Mary Morgan with Heading Home of South-central Indiana at a Wednesday Justice Fiscal Advisory Committee meeting.
(Courtesy of Community Access Television Services (CATS))
The group tasked with making fiscal recommendations for a new Monroe County Jail focused its latest meeting on making housing more accessible for formerly incarcerated individuals.
That was the predominant topic of conversation at a Wednesday meeting of the Justice Fiscal Advisory Committee, the group formed in May to continue discussions about local criminal justice needs.
Mary Morgan is the director of housing security for Heading Home of South-Central Indiana and attended the meeting as a non-voting committee member. She said finding housing can be extremely difficult for formerly incarcerated individuals to obtain after they’ve served their sentences.
“People who are formerly incarcerated have additional barriers to getting housing,” Morgan said. “Even though our society is built on the premise of ‘You’ve served your time, you’ve paid your debt to society, and now you’re back and integrating into society,’ we all know that’s just not the case.”
Many people with criminal histories are often not considered when applying for housing in the region, according to Morgan.
Morgan said it is especially difficult for formerly incarcerated persons with mental health issues to find housing — and the problem is exacerbated by several barriers.
For example, Morgan said south-central Indiana has a shortage of case managers, which creates an additional challenge for formerly incarcerated persons seeking housing.
“I have not talked to any organization that has case managers or outreach workers or other staff that feels like they have the capacity to do what they really need to do,” Morgan said. “It’s really hard to provide the navigation and support that’s needed when you have 40 people on your list, or whatever the number may be, and each with a unique individual program.”
On top of that, Morgan said case workers are often overworked and underpaid, which leads to high turnover. Low salaries are sometimes a result of unsustainable funding sources, she said.
“(Organizations) might be funded by a particular grant for a year, and you stand up a program, but you have no guarantee that program will be sustained in the future,” Morgan said. “If you’re working with a case manager and you build that relationship — and that relationship is one of trust, which is so important — and then that person leaves, then you have to start all over. You might fall through the cracks.”
In the meantime, Heading Home is looking into ways to incentivize local landlords to accept applicants with vouchers for subsidized, low-income housing. It has provided funding for the Bloomington Housing Authority’s landlord risk mitigation fund, a program Morgan said provides an insurance policy for landlords that accept such applicants.
The risk mitigation fund is designed as an incentive for landlords who accept vouchers. Morgan said Heading Home wants to reach out to landlords who are reluctant to do so.
“I feel like we have a lot of work to do in supporting landlords,” she said. “When we have more apartment complexes (…) being purchased by out-of-state owners, I think we’re going to have to turn more and more to locally owned, maybe smaller landlords who we can build that relationship with. Then, provide ways to support them and hear them.”
Morgan floated the idea of a “roundtable of landlords” that would meet regularly to discuss and come up with solutions to some of the problems they commonly face.
Morgan said Heading Home has had conversations with the Gene B. Glick Company, a real estate management and development firm that has properties in Bloomington and Indianapolis.
“We’d like to bring in folks from Glick and other landlords who are supportive, and really have that peer-to-peer recruitment,” she said. “I think that’s powerful, too, where it’s not me or an agency telling a landlord, ‘Hey you should do this’, but it’s another landlord saying, ‘This is my experience. This is what I found to be helpful.’”
