Judge: Chapel Hill, UNC need to help homeless

CHAPEL HILL -- District Judge Joe Buckner challenged community leaders today to form a town-gown partnership to house the homeless, saying no one else is going to do it.

"We need to look at a new paradigm locally," Buckner said. "Forget what the state does."

A 2006 survey found Orange County needed 39 more beds for the chronically homeless, which the local Partnership to End Homelessness defines as people homeless for more than one year or with four homeless episodes within the past three year.

Some of those people end up in Bucker's courtroom, repeatedly.

Speaking at the Community Leadership Collaboration, Buckner said state sentencing guidelines don't allow him to keep street people convicted of minor crimes in jail for more than 20 days. In reality, jail crowding releases those incarcerated much sooner.

And jail is not the answer, Buckner said.

The state is closing Dorothea Dix Hospital. The local mental health authority doesn't have money to serve all those who need help. And many homeless people have mental illness and substance abuse problems that need monitoring in a safe environment.

"Who's worried about taking your mood inhibitor if you're living out of a Dumpster?" Buckner said.

He challenged the collaboration, a group of local government, university and community leaders, to create some kind of residential program that would take homeless people off the streets and provide services to support their living more independently.

Jonathan Howes, a former Chapel Hill mayor and now the special assistant to the chancellor for local government relations, said the university could consider such a proposal.

"We'd be glad to talk about it," he said. "If there were community support and we had the funding to make it work ... you've got to have some link to an academic endeavor."

But one possibility might be the Carolina North property, the satellite campus the university is planning just north of the main campus.

"There will be room there,' Howes said.