More than 100 residents filled Reflections at Lake Toccoa on Thursday, Feb. 27 as a forum on the state of homelessness in Toccoa and Stephens County went on for nearly two hours.
Organized by Toccoa Police Chief Bruce Carlisle, Gainesville Police Chief Jay Parrish attended the forum as the keynote speaker for his department’s longtime experience tackling issues of homelessness in Hall County.
“Be honest of what you feel like the issues are here in Toccoa and Stephens County or if you’ve got some sort of solution for (homelessness),” Carlisle told those in attendance. “…mental health and the drug problem is a big issue here and it intertwines with the homeless issue.”
Before the forum opened, Stephens County Commissioner Debbie Whitlock called for solutions to the issue as a whole.
“I don’t know what the answer is,” she said. “I tend to think we need to do something about the homeless…we all see the people up and down the road, pushing their carts. We have people sleeping on the sidewalk off of Big A Road. There are various reasons people are in these situations, but again, I don’t know the answer.”
As of January of 2025, around 12,000 people (including sheltered and unsheltered individuals) in Georgia experience homelessness on any given night, according to the Department of Community Affairs.
According to Georgia DCA, a total of 5,856 people in the 152 counties of the Balance of State Continuum of Care were identified as “literally homeless by HUD definition” on the night of January 21, 2022 – a 40% increase from 2019.
Of those, 67% were unsheltered and the other 33% were in emergency or transitional housing.
Forum
For the first hour of the forum, community members seemed to unanimously agree that more should be done to aid Stephens County’s homeless demographic. In Stephens County, the population of homeless is estimated to be around 157 (counted as homeless by the state), according to Ninth District Opportunity’s Community Resource Coordinator Paula Duley.
“To be considered homeless in our programs, you have to be living in a car, a tent or somewhere uninhabitable,” Duley said.
At least one resident, Steve Paysen with the Hope Center of Toccoa, was adamant in his position against the creation of a homeless shelter in Stephens County.
Paysen, who works closely with the homeless population, said he believes a shelter in Stephens would only attract more homeless individuals to the community, igniting what he described as an unmanageable outcome.
“We do not need a homeless shelter in this community,” Paysen said. “If we open a homeless shelter, the homeless population will grow 10 times…if it’s a homeless shelter, it’s going to have rules. And what do you do when you break the rules? Where do you send them? To our streets. That’s not the answer.”
Paysen and others also noted issues of limited inventory of apartments and housing options within Toccoa and Stephens County – which they described as a major contributor to homelessness.
“We have to get involved, and we have to change that,” he said. “That is our responsibility. The people who are from here – we have to love them and we have to help them.”
Multiple other residents and members of non-profit organizations spoke during the meeting, with some proposing more options for temporary housing, more drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs and greater support from local churches.
Parrish
Parrish, who spoke during the latter segment of the meeting about his department’s efforts, more or less centered on two central themes needed to combat homelessness – resources and collaboration.
“Homelessness is not a law enforcement problem,” Parrish said. “It is a community issue, and it takes a community to solve it.”
Parrish, named as the city of Gainesville’s police chief in 2019, described his approach to the issue as “multifaceted” in that it involves a combination of mental health professionals as co-responders alongside police, as well as aspects of community policing, to bring positive outcomes.
In 2020, Parrish explained, the city of Gainesville secured a grant to fund a $65,000 salary for a mental health professional to respond to certain emergency calls – oftentimes involving issues of mental health – alongside officers. That professional would deescalate situations in times of crisis and later focus on connecting individuals with resources.
Today, since the program’s implementation, the city has obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funding to expand the department’s mental health and co-responder staff.
“What’s not an answer to (homelessness) is the jail,” Parrish said. “You can’t criminalize your way out of (homelessness)…we do everything not to have the arrest. Work through the system, and we’re going to try and avoid it.”
He added: “How do we fix the homeless issue? (Law enforcement) needs co-responders. That’s not a cheap program. It takes funding. There are grants out there. There are partnerships out there…building partnerships – because the officers can’t do it.”
Parrish reiterated the importance of connecting non-profit organizations with other community entities for streamlined, effective community coordination.
“We have to figure out how to do this together,” he said.
