options for its Blue Bell and Pottstown campuses. For more information, visit https://www.mc3.edu/choosing-montco/our-campuses/transportation-services.