A New Vision: What is in Community Plans to End Homelessness?

from End Homelssness

The problem of homelessness, many say, is an unsolvable problem. Communities across the country have struggled with getting homeless people off the street by building shelters, transitional housing, and soup kitchens. Although these strategies help address the immediate needs of our nation’s homeless people by providing food and temporary shelter, they have not been successful in decreasing homelessness, leaving communities frustrated and hopeless. In 2000, the National Alliance to End Homelessness announced A Plan, Not a Dream: How to End Homelessness in Ten Years. Drawing on research and innovative programs from around the country, the plan outlined a new vision to address the problem of homelessness. This vision included strategies to end the problem by providing affordable housing and needed services, and, just as important, by preventing homelessness from occurring in the first place. Since that time, 220 communities have undertaken efforts to end homelessness and 90 communities have completed plans to end homelessness. These plans echo key strategies outlined in the Alliance’s plan and represent a critical, collective effort to end homelessness nationwide. This report is the first nationwide examination of local plans to end homelessness. The major findings in the report include the following areas.

Plan Types
A majority (66 percent) of the community plans to end homelessness target all homeless people and 34 percent focus on chronically homeless people. Many plans lay out strategies for specific subgroups of homeless people, including families, youth, veterans, and the elderly. Forty-one percent of plans outline strategies to end family homelessness, 49 percent outline efforts to end youth homelessness, and 31 percent of plans address the housing needs of former prisoners, to prevent them from becoming homeless. Planning efforts to end homelessness have taken root across the country—geographically distributed, but concentrated in population centers. A wide range of stakeholders were involved in the community planning process, with the strongest representation from the nonprofit sector and the weakest representation from the private sector. Although some plans (28 percent) involve currently or formerly homeless people, their participation in the development of plans is lower than that of other stakeholders.

Primary Strategies Outlined in the Plans
Communities outline a wide range of strategies in the plans: creating data systems; preventing homelessness—both emergency prevention and prevention at the systems level; outreach to homeless people to get them back into housing; shortening the time that people spend homeless by using rapid re-housing strategies; creating permanent housing options for homeless people; and, once homeless people become housed, linking them to services and to programs that will help them boost their income and increase their ability to afford housing in the future. The plans address the following issues:

* Creating Data Systems. Almost all of the plans (91 percent) outline strategies to create Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS).

* Homelessness Prevention. An overwhelming majority of the plans (79 percent) address emergency prevention (e.g., one-time rental or utility assistance, help negotiating an eviction with a landlord, etc.), and 91 percent of the plans outline systems prevention activities, such as discharge planning from correctional facilities, foster care systems, or mental health facilities.

* Outreach. Outreach efforts to engage people living on the streets are outlined in 79 percent of the plans.

* Shortening Time of Homelessness. Shortening the time that people spend homeless by providing permanent housing to homeless people is included in 67 percent of the plans; 57 percent call for rapid re-housing. In total, the plans call for creating approximately 196,000 units (or subsidies), of which 80,000 units are permanent supportive housing.

* Links to Services. Once individuals or families are in housing, 81 percent of the plans outline strategies to link them with mainstream services so they can earn enough money to pay rent and avoid homelessness.

Implementation and Funding Sources
The plans are a step in the right direction—a forward movement in the effort to end homelessness—but in order for a community to see real declines in the number of homeless people, it must implement its plan. This analysis measured the strength of the plans by calculating a score for each strategy outlined in the plan based on the likelihood that it would be implemented. The strength score was calculated based on whether the plan identified performance measures, set a timeline, and identified specific funding sources and bodies responsible for the implementation of each strategy.

Most of the strength scores were low to medium, with a majority falling between 0 and 2 (the highest being 4). These scores show that, although plans are outlining the right strategies, they are not always setting clear numeric indicators, establishing timelines, implementing bodies, and identifying funding sources to implement each key strategy. While the strength scores examined specific strategies, we also looked at overall plan implementation and funding. We found that a little over half (54 percent) of the plans identify a body that will take up responsibility for overall plan implementation once the plan is completed. Similarly, about half of the plans (48 percent) identify funding sources to implement the overall plan.

Implications for Homelessness and Future Planning Efforts
Today hundreds of communities are tackling the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness by outlining plans that move from managing the problem of homelessness to ending it. The problem of what to do about homelessness is no longer viewed as an unanswerable question. Although community plans to end homelessness represent a collective effort, much more can and should be done. This study reveals that hundreds of communities are planning to end homelessness. Some are implementing their plans—and are seeing positive results—but many more must take their plans off the shelf and move from planning to action. While efforts to end homelessness require participation from local communities, the federal government has a bigger role to take on in the form of increasing access to affordable housing and coordinating mainstream services, such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and mental health services. There is much more to be done, but despite these challenges, for the first time in two decades, communities have a plan and homelessness is a problem with a clear solution.