Danbury's Homeless Need More State Support

Isette spent 30 years as a paralegal. She paid her bills, kept her cats, built a life. Then her rent climbed past what she could afford, and at 62, she found herself evicted, sleeping in her car, and scrambling to find her cats foster homes.

She eventually landed a bed at the Danbury Support Center, a shelter network run by the Association of Religious Communities. Case managers there helped connect her to social services and, when serious skin cancer required surgery and radiation, helped her manage that crisis too. Now she has an apartment lined up and a housing subsidy to help her get there. “I’m on the cusp,” she says.

Her path forward exists because someone had room for her. But the Danbury Support Center is running at the edge of what it can offer, and the organization’s executive director is pushing Connecticut lawmakers to change that before more people fall through the gaps.

The center operates two sites that opened in 2023, housing 40 adults total. The state contract covers 20 of those beds at the statewide rate of $11,500 per bed this year, leaving the other 20 spots without dedicated state funding. ARC Executive Director Ari Rosenberg wants the legislature to pass a line item providing $690,000 for the Danbury Support Center for the fiscal year beginning in July. That funding would expand capacity to 60 beds, still at the $11,500-per-bed rate, with most of the money going toward staffing.

Rosenberg says Danbury has roughly 100 homeless residents at any given time, a number that appears to be growing, and that the city receives less state support than some communities with smaller homeless populations. State housing officials say they stretch their budget as far as they can. Rosenberg’s response is direct: if the Department of Housing cannot provide Danbury its fair share, the legislature should create a dedicated line item to fix the imbalance.

Without enough shelter beds, people end up behind storefronts, in parked cars, and in the woods. Those are not abstract outcomes. They happen in Danbury regularly.

State Sen. Julie Kushner, whose district covers Danbury, backs the funding request. She wrote to the legislature’s Housing Committee in February urging $690,000 for what she called the area’s “only emergency homeless shelter available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” with full-time staff and case managers on site.

The numbers here are not large, as state budget lines go. Sixty beds at $11,500 each. Staff salaries. A building that stays open every day of the year. Connecticut’s overall state budget runs close to $25 billion annually. The ask from the Danbury Support Center is a rounding error against that figure, which makes the gap between what the center has and what it needs harder to justify.

The people cycling through the shelter are not statistics. They are people like Isette, who held professional jobs, paid into the system, and got caught when housing costs outpaced wages. She is not unusual in that regard. The shelter population reflects the broader strain on working-class and fixed-income residents who have watched rents rise faster than their ability to keep up.

Rosenberg’s ask is practical and specific. It does not require a policy overhaul or a new state agency. It requires the legislature to recognize that Danbury’s homeless population exists, that it is underserved relative to comparable communities, and that a single funded line item can make the Danbury Support Center functional at the scale the demand requires.

Sen. Kushner is already on record. The Housing Committee has the request in front of it. The question now is whether lawmakers treat this as a priority or let it stall while a nonprofit tries to cover 40 people on funding meant for 20.

Isette is close to getting out. Others are waiting to get in. The shelter needs the beds to make either of those things possible.