I ran into Captain Charles Smith when I was first walking around my neighborhood getting signatures so that I could run. I love meeting new people and Captain Smith is still relatively new to the area. He and his wife Captain Teri Smith have been running the homeless shelter in Jonesboro for a little over a year now.
We got to sit down recently and talk about homelessness in Jonesboro, about their shelter, and about their plans for expansion. They’re currently working with the city to expand their shelter at their current location building a new shelter on their property which is much larger and allows for them to support many more folks.
Kier Heyl and Captain Charles Smith of the Salvation Army.
That said, even a larger shelter is just one aspect of combatting homelessness in Jonesboro. I don’t think the vast majority of people of Jonesboro realize just how bad homelessness has gotten. The folks you see on the street holding up cardboard signs is only a small percentage of the unhoused. There’s an entire population of folks who are in a house, just not their house. Families living at their sister’s, dad’s or uncle’s houses. Folks crashing on friend’s couches until they can get back on their feet in perpetuity, moving from couch to couch as their welcome wears out while they’re working towards that next break, or an apartment opens up.
Homelessness in Jonesboro conservatively makes up 1% of the population. I want to be clear, 1 in 100 people you see likely don’t have a home to call their own. I say conservatively because we don’t have any good ways of tracking homelessness in Jonesboro, and it’s almost impossible to track those who are couch surfing from house to house. Where we do have good reporting is our schools. We currently have around 350 school aged children who do not live in their own home. Our entire school aged population is around 6,000. That’s over 5% of our school children who are currently sleeping on an air mattress or a couch in a relative’s house. Some worse off than that sleeping in cars. To be clear these are kids of parents who are most frequently working full time jobs, but don’t make enough money to rent a place for their family in Jonesboro.
The only way to address this issue is at its core. If elected I will spend my time fighting for more affordable housing, and better paying jobs in this area. We need to enact zoning policies to not only encourage better multi family housing, but do it in a way that spreads it out instead of building another apartment city. We need to provide resources to folks to help them get their business of the ground. We need to encourage better paying jobs to come to Jonesboro and open up their doors to our community.
We’ve been waiting for a new and improved shelter for over 10 years. The state of our current shelter is very rough, and doesn’t provide the most welcoming environment. It’s also so limited as to be laughable in the face of Jonesboro’s homeless population. We need a new shelter, but we need to combine this with dedicated case workers to help our unhoused population, utilizing existing programs like housing first to address our homeless population long term, but at it’s core we need more affordable living space, and better paying jobs. The poverty rate in Jonesboro is at 16.9%. Almost 17% of Jonesboro population lives in poverty. That’s 6 points above the national average. If we want to combat homelessness in Jonesboro, we have to start by combatting poverty.
