Local News: Homeless Advocates Press City Council on Issues

Advocates for the poor push for more local awareness about poverty and homelessness in Waco
By J.B. Smith (Tribune-Herald staff writer)

From the Waco Tribune-Herald

Waco is making substantial progress getting the homeless housed, city staffers and advocates for the poor told the city council Tuesday.

But on the bigger problem of chronic poverty, the community seems to be in a holding pattern, several speakers said in an extended workshop on poverty and homelessness.

At last count in 2007, Waco had about 400 homeless people, including those sleeping in shelters. Since then, city leaders have worked to get state and federal housing vouchers for about 40 homeless veterans and 20 mental patients. The city now is working with the nonprofit Mercy Housing to build a 55-unit complex that would provide permanent housing for the chronically homeless.

Four years into a 10-year plan to reduce homelessness to practically nothing, the community is on course, Waco homelessness coordinator Teri Holtkamp said. Ken Martin, head of the Texas Homeless Network, told the council that Waco is a model for dealing with the homeless.

“I’m here to tell you you’re doing a fabulous job,” he told the council. “You may be one of the poorest cities in Texas, but you are rich in the amount of effort you’re putting into ending homelessness. . . . You’re probably farther along than anyone in Texas.”

But finding shelter for a few hundred homeless people is only a small part of the bigger poverty challenge in Waco, where 32,000 people live under the poverty line, said Jimmy Dorrell, founder of Mission Waco.

“With an unprecedented 27.6 percent of our community below the poverty line, it is time to do more, much more for our neighbors,” he told the council.

“We desperately need the urgency of a crisis to replace the numbness that has allowed this embarrassing problem to persist,” he said. “Something more must be done.”

Dorrell said there are no easy answers to poverty, and there is no one group to blame for it. But he said the city and other Waco institutions need to make poverty a front-burner issue, addressing education, job training, job creation, wages and neighborhood revitalization.

He proposed a community task force that would meet regularly to research and discuss poverty issues and develop a strategy for reducing poverty. He proposed a city-appointed “poverty czar” to oversee these efforts.

Kenneth Moerbe, former Caritas director and now head of the McLennan County Hunger Coalition, agreed that a combination of research and community planning is needed to start the fight against poverty.

“What we have lacked is political will,” he said. “I realize you don’t represent the entire political will of the community, but you’re absolutely necessary.”

Mayor Virginia DuPuy said she would hesitate to create a poverty “czar” because it would place too much of the community’s responsibility on one person. But she said she welcomed a community dialogue on poverty, which she said should include issues of education.

Councilman Randy Riggs said it’s no secret that poverty is a problem in Waco. He said the city has been trying to address it by recruiting business, but he would like to know what else the city can do.

“I’d like to be part of the solution,” he said.

Published on Wednesday, March 25, 2009