HOUSTON — Houston city officials are hoping new transitional housing will help the unhoused find permanent homes.
The Navigation Center, located along Jensen Drive, has been open for about two weeks and Mayor Sylvester Turner calls the new facility a pit stop on the road to being housed.
It’s an uphill battle for the homeless who are trying to find housing.
“It’s been difficult. It’s been hard,” Anthony Willis said.
Willis said he’s been trying to find housing for at least a year. Between trying to stay safe and get food, the hard part for him has been working through the right agencies.
“You don’t have no phone out here. You don’t have nobody really trying to help you and tell you where to go,” Willis said.
The City of Houston has worked to reduce the city’s unhoused population by closing housing encampments, like the located one near Minute Maid Park, and relocating those in need.
According to the city, last week was the decommissioning of the Chartreuse encampment, the oldest and largest encampment in Houston, about 50 people from the encampment were moved to the Navigation Center.
“The process to house someone off the streets takes time and it takes a lot of work,” Turner said.
The center is a place for clients to have access to onsite case managers and mental and physical health professionals.
“I tell everybody this is as close as you feel to normalcy,” Ricardo Manriquez, a client at the Navigation Center, said.
Manriquez has a terminal condition with roughly 18 months to live. He said that as a married, gay man, the space provides a welcoming environment that he or his husband couldn’t get anywhere else.
“So, we want to have some kind of normalcy before anything happens so if we can get into housing and have a normal life, even if it was just for a matter of months, that would be the best thing that could happen to me before whatever happens to me,” he said.
There are 100 semiprivate beds located at the Navigation Center. Pets and couples are welcome and there’s access to recreation, showers and three meals a day.
Turner said the effort isn’t about cleaning up the streets ahead of March Madness next month, rather, it’s part of a larger effort to continue to reduce the homeless population that he said has come down 63% since 2012.
The city is partnering with the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County, which will operate the center.