City's housing coordinator settles into new duties

Cape Girardeau's first community housing coordinator, officially named at a Wednesday news conference held by the Area Wide United Way, plans to attack the city's housing problems on a comprehensive level, rather than as an isolated issue.

Employed through the Community Caring Council she once directed, Shirley Ramsey's new position evolved from a community assessment conducted by the United Way in 1999. Four key needs emerged from this evaluation, with affordable housing as one of them.

"The vision is that everyone living in Cape Girardeau will have decent, safe and affordable housing," Ramsey said. "The mission is to affect the change to make that happen."

People who have a problem with housing often have other problems as well such as unemployment, low-paying employment, substance abuse or a lack of education, according to Ramsey and Nancy Jernigan, executive director with the Area Wide United Way based in Cape Girardeau. That's why an effort to alleviate housing difficulties must address all possible factors to be successful.

"If someone doesn't have a place to sleep at night, they are not going to be able to concentrate on their job," Jernigan said.

Ramsey believes one of her main duties is to learn about local housing resources and problems, as well as put together a unified community housing plan involving the city, housing service providers and other social agencies.

Ramsey has also been developing a housing resource information directory, which will list existing housing resources and also be used to determine gaps in service, and she has implemented a series of five housing workshops that began last week.

The first workshop dealt with housing grant opportunities; the second is scheduled for the end of March and will present housing resource information as well as support services. Three more workshops are set for April and May, and will address landlord training, tenant training and home buying/owning.

Cape Girardeau's new housing coordinator is being funded through the United Way, the Community Caring Council and New Vision Counseling. A Housing Needs Coordinating Committee, made up of area housing service providers, various social agency personnel and others knowledgeable on the subject, arose out of United Way's 1999 assessment and has been meeting monthly since 2000.

"The housing committee got to a point where we felt that we couldn't move forward without the help of a permanent staff person, that we couldn't effectively address this issue without someone working at it every day," Jernigan said Wednesday.

A housing study commissioned by the housing committee in 2001 concluded that: 1) there is a need for improvements in Cape Girardeau's existing housing, 2) landlord and tenant education is an important component in low- to moderate-income housing, and 3) the city's percentage of home ownership is low compared to other cities its size.

The city's housing issues include emergency, transitional and permanent housing, as well as homelessness, according to the study. And homelessness doesn't necessarily mean people living on the street, but also families doubled and tripled up in housing not designed for that capacity, Ramsey and Jernigan both stated during the news conference.

The study found no emergency shelters or transitional housing for the homeless in Cape Girardeau except those that serve a very specific population such as the Safe House for Women and the Liberty House, which is for victims of domestic violence; the Gibson Recovery Center and Oxford House, which is for victims of substance abuse; and the Lou Masterman Center, which is for people with serious mental illness.

In transitional housing, the city needs to, among other things: Identify existing housing, centralize services in Cape Girardeau instead of referring people to other locations, and survey landlords to see what is needed/wanted, according to the study.

"One of the things I have learned is that I am going to be a connector," Ramsey said. "I have already been connecting people, and some real positive things have come out of that."

jgosche@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 133