TRAVERSE CITY – Tabitha Dunlop, a Benzie County native and mother of three daughters, was 35 when she first became homeless.
She has now been without a home on and off for seven years and currently sleeps at Safe Harbor. Tabitha’s youngest daughter is 9, and has not been under her mother’s care since 2021.
On this particular day, Tabitha is among the group of homeless people who walk from Safe Harbor to eat breakfast provided by Central United Methodist Church in downtown Traverse City.
“She deserves to have a mama,” Tabitha said, her eyes filling with tears as she speaks of her 9-year-old. “She deserves a mama that is clean and who has a safe place to take her. Seven years ago when all of this happened, work and addiction and mental health all kind of tornadoed over me.
“I lived in my own house, had my own job and my own car. I took care of my kids and had a significant other. And it all went away in the snap of a finger. How did it all spin out of control so fast? I’ve been trying to figure it out ever since. I sit and question that a lot.”
“Homelessness does not discriminate against anybody,” Tabitha said. “Nobody. You can be a millionaire today and homeless tomorrow. That’s the truth.”
For Tabitha Dunlop and many others in the Traverse City area, Safe Harbor has been critical to their survival.
And while the consensus among many service and outreach providers is that permanent supportive housing is the key to ending homelessness, some believe the role of emergency shelters is far more important than most people realize.
In fact, switching Safe Harbor, an emergency overnight shelter at 517 Wellington St. in Traverse City, from its current seasonal operation to a year-round service provider is the linchpin in the city’s plan to eliminate a homeless encampment in the Pines.
A group of city officials, philanthropies and organizations that serve people without homes concluded that camping on city land at Eleventh and Division streets — known as the Pines — is unsafe, unsanitary and cannot continue.
That task force then implored the city to ask the Safe Harbor board to consider year-round operations as a two-year pilot. Now a request for a special land use permit to allow that is pending. And, if the request is approved during a May 5 public hearing, the city will enforce its no-camping ban in the Pines beginning at midnight on May 6.
A whole system
The switch to a year-round operation is not without its critics and some residents in the vicinity of Safe Harbor have expressed their opposition to it.
A group of Traverse City residents, the Community Cares Coalition, came together during the winter of 2023. Last year, the coalition established a proposal for a new local emergency shelter that would find a better location to house the services and programs its residents would need.
The coalition envisions building a larger facility that’s open all year, all day, and consolidates services onsite for the people staying there. They based the plan on a cooperative model from Napa, California.
A new location would also lessen the impact Safe Harbor has on nearby businesses and homes.
The coalition’s president, Megan Wick, said their proposal would provide a place where more homeless people could stay and develop plans for their housing without having to walk from shelter to shelter, as they do now.
“There are still capacity deficits at both Safe Harbor and Jubilee House,” Wick said. “I don’t think that is understood by the public. There are still individuals who will not have a bed in the evening, or a place to go during the day.
“Even though Safe Harbor (would be) open year-round, they will still not open until 8 p.m. during the summer months. Jubilee House closes at 5 p.m. So there is a three-hour gap between those critical services, meaning the unhoused will have nowhere to go in the early evening hours all summer, and not be provided a meal.”
That’s a significant gap that will undercut the effectiveness of any plan intended to address the issue, she said.
“Most people are not going to go directly into housing,” Wick said. “As a broader community, and I mean outside the city limits, we can’t keep throwing money at the issue without having a comprehensive plan and shared goals. We need to work on supportive housing, but we also need to work on emergency shelter. It should be a whole system, under one plan.”
Ryan Hannon, director of outreach and discipleship at Central United Methodist Church, said he is familiar with the coalition’s proposal.
“We have those shelters,” Hannon said. “The CCC’s concept calls for single-room shelters, which makes congregate living easier, but still temporary and congregate living nonetheless. I don’t think (the proposed) shelter would help (people find permanent supportive housing) any more or any less. It would just be a different location with resources being put toward it and allocated in different ways.”
Hannon said the street outreach program operated by Goodwill Northern Michigan is focused on meeting people where they are to bring them the resources they need to end their homelessness – wherever they might be.
“Even if someone doesn’t have access to shelter, they still have the resources available to exit homelessness, (although) it is still based on the amount of housing that is available,” he said. “Folks that need (housing) can apply through the street outreach program right in The Pines, right under a bridge, wherever they are.
“They’re not required to go to shelters to be able to access housing.”
Wick said she agrees that the community needs to work on supportive housing, but that it also needs to work on providing more emergency shelter – and more shelter beds in general.
“Our community has spent time on supportive housing,” she said, “And it should be. But part of the discussion should also be how we provide emergency shelter. All stakeholders should be part of that (discussion). That includes residents and businesses.”
Goodwill Northern Michigan Executive Director Dan Buron said that, while he understands emergency shelters are necessary to ensure people are safe and healthy, he doesn’t want the community to over-invest in shelter or to maintain people in homelessness at the expense of investing in permanent solutions.
“The Community Cares Coalition is at the table,” he said, “and they will be part of the task force. The conversation about (deciding on) the number of shelter beds that we need is important, and I hope that the task force will be able to address that.”
Shared goals
Whether or not the proposed task force ultimately decides to invest in more housing-first emergency shelter, all parties seem to agree that everyone involved needs to make sure they are heading in the same direction.
But Wick said she isn’t convinced that is happening.
Ending homelessness “takes shared goals across all agencies, being transparent with data, and having a discipline for improving outcomes,” Wick said. “I’m not sure that we’ve had that so far. I think that was proven by the (Dec. 16) City Commission meeting when they were asking for funding. I don’t think the data has been transparent. I think data gets cherry-picked in what’s shared with the public and stakeholders.”
People can have good intentions, she said, but unless they have shared goals, progress is not going to be made.
“If the goal really is to help a population of people, we need to define it and understand the data,” Wick said.
Buron agreed data transparency is of the utmost importance.
“Transparency in the overall system helps ensure that resources are used in the most effective and efficient way possible,” he said. “You have to build trust and credibility with the community. Data transparency is really, really important.”
Rotary Charities of Traverse City CEO Sakura Takano also agreed that part of combatting the realities of the region’s homelessness scale must be through continued information and data transparency.
“If we have access to more housing, people can flow into housing more, and it reduces the overall level of chronic homelessness,” she said. “If you have services that help connect people before they are unsheltered for a long time, you are attacking the problem at both ends: You are preventing people from entering into homelessness and you are getting the folks who have been homeless for the longest time out of it.”
“There is definitely a working model,” Takano said. “With better and more transparent data, more people will rally around the cause.”
Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness and its partners have been working with the coalition along the way, she said, and they have been sharing information with them.
“Delicate conversations are being facilitated to help keep this group open to different perspectives,” Takano said. “This doesn’t have to be a one-way highway.
“This conversation around data is going to be really important.”
“A lot of things have to happen for all of this to work,” Takano added. “But the hope is that we won’t need an (additional) shelter.”
Rev. Jim Perra, the rector at Grace Episcopal Church which operates the Jubilee House drop-in center, said there has always been some tension between providing resources for emergency shelter and trying to get people into permanent shelter.
“We all know that housing ends homelessness,” Perra said. “We’ve got a lot of new housing coming online right now, but I think it’s a little too early to think that we can start moving away from resourcing emergency shelters. I’ve heard some of that rumbling.”
“You’ll never hear me not back (housing) as a definitive solution,” Perra continued. “I just want to make sure that our capacity to take care of the unhoused remains high. I think we can do a significantly better job of providing those who are unhoused with the opportunity to have dignified lodging during the period of time that they are unhoused.”
Perra said he believes that’s what the coalition is hoping to bring to the table.
Looking ahead
Breakfast at Central United Methodist Church drew to a close. Tabitha Dunlop said she was heading to Jubilee House for the rest of the day.
The Record-Eagle asked her if there was anything she’d like to say to all the people and organizations working to end homelessness in the community.
“Honestly,” Tabitha Dunlop said, “I just praise them. They do really well. I would come back to this homeless community once I’m able to step out of surviving in it. Once I have my own place, I would love to come back here and volunteer and help.
“I can’t imagine a lot of the individuals who work on this have actually experienced (homelessness). But they see us every day and do everything they can to soak it up and understand what we are going through. They have love and care and compassion.”
Many local people involved in addressing homelessness expressed hope that Traverse City might one day become a model for other communities to emulate.
Perra said the city’s goal of eradicating chronic homelessness by 2028 is not only laudable, but realistic.
“As long as there is an aggressive response system,” geared toward quickly moving unhoused individuals into stable environments where they can be provided with the proper care and support, that would be key, he said.
“The Traverse City region can be an example for the country about how to end chronic homelessness in a rural community,” Buron said. “That’s an exciting opportunity. We have the capacity, we have the know-how, and we have the will. I think we also have the values to do this. We could be an example of best-practice (in ending chronic homelessness). I look forward to being able to say that at some point.”
Ryan Hannon also is optimistic about the future.
“We are a wonderful community and we can come together to meet the needs of our most vulnerable,” Hannon said. “We can literally see the wonderful, good things happening in the community; and the most terrible. We can promote ‘everyone needs a home.’ Maybe not as much as ‘come here to visit,’ but we can promote and allocate resources towards that. There’s enough (here).”
Tabitha Dunlop said she believes that if Traverse City continues to work together, chronic homelessness here can become a thing of the past.
“People are working together,” she said, “and I can see a huge difference – even just in the last few years.
“I am just thankful for Traverse City. I really am. Things have been rough, but Traverse City has made it possible for me to survive.”