People who live on the streets tend to cycle through emergency rooms, addiction treatment, psychiatric care and jails. They’ve done it by guiding homeless people into permanent supportive housing, with retention rates between 85 and 90 percent. New York, Denver, Wichita, Kansas and Norfolk, Va., for example, have significantly reduced their street populations, in some cases by more than half. The big story with street homelessness is that when cities make a concerted effort to reduce it, they succeed. But organizers say they are gaining momentum. As of today, 6,816 people have been housed - on track to hit 98,000 by the deadline. So far 64 communities have come on board. The campaign was launched this past July by a New York-based organization called Common Ground and close to 20 organizations that focus on homelessness, veterans’ affairs, mental illness, housing and health care. Whether the goal is achieved or not, the campaign is shifting the way cities address a problem that has often been seen as more of a nuisance than a public health emergency. It’s the human welfare equivalent of NASA’s race to put a man on the moon. Without direct assistance, many will remain homeless for the rest of their lives - at enormous cost to society and themselves.Īgainst this backdrop, the 100,000 Homes Campaign has set the goal of placing 100,000 chronically homeless people - pinpointing those who face the greatest risk of dying on the streets - into permanent supportive housing by July 2013. They are also five times more likely than ordinary Americans to have suffered a traumatic brain injury, which may have precipitated their homelessness. They often live on the streets for years and have mental disabilities, addiction problems and life-threatening diseases like heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
Each day, roughly 700,000 people in the country are homeless. It’s not an indeterminate “war on homelessness,” but a methodical approach to do away with a major social problem. This is a story about a plan to end chronic homelessness in the United States.
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