As homelessness rises, annual resource fair offers one-stop connection to housing, social services

Only a few hours before beginning her shift working as a security guard, Lakera Minner is sitting down with a housing coordinator trying to begin the process of finding a home for her and her three children.

Minner and her children, 12, 8 and 7, were evicted in July. Since then, she has struggled to regain her footing. The children are staying with family. Minner has been sleeping in her car since last month. 

“It’s hard, especially being a single mom,” she said. “I have a job. I do what I’m supposed to do. But the way the world is now, it’s not easy for any of us,” she said, noting wages aren’t keeping pace with rising prices. 

“You have to work 24/7, 365 days a year just to get somewhere.” 

Minner was one of the hundreds of people attending Tuesday’s Project Homeless Connect at the Cambridge Recreation Center. 

The annual event features 125 agencies that offer housing assessments, information about mental and behavioral health resources, legal help, assistance with identification and birth certificate retrieval, assistance with filling out paperwork for Medicare, hair cuts, showers and free food.   

“We also have agencies ready to pay for housing and utility bills on the spot or late rent if it’s in our capacity to mitigate, that so people won’t fall into homelessness,” said Catrina Grigsby-Thedford, the executive director of the Nevada Homeless Alliance.

Grigsby-Thedford said last year’s event had more than 800 people come through, and expected more on Tuesday.   

The annual event comes as recent data showed Southern Nevada’s homelessness has grown to the largest number in about 10 years. 

The 2023 Point-in-Time Count, an annual snapshot of homelessness on one particular night, counted 6,566 people experiencing homelessness, a 16% increase from 2022 when 5,645 unhoused people were identified. 

An estimated 16,251 are expected to experience homelessness this year. 

The numbers are assumed to be an undercount that doesn’t capture the full scope of homelessness. 

The sharpest increase was among families, which grew from 516 counted in 2022 to 794 this year. 

It was the first time Minner has ever attended an event offering homeless services. 

In addition to struggling to afford rent, she said places declined to give her a chance because of the eviction on her record. 

Though Minner was able to live with a family member for a little while after her eviction, she said “it didn’t work out” and she had to leave, and began sleeping in her car. 

“It’s hard to be separated from them,” she said. “I spend time with them on my days off but it makes it hard because when I have to drop them back off, they are crying. They don’t want me to go. It makes it a lot harder.”

Minner wasn’t sure how long it would take to complete the housing assessment at the event, and was told she would receive a call if she had to leave in order to go to work. 

Even as she was waiting, she said just being able to come to the event “is a blessing.”

“People need to know this is life,” she said. “Not all of us are on drugs. Not all of us did something to end up here. I’m working full time. It’s just how life works.”

Grigsby-Thedford said having a one-stop resource event helps people overcome barriers, including transportation.

Before unhoused folks can obtain housing or employment, they might need to obtain their ID or birth certificate if they lost it while experiencing homelessness. 

Oftentimes, she said, people are finding themselves traveling throughout the valley in order to connect to multiple services. 

“Imagine a person having to go to four offices in Vegas and catching the bus,” Grigsby-Thedford said. “It’s often easier for them to say, ‘that’s too much.’ It’s a lot to navigate for a person. Having an on-the-spot-resource fair is very convenient for the individual experiencing that housing crisis.”

That’s exactly how Vann, who is attending the event on Tuesday, felt when he tried to exit homelessness years ago. Vann declined to give his last name.

Earlier this year, began getting addiction treatment. He is currently staying in a transitional housing program but is trying to prepare for life after the program. 

He tried to exit homelessness before but was trying to put all the pieces together to gain stable housing and mental services. He likened the process to “running around like a chicken with your head cut off trying to figure out how to do things.”

“I did this for the last few years,” he said. “It’s stressful and horrendous. It leads to a lot of negative decisions that make it so you can’t get the footing underneath you to make the choices you need to make to succeed.” 

In addition to a hot meal, Vann was able to get assistance applying for a new Social Security card. He is also looking for assistance to plan for when the transitional housing program ends

“I’m doing a housing assessment now so when it’s time for me to leave transitional housing I will have everything set up and won’t have to spend any more time out on the streets,” he said.  

While Grigsby-Thedford said some people attending Project Homeless Connect could be “connected to housing on the spot.” The event also helps prevent people from losing housing in the first place. 

She said one booth offers “housing-problem solving” where they ask people at-risk of homelessness about their current situation and come up with creative solutions, whether it’s working out an agreement with landlords, paying back rent or having people move in with family and friends. 

“We already resolved two incidents of homelessness by talking to their landlords and making plans to get that late rent paid up so they won’t get kicked out,” she said. 

In some instances people are at risk of losing housing because of conflict within the homes with family members. 

Grigsby-Thedford has had people ask families to leave because there wasn’t enough food to support the entire household. Instead, they offered gift cards to obtain more food and connections to other assistance programs. 

“We had a young lady staying with her sister with three kids,” Grigsby-Thedford said. “A curling iron got broken. All it took was for an agency to pay for a new curling iron for her to stay there.”