Ending Homelessness: Learning By Doing

Rosanne Haggerty first came on my radar in 1991, when the Times Square Hotel re-opened in New York City. Haggerty, who founded the non-profit Common Ground, knitted together sufficient funding to restore and renovate this building, which was on the country’s register of historic properties. The Hotel offered 650 homes that were affordable to tenants with very low incomes. It also provided 24/7 supports on site. The tenants included people with a history of chronic homelessness and people from the entertainment industry.

The results were impressive. Chronic homelessness within a 20 block radius of the Hotel dropped by 87%. Haggerty took that single example to a larger scale. The 100,000 homes campaign, which set out to add 100,000 units of housing for people who were homeless, exceeded its target well ahead of schedule. And although this is a considerable achievement, the story doesn’t end there, because the numbers of people who were homeless continued to grow.

The U.S. model to end homelessness is community based. Funding is available to support service coordination at a local level. Local coordinators were understandably frustrated that despite their efforts and the impressive results, the number of people who were homeless wasn’t going down. Haggerty founded Community Solutions to work with local coordinators to turn the results in the right direction. Built for Zero is the result of that collaboration.

In following the Built for Zero model, local coordinators and service providers:

• changed their focus from delivering services to ending homelessness.
• switched from a one year point in time count to a by-name list of people who were homeless and updated it monthly.
• decided on a specific group of people to support, starting either with Veterans or people who were chronically homeless¹.
• treated homelessness as an emergency and adopted practices and structures based on the most successful emergency management models.
• agreed to be flexible in how they would use their resources to support people to end homelessness.
• committed to looking at what the data from the by-name list was telling them about what was working and what wasn’t.

A campaign with 70 communities launched in 2016. Currently, the initiatives range in size from large cities (Chicago) to Abilene, Texas, which includes all of the smaller centres and rural areas in that state.

These changes are showing significant results². Rockford Illinois, with a population of 150,000+/-, started with homeless veterans. The team in Rockford brought their numbers down to zero and has continued to maintain that level. They moved on to people who were chronically homeless, with the same result. Now they are working with youth experiencing homelessness. Their story and more is reported in Next City³: The City That Plans to Completely End Homelessness

The Built for Zero design provides a forum and a structure to face new challenges and to figure out how to solve them. Community Solutions, which supports local Built For Zero campaigns, can keep an eye on common challenges and think about ways to adapt the program further. A report called Getting to Proof Points includes a discussion about the software that HUD requires local coordinating groups to use. The software has outlived its usefulness and needs to be upgraded or replaced.

The report also relates a David and Goliath moment when HUD chose outcomes and targets that didn’t align with Community Solutions’ ideas. HUD and Community Solutions agreed to set the matter aside and continued to work together to end homelessness, despite their differences. Later still, with more learning by doing, each group made further changes and their definitions came into alignment again.

Finally, here’s a video discussion, which was sponsored by the University of New England Center for Global Humanities, and recorded in October 2020. It features a conversation between Rosanne Haggerty, Addi Smith-Reiman, Executive Director for the Portland (Maine) Society of Architects, and Anouar Majid, from the UNE Center for Global Humanities.

Addi reflects on Portland’s commitment to end homelessness and the tortuous path to implementing changes. She asked for ideas about how to keep the initiative moving forward. Haggerty suggested applying what has worked in Built For Zero at a community level. This would mean establishing a framework to focus discussion, decision making and action, based on three goals: no one is homeless, no one is paying an excessive amount of income for housing and everyone is housed safely. For more, you can check out the discussion here: Homelessness is a solvable public health emergency

These resources include a host of ideas and actions for consideration in other countries and communities where the number of people who are homeless keeps rising. These examples are specific to United States, but could be adapted and applied elsewhere⁴.

1. Here, “chronically homeless” means people have been homeless for 12 consecutive months or had three or more episodes of homelessness in their lifetime.
2. Results across the United States are reported on the Community Solutions web site: Built for Zero
3. Next City provides three free reads per month. For more free reads, you will need sign up with an email address.
4. As one example, the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness has followed the U.S. experience closely, and launched Built For Zero Canada in 2018.