Rafael Pagan Jr. is getting the finishing touches ready for the Oct. 21 annual fundraising gala for Pacific House, the Stamford nonprofit where he serves as executive director.
But while the gala”™s promotional material promises “a festive ”˜live from the red carpet”™ experience,” for Pagan the event is an evening”™s break from his mission of assisting the homeless population of Fairfield County in their search for a safe habitat.
One main challenge that Pagan faces in his work is getting public acknowledgment that the region has a homeless population.
“It depends where you drive and where you’re at,” he explained. “You see more of it in Stamford, less of it in other communities — they are out there but (in) much lower numbers. We get calls occasionally from Greenwich where there are some homeless individuals.
“The biggest place where they tend to congregate, believe it or not, is the train station,” he continued. “You’ll see more of that, especially in the Stamford train station, evening and nights. During the day they go about their business, but when evening time comes and late at night, they start congregating in that area.”
Originally launched as a 67-bed men”™s shelter in Stamford four decades ago, the nonprofit took a more proactive than reactive approach to the issue in 2007.
“We really started looking at the issue of homelessness and thinking through a different lens — rather than concentrating on emergency shelter, we really want it to be more about solutions,” Pagan said. “So we embarked on a new mission that addressed providing deeply affordable housing for the homeless community.
“As we embarked on that, we realized that no one out there was developing housing for the homeless community. There was some affordable housing being developed but it was largely for workforce and our population — which is typically 25% of median income and below — was left out of that process.”
In the years that followed, Pacific House has placed a primary importance on developing housing specifically designed to assist the homeless.
“We had seven units of housing in a three-family home,” Pagan recalled about the initiative”™s launch. “We now are up to 13 homes and we provide housing for over 140 individuals and families, so we’ve really turned the dime.”
For Pagan, the solution to homelessness is to ensure the people coming through Pacific House”™s care are only making a temporary stop on the route to a more secure environment, with the goal “to get them out within 60 days and place them in permanent housing.” He admitted that the timeline often stretches to 90 days, but the 60-day mark is still an aspiration.
Today”™s local homeless population affected a diverse number of situations, ranging from the loss of livelihoods that spiraled into a loss of residency to individuals going through physical and emotional health problems who are not able to find people a place to stay. The Covid-19 pandemic and the economic mayhem created by the health crisis exacerbated the situation.
“We recently purchased an 85-room hotel with the support of the Department of Housing to provide emergency services in Danbury, as well as housing units,” Pagan said. “The people we serve are unemployed or have lost their jobs or are underemployed, and many of our consumers suffer from substance abuse. And then we also get people with mental health or illness, and many have dual diagnosis of substance abuse and mental health.”
Yet Pagan stressed that there is never truly a time when homelessness abates.
“When the economy is bad, you get more people that are struggling with the economy and employment issues,” he said. “And when the economy is better, you get more and more folks that have other challenges. But we’ve gotten better as a system, to the extent that we’ve been able to house as many people as we have.”
Still, Pagan pointed out the situation is better now than in previous years, noting that Fairfield County “was one of the first to eliminate chronic homelessness with veterans” while Stamford is now close to eliminating chronic homelessness.
Pagan also urged the local business community to become more cognizant of some of the root causes that result in people becoming homeless: a pricey rental housing market that is often out of reach for lower-income workers, even with government housing subsidies.
“One of the things I’ve realized in my discussions with companies throughout the years is that they have difficulty attracting people in lower-level jobs,” he said. “And if they do, they come from Bridgeport or other communities much farther away. It’s not very sustainable in terms of keeping your workforce closer to the community so that they could have access to employment.”
