How Houston moved 25k people from the streets to homes

[Velar Fricative]

@@ warning - the majority of the article discusses all of the strategies and progress, but there is a mention of one family in part of the article plus @ mentions sprinkled throughout the article. 

It's a long read but interesting.

www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html

During the last decade, Houston, the nation’s fourth most populous city, has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses. The overwhelming majority of them have remained housed after two years. The number of people deemed homeless in the Houston region has been cut by 63 percent since 2011, according to the latest numbers from local officials. Even judging by the more modest metrics registered in a 2020 federal report, Houston did more than twice as well as the rest of the country at reducing homelessness over the previous decade. Ten years ago, homeless veterans, one of the categories that the federal government tracks, waited 720 days and had to navigate 76 bureaucratic steps to get from the street into permanent housing with support from social service counselors. Today, a streamlined process means the wait for housing is 32 days.



Houston has gotten this far by teaming with county agencies and persuading scores of local service providers, corporations and charitable nonprofits — organizations that often bicker and compete with one another — to row in unison. Together, they’ve gone all in on “housing first,” a practice, supported by decades of research, that moves the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and without first requiring them to wean themselves off drugs or complete a 12-step program or find God or a job.

[neverfstop]

Just read this on the plane. So encouraging & I hope these lessons can be used in other cities that are really struggling with this issue.

————-

But mostly I wondered what individuals would extract from Houston’s example. Homelessness is a calamity millions reckon with each day — a calamity provoking a mix of rage, fear and powerlessness in the housed and unhoused alike. For me, the big reveal after a year was not that Houston had solved the problem. It hasn’t. There is no one-time fix to homelessness.

The reveal was something different. It was that in broken America it’s still possible for adversaries to share facts and come together around something contentious and difficult. Public and private, county and city, businesses and nonprofits, conservatives and liberals, the housed and unhoused: In Houston, enough of them have agreed on a goal that seems worth striving for. Working in concert, they have made genuine progress in housing previously unhoused people. And, so far, the benefits of collaboration have fended off the usual forces of entropy. That was an eye-opener and a sign of hope.

[eddy]

I am so glad you posted this. I was completely captivated by this article this AM and was going to post it here for discussion.

It is hard to read that their success is summed up as just working together across orgs, political parties etc. I mean that is so fucking simple. I know it isn't simple, but they didn't come up with some grand new idea. They just cut red tape and bullshit. I also love the housing first concept. Makes absolute perfect sense.

[af1212]

This is an awesome article and I look forward to reading the whole thing but right now I have an off topic question. Velar Fricative how did you put that box around the text from the article?

[Velar Fricative]

Jun 14, 2022 9:21:00 GMT -5 af1212 said:

This is an awesome article and I look forward to reading the whole thing but right now I have an off topic question. Velar Fricative how did you put that box around the text from the article?

When I'm on my desktop or laptop, when I reply there's a button near the smiley face icon above the text box that says "Quote." Click on that, and then insert the text you want to use from the article inside.

[pixy0stix]

Jun 14, 2022 9:48:51 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

Jun 14, 2022 9:21:00 GMT -5 af1212 said:

This is an awesome article and I look forward to reading the whole thing but right now I have an off topic question. Velar Fricative how did you put that box around the text from the article?

When I'm on my desktop or laptop, when I reply there's a button near the smiley face icon above the text box that says "Quote." Click on that, and then insert the text you want to use from the article inside.

You can also use the quote tags [*quote] text [*/quote]  - just remove the *

[Velar Fricative]

Jun 14, 2022 9:50:24 GMT -5 pixy0stix said:

Jun 14, 2022 9:48:51 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

When I'm on my desktop or laptop, when I reply there's a button near the smiley face icon above the text box that says "Quote." Click on that, and then insert the text you want to use from the article inside.

You can also use the quote tags [*quote] text [*/quote]  - just remove the *

I knew there had to be a quicker way lol. 

[wildrice]

Thanks for sharing this article - I had not come across it. I recently started working for a non-profit focused on this population, and it's really heartening to see how Houston has accomplished this. I hope other cities can follow their lead. The more I've learned about the housing first concept, the more it makes sense and seems so obvious. As our CEO says all the time, we don't tell people that they have to be food ready or clothing ready - why do we say people have to be housing ready? Housing is a basic, fundamental human need and should be a human right.

I'll share a few health related statistics that I think are incredible - People who move from the streets to housing experience (I think within a year or maybe 2 years):
- 67% decrease in ER visits
- 77% decrease in inpatient hospital visits
- 66% decrease in emergency costs, 76% decrease in inpatient costs - another study said there was a $8724 reduction in yearly expenditures to the health system by housing folks
- 47% reduction in medical health outpatient and 44% reduction in mental health outpatient visits

The study is here: www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1694.html although it is very long so I haven't personally read through it.

I am very worried that with housing becoming even more unaffordable in the last year or so, things are only going to get worse. An affordable housing complex in my city opened up applications for 35 apartments yesterday, and hundreds of people stood in line that first day to apply. Hundreds of whom are still going to go without, because there are so few opportunities available. What will become of them?

[Michelle]

Goooo Houston!

And also - I live just south of the Houston city limits. My county has a ton of stupid propaganda saying, "Don't Houston My [insert town]." Houston has come a long way in trying to ensure better voting access, better services, better education equity, and the freakin red around it still tries to choke it out. ::pouts::