Beginning in 2025, Birmingham will have “Heart” to address nonemergency episodes involving its homeless population.

The Birmingham City Council this week approved spending more than $1.7 million for Urban Alchemy to operate Heart Birmingham.

“We operate a program called Heart that connects to emergency response numbers like 911 and 311,” said Kirkpatrick Tyler, chief of community and government relations of Urban Alchemy. “When an unhoused neighbor is in crises, instead of an armed officer coming, one of our practitioners comes.”
Tyler prefers unhoused neighbor to homeless, he said, because the more common term carries a stigma.

“Language has power,” he said. “Rather than talking about a situation where a person is in, we begin to label the person. When we talk about unhoused neighbors, it changes the conversation from a person who is labeled by his situation versus a human being, a neighbor, a community member who happens to be in a space right now where they don’t have stable housing.

“We prefer to focus on the person rather than the circumstance,” he continued. “That’s become a part of the nature of serving the unhoused population.”

The engagement aspect of Heart begins with proactive teams that go out without responding to a call.

“They’re there to build relationships with our unhoused neighbors, with our housed neighbors, with stakeholders, with everybody who’s a part of the community,” Tyler said. “The purpose is to build relationships. We believe one of the tools that helps us to be successful engaging unhoused neighbors in crisis is having built relationships with them without crisis.”

The Heart team hopes to assist unhoused persons by connecting them to interim housing, mental health support and basic things such as food and clothes.

“We try to meet people where they are with the needs that they have and use that to bridge them into more sustainable services and, hopefully, ultimately to permanent housing.”

Heart also responds to nonemergency situations with the aim of de-escalation, offering an alternative to armed law enforcement meeting a troubled person.

“If you or I were having a rough day or even having a mental health episode, the last thing we would want is someone who has a revolver approaching us,” Tyler said. “What we would want is someone who has empathy, someone who can connect and communicate with us even in the midst of our crisis, someone who can help us de-escalate and finally someone who has tools and resources to help us address the issues and challenges that probably brought us to that episode.”

The chief of community and government relations said more than 98% of Urban Alchemy’s staff is comprised of men and women who have served extended sentences, 10 to 15 years and beyond, or have lived in an unhoused situation, struggled with substance abuse and were able to recover and regain their stability.

“In our programs nationwide, we’ve had folks who have successfully transitioned from someone we were serving to being on the team,” Tyler said. “Who better to do the work than the people who are most affected?”

Urban Alchemy – which currently operates in San Francisco; Los Angeles; Culver City, California; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Oregon – draws its name from the definition of alchemy, which is the changing of base metals into gold.

“Urban Alchemy is all about that except we’re not talking about base metals,” Tyler said. “We’re talking about people that through the experiences of our practitioners – who are primarily former long-term offenders and returning citizens – are trying to change a bad situation into an opportunity to be of service to the community.”

Affordable Housing

In another housing-related action, the council approved a pair of redevelopment agreements between the city and the Housing Reinvestment Corp. of America. Eighty vacant lots in Belview Heights and North Pratt will be transferred and redeveloped into affordable housing.

The anticipated target sales price of these homes will be in the $200,000 range, which will be consistent across all the lots. As part of the agreement, the city will provide $1,535,500 to subsidize the development in Belview Heights and an additional $3,950,984 for the construction of 53 homes off Pratt Highway, which will be known as the Shadow Brook Development.

According to the developer, the timeline of completion may vary but four homes will be constructed at both sites in the near future.

“I’m excited to see these projects continue, and we’ve gained knowledge from previous projects of this nature in Birmingham,” Councilor Clinton Woods said. “But I think this is a great illustration of using American Rescue Plan Act funding to make an impact in our neighborhoods and help restore some of our communities.”