Harm reduction workers pulled their van into a darkened Bushnell Park on a recent winter evening where people who had no place to live were huddled on benches, some settling in for the night even as the temperature dropped to 30 degrees.
Workers bandied about a slew of questions at the Hartford park, all centered around one broad theme: What is it you need?
They’ve got toe warmers and hand warmers. Need a sleeping bag? Needle exchange? How many? What about Narcan? Sorry, no snacks today. And, notably, the shelters are filling up.
“There are no shelter beds tonight,” one worker told a man in the park. “But I can try to get you to a warming shelter.”
And all this — the exchange of supplies, the camaraderie as harm reduction workers tried to sort out the best way to keep people experiencing homelessness safe on winter nights — was happening in clear view of the illuminated gold top of the Connecticut State Capitol.
Unsheltered homelessness has been on the rise in Connecticut. Just over 1,050 people are living outside or in places not meant for human habitation. Close to 350 of those are over the age of 55, and another 24 are children, according to data from the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness.
This winter has posed a particular problem because homelessness overall has been increasing for the past couple of years in Connecticut.
People are also staying in shelters longer as they struggle to find a place they can afford to live. Camps of people experiencing homelessness have popped up across the state, and service providers have been out in force, asking lawmakers for help.
The harm reduction team in the Hartford area is charged with patrolling public transit stations. It’s a program through a partnership between the Connecticut Department of Transportation and the Connecticut Harm Reduction Alliance. The alliance is contracted with the state to offer harm reduction services for people with substance abuse issues who gather at public transit.
Legislative session
The team at the alliance is among the service providers asking the state government for $20 million to ensure there’s enough money each year for cold weather services, to offer raises to underpaid staff and strengthen shelter outreach programs.
Despite bipartisan support expressed at press conferences earlier in the year, obtaining more funding will likely be a difficult political battle as many groups, including mental health service providers, housing advocates and higher education institutions, also ask for more money.
Gov. Ned Lamont has touted his administration’s work to pull Connecticut out of a financial pit, and lawmakers last session voted to reup the state’s fiscal guardrails.
Lamont has established an Interagency Council on Homelessness to promote more cross-sector work to reduce homelessness.
The alliance offers a needle exchange, which has been shown to reduce the spread of illness. They also offer supplies for people who are experiencing homelessness, and they offer Narcan, a drug that reverses overdoses.
It’s one of many outreach programs in Connecticut. Some are starting out with federal grant money. The outreach programs aim to offer services to people who are hard to reach, such as those living outside.
As homelessness increases, outreach is among the additional services that providers hope to offer with an additional $20 million. The money was initially included in Senate Democrats’ housing priority bill, which passed through the Housing Committee earlier this month.
But ahead of the committee vote, lawmakers removed funding elements from the bill, saying they wanted to avoid the extra steps for bills that require the state to spend money. Co-Chair Sen. Marilyn Moore, D-Bridgeport, said she wants to get the funding approved in a different piece of budget adjustments.
The measure has received bipartisan support, with Democrats and Republicans gathering at press conferences in support of it in the weeks leading up to the legislative session.
Sarah Fox, president of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, pointed out in written testimony to the legislature that while the state has given additional money to homelessness response in the last year, much of that was one-time funding from COVID relief money.
To respond to the growing numbers, they need regular annual money, Fox said.
“Moreover, the past year has seen homelessness declared a public health crisis in Connecticut, and it has burgeoned into a humanitarian crisis affecting communities across our state,” she wrote. “Homelessness directly impacts individuals’ health and is a critical social determinant of well-being. Yet, unlike healthcare, transportation, or education, which benefit from consistent annual funding, our homeless response sector is left scrambling for resources yearly.”
During the last legislative session, providers asked for an additional $50 million and received $5 million.
The rise in homelessness is connected to the lack of affordable housing across the state. Research has tied regional variances in homelessness to a lack of affordable housing, and Connecticut service providers say it’s harder than ever to find places for people experiencing homelessness to live.
The rest of the country has also seen increases in homelessness. The most recent point-in-time count, an annual census of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S., found that homelessness rose by about 12% from 2022 to 2023.
That marked the biggest one-year jump since 2007, when the point-in-time count began.
“Connecticut stands at a crossroads in addressing homelessness,” Fox wrote. “We must decide whether to commit to ongoing funding dedicated to housing or continue making ad hoc investments that jeopardize our progress. The choice is clear: we must prioritize the well-being of our unhoused neighbors and ensure that they receive the support and resources they need to thrive.”
Outreach work
Some initiatives, such as the outreach program at The Friendship Service Center in New Britain, are in earlier stages of building their work. Miguel Rodriguez, the outreach and engagement program manager, said he’s working to build relationships with people camped in wooded areas.
Several times a week, Rodriguez loads up his work car with food, blankets, Narcan and other supplies to go out to the camps around New Britain. The car, he explains, has a broken handle on the outside passenger’s side and another on the inside of the driver’s side, but he can work around that.
He doesn’t see people every day. Sometimes, it’s just signs — used oxygen tanks on the ground, a complex system of tarps stretching through the trees to collect water, a tiny silver toddler’s shoe muddied on the ground. When no one is home, he leaves supplies at the entrance to their tents.
Some camps are hidden in wooded areas of local parks, others are built behind abandoned stores.
“Any politician could come here,” he said one day in February, gesturing to a collection of tents. “You don’t need a microscope to see this. And this did not accumulate overnight.”
One day he encounters someone, who tumbles out of her tent yelling for help.
She needs to go to rehab, she says. She doesn’t know how to get into a program, but wants to know if he can help her.
It’s hard to do on a Friday afternoon, but he finds an open facility bed and promises to take her in the morning.
“I’m using just to not be sick,” she said, starting to cry. “I don’t even know what high is anymore.”
Rodriguez says addiction and homelessness are often intertwined for the people he serves. It’s hard to know if they’ll still be open to help the next day, but when he promises something, he always delivers.
He sees his city differently since starting this work. The emergency room is a place where people go if there are no more shelter spots. Sometimes, they just need to warm up. Other times, they haven’t seen a doctor in far too long and need care.
He points out a group on the sidewalk and says they spend their days “canning,” meaning gathering cans for resale. The deposit price doubled to 10 cents in January, which he said has been a big deal for the unhoused population.
“Everybody deserves a chance to live, whatever life that may be — in a high rise or in a hut, but everybody deserves a chance to live and to have something they could call their own,” Rodriguez said. “A lot of these folks have been disappointed throughout their whole life.”
Similarly to Rodriguez, Kaye White, who works with the Hartford harm reduction program, sees the world differently because of her work. When she sits in the train station, she’s keeping an eye out for people. She makes a mental note if anyone is waiting at the station for a long time, if they’re darting in and out of the bathroom or if they’ve got a lot of bags.
One man walks through the lobby with mismatched shoes. White waits a moment before walking casually over to check on him.
Another man drops a backpack by the water fountains and methodically removes container after container to fill. There aren’t many public water fountains, harm reduction worker Will Moffett explains.
Often when things are open to the public and people experiencing homelessness utilize them, they’ll be blocked off. A charger outside the station has since been plugged up, for example.
The harm reduction program team drives around the Hartford area, stopping at public transit stations for hours through the night. They typically finish up at about 1 a.m. on weeknights, and later on the weekends.
Much of the work, they said, is making connections and building trust. They try to remember people’s birthdays and often have to reassure people that they aren’t police officials or other authorities there to make them move.
“A lot of people just don’t trust us,” Moffett said. “It’s making connections … consistency is a big thing.”
They also take people to services if they need them. They’ve driven people to rehab facilities and shelters across the state in the middle of the night.
“We deal with people with a lot of mental health issues, but we build relationships with people,” White said. “It’s a lot of de-escalations with just regular everyday people who take public transportation, the homeless, people with mental health, even bus drivers may have situations with people on the bus so do de-escalation. We’ve built a lot of relationships here and people know, and they respect us for it. A lot of this is just listening to people.”
Sometimes, someone to listen is all someone needs. White listens intently for several minutes as one woman tells her about a conflict she’s having with another woman staying around Bushnell Park.
“You stay safe out here,” White calls out the window as they drive to the next location.