Empowering Independence

Hello Alamo! I hope you’ve enjoyed your weekend.

Tuesday, March 25th was a day I’d been looking forward to since the end of January. Courtney McCary invited speakers to share their experience empowering the unhoused with us at a City Commission meeting.

The Executive Director of Mesilla Valley’s Community of Hope Nicole Maxwell and Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization administrator Natalie Green were first up to talk about how they’ve developed private-public partnerships to establish Las Cruces’ supportive housing efforts. Both presentations will be included below.

The hope is that a way smaller city like Alamogordo could invest in some of these services to support our less than 100 unhoused individuals.

On a tour of the campus, it was striking to see just how comfortable the people seemed there. They were allowed their pets, locker space for their belongings, and a patio just to safely congregate on.

As you walk in to the main building, to the left is the check-in desk and to the right is a laundry room with a sign stating a limit of one load per week. Behind the check-in area are showering facilities and a hall with different offices full of people committed to helping navigate services, like one dedicated specifically to Veteran’s Affairs social workers. The hall leads out to a protected campground called Camp Hope. The other hallway led to a small library and resource center.

As I mentioned, that was just the main building. The campus has much more, including a garden, Casa de Peregrino’s food bank, soon-to-be expanded El Caldito’s soup kitchen, Amador Health Clinic, even services to help with childcare and job placement.

I was quite impressed, and honestly, I would love to just copy-paste Community of Hope into Alamogordo, but we are just barely tackling this issue again. It will take some time. This venture began with incorporation in 1993 and officially started providing stable housing in 2006. But according to Maxwell, it definitely didn’t provide all the services it does now right away.

Another support MVCH provides now is supportive permanent housing. The non-profit itself owns 2 housing properties, and partners with the City and other authorities to provide 2 apartment complexes on-campus, Desert Hope and Amador Crossing (the latter of which just broke ground).

I didn’t write my last few posts for nothing.

Camp Hope is an amazing option for transitory housing. This campus hires its own security, fences off the site to keep everyone safe, and even provides a little shelter over each tent with help from New Mexico State’s engineering department. To me, all of this screams human dignity, and it was great to see.

Maxwell said during her March 25th presentation that the average time someone stays at Camp Hope was a little over 2 months.

The only problem with transitory housing is that these people need somewhere to transition to, or else they’ll just stay on the streets. Homelessness will always be an issue here in our community until we get truly affordable housing under an effective model, and as I pointed out, the US trends over the last almost 2 decades show this country isn’t all that interested.

Establishing a whole campus like Mesilla Valley Community of Hope would have to be a long-term goal, which may or may not be realistic in a city this size, but there are services in Alamogordo. We’re not exactly starting from scratch. We have some guidance. We have a coalition. And, for the millionth time, we only have about 78 unhoused people to support.

The elephant in the room that we very unfortunately have to acknowledge is the gutting of public services. I wish I had something more inspiring to say at this moment, but I’m scared too. We kind of just have to wait and see what happens, pressure our elected officials to do their job, and work with what we have while we still have it. And what we do have is a passionate, intelligent, experienced, and capable community.

As Jacob Justus mentioned in January and I’ve now written about, Housing First works. Shelter allows people to access the services they need. If independence is what the local government wants, this is the path. Whether they get on board remains to be seen, but it’s up to us to make sure our most vulnerable neighbors receive community care and basic human dignity.

Until Tuesday,

Salud.