Homelessness in Missoula a strain on city’s people, economy, study finds  (2024)

Backers of a recently released report exploring the economic impacts of homelessness in Missoula hope it will better inform discussions that help to resolve the widening issue.

The report, citing data and research, details the effects of homelessness on people experiencing it and on the community and highlights the challenge of managing homelessness while working to reduce it.

This challenge is top of mind in Missoula as the city’s urban camping working group meets this spring to discuss how to reduce the impacts on unhoused and housed residents after seeing a spike in the unsheltered population last spring and summer.

The Missoula Economic Partnership commissioned the study from ABMJ Consulting about four months ago to present an unbiased understanding of the problem to help guide the community’s response, the partnership’s CEO Grant Kier told Montana Free Press.

The study shows the importance of perspectives from people primarily concerned with the interests of unhoused people and others frustrated and overwhelmed by impacts on businesses and the community, Kier said.

“The only way to address this problem fundamentally in the community is to recognize and be respectful of both sides’ concerns and try to address them going forward,” he said.

The economic partnership has already heard feedback from people acknowledging they only saw one side of the problem before reading the report, Kier said. The document helped them understand the other side or how complex issues contribute to challenges around homelessness in the community, he said.

For the Poverello Center and other service providers, the report summarizes and gives solid data around their day-to-day experiences with unhoused people, said Jill Bonny, the center’s executive director. Along with operating the 150-bed emergency shelter on West Broadway and the Johnson Street shelter, the organization provides food and housing resources and runs an outreach team that connects with people living outside.

“This report really feels like everything we knew from working with people on the ground,” Bonny said. “We were really appreciative of it, and it gave some value to the stuff we knew we were experiencing with people.”

The report states that the costs of homelessness to a community are not evenly distributed and are highest for the people experiencing homelessness and the people and places closest to them.

Unhoused people bear the most substantial costs, including poor health, a toll on mental health, higher risk of violence, increased exposure to the criminal justice system and significant barriers to health care, employment and housing, author Bryce Ward writes in the report.

Studies regularly find that 60% to 70% of unhoused people have at least one chronic health condition and 76% have a current mental disorder, according to the report. Mortality rates among unhoused people are higher, with a recent study finding that a 40-year-old homeless person has the same mortality risk as a 60-year-old housed person and a 50-year-old poorly housed person, the report states.

“While some people believe that many people choose to be homeless, this is untrue,” Ward writes. “However, people experiencing homelessness face numerous barriers to obtaining and maintaining secure housing, and the experience of homelessness only adds barriers by leading to adverse health shocks, exposure to violence, criminal records and unemployment.”

The prevalence of homelessness affects the quality of life and the level of economic activity in the community, but many costs can be hard to quantify, according to the report.

Historically, studies have shown a strong correlation between homelessness and crime, but the cause was hard to prove, the report states. Results of recent research suggest a causal link between homelessness and crime, but note victims of homeless-related crime are often other unhoused people, according to the report. Methods vary for calculating the cost of crime but can add up to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the crime, the report states.

Studies estimating costs of homelessness to the government and health care system typically find communities spend an average of $7,000 to $10,000 per unhoused person per year, the report says. A small proportion of the population is responsible for a large percentage of the costs.

While the report didn’t include Missoula-specific numbers, hospital visits for the uninsured are very expensive, Bonny said. Many unhoused people do have Medicaid, but some may have lost coverage during the government’s recent redetermination process, she said.

Chronically homeless people — individuals with a disability who have been unhoused for at least a year or repeatedly — are more likely to have higher costs. A 2016 HRDC report found that Gallatin County spent $28,300 annually per homeless “super-utilizer” on health care, social services and law enforcement, with health care making up a majority of costs.

In Missoula, city and county governments’ budgets include nearly $4 million for various homeless programs, including the Temporary Safe Outdoor Space, Johnson Street shelter and encampment cleanup expenses, the report says. Federal and state government agencies and nonprofits also spend millions related to homelessness.

Service providers working with unhoused people or those at risk of losing housing often have high rates of turnover and burnout, suggesting the typical pay doesn’t compensate for the toll these jobs take on workers, Ward writes.

While the Poverello Center has “really good people” working for the shelter, the industry’s lower-than-deserved pay is a struggle, Bonny said. Since workers are often underpaid, they typically have a passion for helping people and often bring work home with them, she said. Many have secondary trauma, she added.

“We as an employer not only are trying to figure out ways all the time to recruit good employees and pay our employees a thriving wage, … and get them good training and professional development, but then also we’re trying to provide access to services that will help them stay well,” she said.

The report states that in addition to direct costs to governments and other services, homelessness also has indirect costs whenever outcomes or behaviors change because of it. For example, if someone skips a trip downtown or a tourist chooses to visit a different city, there’s an economic loss. Comprehensively measuring these costs is difficult, the report says.

Missoula Economic Partnership heard from business owners about the difficulty of some homeless people disrupting business, trespassing or exhibiting threatening behavior, Kier said.

Some community members have expressed frustration over feeling they were not able to use parks, open spaces and community spaces because of homelessness, he said.

“We worked hard to understand and articulate the extent those problems have real impacts on community,” Kier said.

The uneven distribution of costs creates tension and conflict in the community, further increasing the total economic cost of homelessness, the report states. While individuals can benefit from shifting the burden, doing this without addressing the root causes of homelessness can create a costly, inefficient cycle, according to the report.

Each scenario is different, but people typically become homeless when their income is insufficient to afford housing, the report says. The risk of homelessness also depends on what resources are available from formal and informal safety nets and how accessible they are, the report states. Individual circ*mstances, such as health problems, skill levels and social networks are other factors.

The report states that communities can reduce homelessness by improving market conditions, like housing affordability, providing a more generous, efficient, and accessible safety net, and creating healthier, more capable individuals.

“While working toward reducing homelessness, the issue must be managed, requiring difficult conversations about how to allocate scarce resources and about which people and which places bear more of the localized costs associated with homelessness,” Ward writes.

The report provides interesting information for Missoula’s urban camping working group as it continues these discussions in its upcoming meetings, Bonny said.

“Whatever we do, we should be thinking about how is this policy going to help people be housed,” she said.

The report gave Kier, also a member of the working group, more confidence to appreciate different perspectives, he said.

“That committee has a narrow scope,” Kier said. “We have to be mindful of the bigger and more complex problem even when trying to address the immediate and urgent impacts we’re experiencing as a result of homelessness in urban public spaces.”

The Missoula Economic Partnership isn’t promoting any one solution but hopes the report can benefit communities across the state, Kier said.

“It creates an opportunity for people to build a constructive dialogue to invest in solutions moving forward in Montana,” he said.

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