Homelessness in America is a public health emergency. The mortality rate for street homelessness is on par with some forms of cancer, cutting a person’s lifespan by an average of 25 years.
Meanwhile, the publicly funded health costs of allowing people to remain on the streets exceed the cost of permanent housing by tens of thousands of dollars per person. With more than 90,000 Americans experiencing chronic homelessness, something has to change.
The time has come to stop managing homelessness and start ending it.
We believe that the primary obstacle to housing our homeless neighbors is not a lack of money or a shortage of effective strategies, but a refusal to work together around permanent, targeted, data-driven solutions. We cannot succeed if key players in each community continue to work in isolation, nor can we end homelessness if we fail to prioritize housing and supportive services to the most vulnerable among us.
The failure to collaborate meaningfully within and across communities is akin to a national homeless industrial complex that must be dismantled one community at a time. Until local businesses, foundations, government agencies, landlords, outreach workers and service providers are seated at the same table
with the same data, local systems will not improve and the same people will continue to languish on the streets.
As communities in the 100,000 Homes Campaign, we are not interested in who gets credit or who gets blame. We are interested in who gets housed.
Together, we are leading a national movement to permanently house 100,000 of our most vulnerable and chronically homeless neighbors. In the process, we are transforming the way our communities respond to homelessness and ensuring that a lifetime on the streets will be unheard of and unimaginable to our children.
Our movement stands for
Housing First
Permanent housing that happens first and fast, so that no one must battle disease, disability, mental illness or substance abuse without the safety and stability of a home.
Know Who’s Out There
Communities where every homeless person is known by name because someone has deliberately gone out on the streets to find them, assess their needs and meet them where they are at.
Track Your Progress
Local, multi-sector teams that use regularly collected, person-specific data to accurately track their progress toward ending homelessness for their most vulnerable neighbors.
Improve Local Systems
Housing and service systems that are simple and easy to navigate, while targeting resources quickly and efficiently to the people and families who need them most.
These principles reflect the danger and urgency of homelessness and chart a clear, viable path to overcoming it for the thousands of Americans at risk of dying on our streets. For those Americans and for all of us, the time for temporary, go-it-alone strategies is over. Instead, let our communities come together in meaningful collaboration to end homelessness, once and for all.