Emails show Norristown officials turned down federal funding to fix homelessness crisis. Advocates plan to denounce them at the UN.

Local and national advocates plan to charge Norristown officials with human-rights violations of people experiencing homelessness during a meeting at the United Nations next month.

Allegations include “criminalizing” homelessness and disregarding people’s rights to housing.

Any findings by the U.N. would not carry the weight of law. But U.N. resolutions have been central to court decisions in the United States that recognized the right to housing, advocates said. They also acknowledged that they hope to “shame” the borough with international derision that might force change.

Stephanie Sena, a faculty member of the Charles Widger School of Law at Villanova University, is to attend the U.N. hearing on human rights at its Geneva, Switzerland, location, an international center for conferences, on Oct. 17 and 18. Eric Tars, legal director for the National Homelessness Law Center in Washington, said a colleague from his nonprofit will deliver a report Tars wrote. Legal Aid of Southeast Pennsylvania also has discussed sending a representative to the U.N.

Several complaints relate to information gleaned from about 600 emails written by Norristown officials and others concerning homelessness in the municipality. The emails were released to advocates in July after they’d filed Right-to-Know requests with the municipality in May.

That correspondence, reviewed by The Inquirer, shows that despite the borough’s high rates of poverty and homelessness, officials have eschewed federal funding for housing because it included stipulations to construct affordable dwellings for people with low incomes or disabilities.

“Other than affordable housing, is there anything possible for us?” Norristown Municipal Administrator Crandall Jones wrote in February to Jayne Musonye, director of planning and municipal development.

She answered, “I am reluctant to recommend using these funds ... for fear of imposing ‘affordable’ requirements that goes against our vision for future housing in Norristown. Other funding sources address housing for the homeless population or people with disabilities.”

Sena called the exchange “disgusting, cold, and repulsive.” The lack of affordable housing, Sena added, is “the root of homelessness.”

Advocates have excoriated Norristown officials for “violating the rights of people who are unhoused,” while officials say they’ve grown weary of being the “only municipality” dealing with poverty, and have bristled at criticism from “outsiders.” That acrimony boiled over in the spring, when City Council President Thomas Lepera yelled and cursed at advocates on a Philadelphia sidewalk, saying he would bus people who are homeless to the Villanova campus where Sena teaches. Lepera has denied cursing; he hasn’t answered Inquirer questions about the busing.

Meanwhile, advocates complain, officials in Norristown and municipalities all over Montgomery County use zoning laws to preclude construction of affordable housing.

Jones said that the Norristown emails have been interpreted “without the appropriate context.”

Sena disagreed: “These emails,” she said, “show a very clear vision for war on the poor.”

Tars labeled Musonye’s email a “smoking gun.”

He said: “Norristown blames homelessness on the unhoused. But the emails show officials actively refusing to get funds for people for affordable housing. The negative behavior here is on the part of officials who weren’t being responsive to the needs of their constituents.”

Asked to comment on the the emails, Jones wrote in a statement to The Inquirer that he and Musonye were not speaking for themselves. He added, “Anything we ... articulate as the position ... of the municipality results from the municipal council having deemed it so, not because any of our individual positions.”

Jones said that Norristown’s median monthly rent for a one-bedroom of $961 is considered affordable by state standards. He complained that other Montgomery County municipalities don’t “carry the same weight” as Norristown in dealing with “intentionally formed, unjust” concentrations of poverty.

Council President Lepera said in a statement to The Inquirer that residents don’t want “more Section 8 housing or homeless shelters.” They want officials to “increase the tax base by attracting new home buyers with disposable incomes which, in turn, will attract more businesses.”

Asked for thoughts on the possibility that Norristown will be embarrassed internationally by the U.N., county officials said in a statement, “We sincerely appreciate the efforts of those working to bring attention to this global crisis.”

Referencing funds the county has made available for affordable housing, the statement added that “the views expressed by individual elected officials or municipalities do not represent the county-wide effort that has taken place over the past decade to address the root causes of homelessness.”

County officials made sure to praise “partners and advocates [who] are vital to the mission of ending and preventing homelessness.”

County social services agencies petitioned to extend the lease of what had been the only homeless shelter in the area, but Norristown officials declined, closing it in 2022. The municipality didn’t choose to bring in low-income housing to replace around 100 such units destroyed by Hurricane Ida in 2021.

Tars claims that Norristown “criminalizes” people living in homeless encampments because it passed an ordinance in August 2022 that would fine or arrest people for being in parks between dusk and dawn. The law has triggered harassment of people experiencing homelessness, Tars said. The U.N. labels criminalizing homelessness “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Jones said the accusation that Norristown criminalizes homelessness is “unfounded, untrue, and unfair.”

In May, Sena said, Jones told her in a phone call that the borough wasn’t closing homeless encampments. But in an April 5, 2023, email that Jones wrote to Thomas Odenigbo, director of public works, and Michael Bishop, acting police chief, Jones said, “It’s time to get the encampment at Poley Park cleaned out.“

That document “confirms they were doing sweeps when they said they weren’t,” said Marielle Macher, executive director of the Community Justice Project, a Harrisburg-based nonprofit legal aid program that represents low-income Pennsylvanians.

In a statement to The Inquirer, Jones said, “Neither the municipal council nor I have taken action on or asserted anything ... that you reference.”

Taking exception to the language of the emails, Macher said they were “unbelievably dismissive,” with references to “cleaning out” the “homeless menace.” Officials were “not recognizing that people are human beings,” she said.

In a Jan. 11, 2023, email to a real estate lawyer and six other people — most of them state officials — Bradley Swartz, an official of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Real Estate, said he’d learned that “homeless people” were trying to break into the shuttered homeless shelter in Norristown “to get out of the elements.”

An hour later, Jones was referring to that email in one of his own, and ordering local officials to “further secure the building,” but not before instructing them to “mine the metals and equipment from that building before they are stolen.”

“I felt so upset when I read that,” said Mike Hays, a Montgomery County social worker and homeless advocate. “Desperate people were trying to break into a closed shelter on a bitterly cold night. Contrast that with Jones, whose primary concern was metal.”

In response, Jones said only that officials had been dealing with “spring and summer incidents” of “people breaking into the building to mine metals.” He didn’t elaborate.