The Sarasota City Commission this week approved an eight-point plan to address homelessness, including exploring a Housing First policy and private sector support to tackle issues facing the chronically homeless. City Manager Tom Barwin spoke with SRQ about the plan. 

Why are you confident this plan is the right approach? To be able to impact the problem, you need to be able to understand its causes, and to lay out the city and community response over 26 or 27 years. The city has really stepped up historically, with the Resurrection House and the Salvation Army. The problem has evolved, and for a variety of reasons, the needs have grown. Frankly, the numbers are higher than those institutions can satisfy, especially when you consider those people who can’t utilize those institutions. But a big element of the plan is to focus more directly on providing housing—100 units of permanent supportive housing and 100 units of transitive housing—while also calling for more units to be built throughout the county. We will see if there is support for that in the community. The current approach, though the costs are hidden, is very expensive, and we are starting to put alternatives on the table and backing those up with the experience we have had here, especially on the streets in the last nine months.

How do you make sure this effort doesn’t fall by the wayside the same way parts of the Marbut plan [developed by consultant Dr. Robert Marbut after he was hired by Sarasota County and city leaders] did? We have put nine months of intensive effort, research and strategies on the table, and suggested actions with specific goals. Now let’s see what we can get done. All of us need to take a deep breath and get into the details and see what we need as a community to work on. We need to find common ground and look for win-win scenarios. What we suggest is less expensive than what was on the table before, though it may not look like that at first blush. It will save in the medium and long run while providing a much more human kind of compassionate approach… It’s one thing for a consultant to parachute in and present a cookie-cutter plan, and another thing for a very experienced community and its many actors who were involved in tackling the tough issue to draft the appropriate solutions that will work where they live. We can take everything we learned in the past couple years, including the Marbut experience, and add to it where there were some gaps.

Read an extended version of this interview at SRQMagazine.com