Momentum is building on two fronts for strategies to reverse the growth of Carmichael’s homeless population and its negative impact on the community.

“We’ve reached a tipping point,” Greg Alderman, senior pastor of Christ Community Church, said in an interview. “Ideally, family would be there to help people get off the street, but what happens when that’s no longer the case? There are as many as 150 people on the street saying, ‘I live here.’ There has to be a plan to transition people off the street who want to make that move.”

Alderman is participating in a broad collaborative effort to move homeless individuals into supervised transitional housing and services to help them to become self-supporting. It’s called Carmichael HART (Housing Assistance Resource Team), a joint venture involving area churches, nonprofits and businesses. Similar HART groups already are operating in Elk Grove, Rancho Cordova and Citrus Heights. Elk Grove HART has two transitional houses.

On another front, business leaders are engaged in the county’s approval process through a Carmichael committee affiliated with the Chamber of Commerce to develop a “Property Business and Improvement District (PBID).” The target area is mainly along the Fair Oaks Boulevard corridor from El Camino Avenue to Manzanita and Cypress.

If successful, a nonprofit corporation to be formed early next year would act on behalf of Carmichael business and other non-residential property owners who would tax themselves to hire private security and finance economic development. Other PBID arrangements have been highly successful elsewhere, including Fulton Avenue, Watt Avenue north of Auburn Boulevard and Mack Road with strong law enforcement support.

“The condition of Carmichael has deteriorated significantly in the past few years,” said Gary Hursh, an attorney who chairs the Carmichael project’s steering committee. “In my opinion, without action, it will get so bad that expensive and possibly drastic measures will have to be taken.”

Hursh and Alderman agree that any fix to Carmichael’s homeless problem must have complementary strategies to motivate people from settling into a transient lifestyle and instead consider housing with resources – if that were available.

“Until we start giving them a picture of what transitioning from the street can look like, nobody’s going to believe it’s possible,” Alderman said. “Homeless people rely on word of mouth and regularly check in with each other. If we had stories of people transitioning off the streets, word would travel fast.”

Proponents cite national studies showing that the bill for housing a homeless person costs only one-fourth to one-third as much as leaving the person on the street.

“Keeping the homeless out of emergency rooms, detox centers, psychiatric hospitals, jails and other institutions would diminish our costs greatly,” reports Sacramento Self Help Housing, a Carmichael HART supporter and nonprofit that allocates federal money to shelter people, provide life skills improvement and referrals to community-based help.

Kathilynn Carpenter of Citrus Heights HART estimated at a recent Carmichael HART organizing meeting that having people on the street costs $50,000 a year on average, compared with $12,000 to place them in transitional housing with services. The savings comes in part from reducing spending on policing, property damage and theft, emergency room visits, and jail, court and legal fees.

Scott Young, director of ATLAS of Carmichael, says the cost equation is important because a lot of people don’t know that housing saves money.

“A lot of people might object, asking, ‘We’re going to pay to house people and not make them pay for it?’ But the point is, we’re already spending more money on leaving them out than we would spend if we brought them in. That’s a powerful argument.”

ATLAS (“Attaining Truth, Love and Self-Control”) donates clothing to homeless people from its nonprofit Fair Oaks Boulevard thrift store. It also provides mentoring for people need. Elsewhere, many Carmichael churches are offering winter sanctuaries, food closets, free meals, clothing, showers and limited financial help.

Sacramento Steps Forward, the lead agency working to end homelessness in the Sacramento region, promotes a “housing first” approach to quickly move homeless individuals into independent and permanent housing, then make available additional support and services as needed. “People are better able to move forward in their lives and address additional factors leading to homelessness if they first have access to a stable living situation,” the nonprofit advocates in its mission statement.