Why Should Delaware Care?
With Delaware’s unsheltered population increasing by 58%, the need for better resources is becoming increasingly acute, particularly downstate in areas like Kent County, where housing resources are more scattered compared to New Castle County. As the problem worsens, vulnerable demographics, such as single women, are being overlooked.
Community-Powered Journalism
This story was developed following discussions at a Spotlight Delaware Community Listening Tour stop. Find out more about the tour by clicking here.
Dawnesha McRae is determined to rebuild her life and fully engage with society. She’s recovered from addiction, certified in community health work and is eager to start her career in social work.
But despite her efforts to be an active part of society, McRae has been homeless for four years.
After losing her home in the wake of Tropical Storm Isaias in 2020, McRae attempted to utilize any resource she could find, but has been unable to find stable housing in Delaware.
“I’ve been on a waiting list for the shelter for three years,” she said.
McRae was finally given a bed at Whatcoat’s emergency shelter this month, but if she doesn’t receive proper services before her short-term stay is up, she’ll be back to square one.
As a single woman living in central Delaware, McRae’s experience is not unique.
While some argue that single women are well-served in Kent County, others believe that the available services fall short, leaving many in a state of prolonged instability.
This October, Dover Interfaith Mission for Housing is opening a new shelter to support single women and women with children, after securing $5 million from a federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) grant.
Shirlene Webster, the executive director of DIMH, argues that single women are a forgotten demographic that has fallen through the cracks in the service network.
“Transitional housing and unhoused services really seem to hone in on those who have children or those who are not able-bodied adults or are senior citizens,” Webster said. “But unfortunately, it’s this forgotten population of individuals who are able-bodied, they do work, they don’t have any substance abuse, no mental health services. And it’s just kind of like, ‘Oh well, you’ll make it through, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”
This year Delaware saw a 9% increase in homelessness, finding that 1,358 people were unhoused in January, according to the most recent Point-in-Time count that tracks the population each year.
The nonprofit that organizes the count, Housing Alliance Delaware, collaborates with various agencies and community stakeholders throughout the state to tackle homelessness-related issues.
Each year, the Alliance and Delaware Continuum of Care choose a night in January to conduct an annual census called the Point-in-Time count, creating a snapshot of the overall issue of homelessness in the state.
Their annual PIT count is the most accurate census the state has on homelessness, but it’s clear that there is a need for more resources throughout the state.
“There aren’t enough emergency and crisis shelter options for people who have lost their housing and have nowhere else to go,” said Rachel Stucker, executive director of HAD.
Kent County is home to almost 20% of both the state’s unsheltered and sheltered homeless populations, according to the 2024 PIT count.
Between 2020 and 2022, the state’s PIT count doubled, starting with 1,165 in 2020, which was Delaware’s highest PIT count at the time amid the COVID pandemic. The next year it saw a 35% increase and then a 50% increase in 2022 with 2,369 individuals experiencing homelessness.
The PIT dropped again in 2023 to 1,245 people, however, which researchers attribute to the end of the pandemic.
Steve Metraux, a University of Delaware professor and recognized sociologist who studies homelessness policy, notes the difficulty of assessing the unsheltered homeless population because of the different spaces they could inhabit.
He argues that homelessness didn’t suddenly increase during the pandemic, but instead there has always been this “invisible homelessness” that no one saw until there was adequate shelter available, which was made possible by the extraordinary funding put forward by Congress in the COVID response.
The PIT count accounts for both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness, which then makes up the total number for the year. And since 2020, Delaware’s unsheltered population – or those truly living on the streets – has increased by 58%.
This year, men and boys made up more than 60% of the state’s homeless population, while 32% of those experiencing homelessness were women and girls.
However, adult-only households experienced homelessness at more than four times the rate of households with children, and as the homeless population continues to rise, the need for more adult-centered resources becomes evident.
“As a woman, if you’re not on drugs, you don’t have children, you’re not pregnant and you’re not 62, there’s no resources there,” McRae told Spotlight Delaware.
The House of Hope is one of the few transitional housing programs that specifically serves single women. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
The House of Hope
Of the seven organizations in Kent County that provide housing resources, only one shelter – the House of Hope – is dedicated to single women, while others are tailored to assisting single men, women with children and families.
Code Purple Kent County services between 40 to 50 single women a year, while servicing between 40 to 45 single men and about 100 women with children. During the colder months, they work in collaboration with the Center for Neighbors in Need at People’s Community Center to house 130 men.
People’s Place II Whatcoat facility only provides transitional housing for families with small children, but they serve both men and women in their 25-bed emergency shelter.
Shepherd’s Place also takes in single women in addition to men and families, but at this time they only care for 6 single women.
In 2018, the mayor’s office initiated the Blue Ribbon Task Force to End Homelessness in Dover to address homelessness in the city, which created a nonprofit organization called the Central Delaware Housing Collaborative.
According to the shelter’s director Stefi Myers, many single women in need of shelter were not seen as priority, always being waitlisted behind those with children. As a result, the CDHC created the House of Hope in 2019.
Since COVID, the House of Hope has seen an influx of older women who are struggling financially, often due to a loss of their home or their spouse and their inability to manage the financial situation on their own.
Now most of the facility’s residents are now between the ages of 40 and 60 years old.
The homey facility has 16 emergency shelter beds that allow stays up to 60 days, depending on a person’s situation. It also has eight beds in their two transitional houses, allowing clients to stay as long as they need, given that they continue to make progress to eventually move to stable housing and become self-sufficient.
Like almost all other housing facilities in the state, the House of Hope accepts clients though the Housing Alliance’s centralized intake process. But they also have a memorandum with the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services that reserves eight beds for people through their voucher program, allowing women to stay at the shelter for up to 56 days, as opposed to using the vouchers for the usual motel stay which only grants 21 days.
The eight beds reserved for vouchers are rarely ever full because a client can only use their voucher one time a year, highlighting the need for better funding, Myers said.
In order to receive an emergency shelter voucher from DHSS, the state requires that you either have food stamp benefits or Medicaid coverage.
Officials from the James W. Williams State Service Center in Dover said emergency housing voucher eligibility is aided by children, but no one is turned away from applying.
The women at the shelter, like individuals at other facilities, receive different resources like case management, workshops and referrals to assist with career development, financial literacy, education and life skills.
Women face higher risks of physical and sexual abuse in homelessness, which can limit the resources that they may seek out. | SPOTLIGHT DELAWARE PHOTO BY BRIANNA HILL
A woman’s reality
Paulette Winkfield, the vice chair of the executive board at the House of Hope, is proud of the work they do, however, she does not believe the resources are sufficient enough to handle the needs of single women in Dover.
“Housing Alliance’s definition of chronic homelessness is unsheltered, that’s sleeping outside. However, most women put themselves in harm’s way because they have to sleep on somebody’s sofa, be with a man, trade sex for a roof over their head, stay with friends,” she said.
Displaced single women can be vulnerable in many ways that men aren’t, as they are susceptible to sexual violence and exploitation, which can worsen with precarious living situations. Single women also have specific health needs including reproductive health, and as they suffer from a lack of access to proper services, it makes those needs difficult to manage.
Winkfield also notes the stigma surrounding unhoused single women.
“We’re supposed to be the nurturers and the caregivers, and so automatically the blame starts being on her, and it could just be her mental health,” she added, noting the stigma if a woman doesn’t have custody of her children either.
The House of Hope was one of the few initiatives that came out of the task force, which ended not too long after its inception, but Dover Mayor Robin Christiansen feels there’s more to be done about homelessness in his city.
While he contests that Dover is limited in resources as funding comes from the state, he believes those dollars need to be more guided in solving the problem.
“The need is ongoing, and I have seen the need,” Christiansen told Spotlight Delaware.
Funding issues
While 62% of the state’s homeless population lives in New Castle County, and therefore draws the bulk of the state’s resources and housing, the lack of resources downstate, even in larger cities like Dover, makes it harder to end homelessness.
The state capital’s homeless services are largely dependent on federal funding that comes through Community Development Block Grants, a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development program. In Fiscal Year 2023, it granted Dover more than $321,000 to aid 195 homeless men and 89 homeless women. The House of Hope only received about $20,000 from the grant.
HAD and the DE CoC, which works to provide funding for rehousing and improving access to services, also provides funds statewide through the HUD Continuum of Care program competition each year.
Each organization is in charge of putting in an application that then gets reviewed by a scoring committee. However, Stucker said applications from Kent County are rarely ever received for consideration.
In Fiscal Year 2023, HUD provided over $10 million for eight projects statewide. The only applicant from Kent, Code Purple, received funds from the grant, however, they ultimately returned them after deciding they could not fulfill the project.
In addition, the Delaware State Housing Authority (DSHA) administers funding for the Emergency Solution Grant and the Home4Good grant. In 2024, two of Dover’s organizations were awarded Emergency Solution Grants. The Shepard Place was given almost $18,000 and two of People’s Place II facilities, WhatCoat and SAFE House, were each given upward of $40,000.
At the end of last year, the Home4Good program, a partnership between DSHA and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh, also provided a $1 million grant to 10 nonprofits to provide better support that leads to stable housing in the state.
But only two of those awardees, People’s Place II and The Salvation Army, were facilities in Dover that were not tailored to re-entry or addiction programs.
Winners of the Home4Good 2024 grant will be announced at the end of this year.
Despite the small chunks that are given out to organizations through these channels, the costs to run these types of programs require much more than what the state provides.
The new DIMH shelter will require $250,000 annually for salaries alone, in addition to about $25,000 for utilities, according to Webster.
“[The capital ARPA grant] was strictly for purchasing and renovating a building, which is great. That gave us the building,” Webster said. “But now here we are. We need to open, but we have to find funding to hire, find grants and do fundraising as well to hire for this building.”
In spite of the funding issues in Dover, many of their shelters pull their own weight, receiving funding from different foundations and through fundraisers.
But in addition to funding, the current affordable housing crisis has only made the search for stable housing more difficult for people like McRae.
Housing barriers
State programs for low-income families can be useful for those struggling to make ends meet, but given the long waiting lists for affordable housing and government assistance programs, it can be challenging for individuals to solely rely on those resources.
McRae says that she has been on the housing authority’s waitlist for seven years.
“We currently have about 12,000 people on the waitlist, and the estimated wait time is around seven to eight years,” said Caitlin De Collo, chief strategy advisor of the Delaware State Housing Authority. “If someone is being considered for one of DSHA’s public housing sites, it will depend on the size of the unit, which is determined by the size of the family.”
Rufus Mincey, executive director of Dover Housing Authority, also admits that some individuals who apply take priority over others, and those who have been on the waiting list for years usually have a lower priority, furthering the issue of housing availability.
“Our top preferences are victims of domestic violence and homeless veterans,” Mincey said.
Winkfield says this is a common problem she sees among her clients, as many of her residents have jobs, but they still can’t afford their own places due to the strict and expensive guidelines in place.
On average, renters have to earn three times the monthly rent, report a credit score of 650 or higher, and pay an average security deposit of $500 for most Dover rentals, Winkfield said. These constraints can make it difficult for those working minimum wage jobs to keep up in order to secure a place of their own.
In addition, some facilities like the House of Hope will hold on to clients who aren’t quite ready to be sufficient on their own.
Winkfield said that some of her residents in their transitional houses have been with her for as long as four years, which could also contribute to why waitlists for womens’ shelters can be so lengthy.
Plans to address Dover’s issue
Earlier this year, the mayor’s office initiated a group called the Unsheltered Working Groups in collaboration with first district councilman Gerald Rocha and third district Councilwoman Tricia Arndt.
The group was developed after the homeless encampments that were found on Delaware State University property came to light.
The committee, which is filled with city officials, different specialists, and representatives from the surrounding homeless shelter organizations, plans to present new findings pertaining to the homelessness issue in Kent and Dover sometime in October.
Rocha says one of the things he plans to address will be the issue of resources for single women.
“The plan that is being worked by the Unsheltered Working Group aims to work with current providers by seeking grant funding to bring to our city and Kent County as a whole to address the issues we face with this demographic,” Rocha said.
The House of Hope also plans to renovate the house adjacent to their shelter, creating more emergency shelter for women in need. Although they are unsure of when the renovations will start.
The struggles of single women like McRae highlight the reality that for some the road to secure housing is not just about overcoming personal challenges, but also navigating a flawed system that can often feel indifferent to individual efforts.
“I’m one voice. I’m one person. I’m fighting my own struggles, so I can only do so much for the next,” McRae said.
Get Involved
Stay up to date with the Dover City Council and committee meetings here to look out for the Unsheltered Working Group presentation.
To stay informed about events and opportunities to advocate for housing stability, click here to become a Housing Advocate with Housing Alliance Delaware.
The post ‘The forgotten population’: Single women struggle in fight against homelessness appeared first on Spotlight Delaware.