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Enlarge this image Buckshot Cunningham lived without housing for years before he moved into a small cottage at Hope Village, a shelter run by the nonprofit Rogue Retreat in southern Oregon. April Ehrlich/Jefferson Public Radio Chilly winds and hail don't bother Buckshot Cunningham, who lived outside without a shelter for years until he came across Hope Village in southern Oregon. "This is my umbrella," he says as he shrugs on the hood of his coat while walking into a mid-January winter storm. Hope Village is run by Rogue Retreat, a nonprofit serving low-income people in Medford, Ore., near the border with California. It's a collection of about a dozen small cottages with a communal kitchen, dining area and bathrooms. This is what housing advocates call a low-barrier shelter, with few rules and requirements to get in. There are some behavioral rules — you can't be violent or do drugs on the premises — but you don't have to be sober when you come in and you can bring your family, partner or dog. "Twelve years of drugs and alcohol" is how Cunningham says he became homeless. But there's a bit more to his story: A career as a firefighting smokejumper left him with physical disabilities. He lost his son to suicide, then his wife to cancer. "And I just went downhill from there," he says. Homelessness is often seen as an urban issue, but rural areas along the West Coast are also struggling with large homeless populations. Many of these areas don't have the resources for shelters like Hope Village, but even when they do, they're sometimes reluctant to build them. Viewed as "enabling" Just across the state border in rural Northern California, Shasta County had earned a $1.6 million grant to help fund a similar low-barrier shelter. County supervisors considered its proposal last winter when they heard from Police Chief Michael Johnson from the city of Anderson. "It is just another enabling mechanism for the homeless, the transients and the displaced people here," Johnson told the board in February 2019. "When you create something and enable people, you're going to attract more." Shasta County supervisors pushed the project back several times, citing their concerns about crime and a fear that services such as this would attract more homeless people. So Johnson proposed an alternative: a detention facility to house people who have committed low-level crimes such as public drinking, urinating in public or sleeping in public spaces, which are sometimes unavoidable for people without homes. Johnson says incarceration can be used as a tool to provide services to people who are homeless and struggling with drug addiction or mental health issues. "That's our opportunity to try to get that particular person involved in a program that will turn their life around and help them," Johnson says. "That's when the
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