In a little over a decade, Houston has housed over 28,000 people who were experiencing homelessness. The U.S.’s 4th largest city has cut its total homelessness figures by more than 60% since committing to tackle this issue head-on in 2012.
Representatives from cities nationwide visit Houston to learn about how they’ve achieved such progress.
Houston adopted what’s called a Housing First strategy. Housing First, for those unfamiliar, is an approach to addressing the challenge of homelessness by first, before addressing anything else (addiction and sobriety, employment, etc.), housing the individual in question. Research has shown this is the most effective way to get and keep people out of homelessness. Various studies confirm that a rapid re-housing approach leads to 75%-91% of households remaining housed after one year.
The thing is, Housing First has been around for a while. While the ideas originated around the world over 100 years ago, the term became more widely used in the U.S. in the early 1990s.
Not to take away from what Houston has accomplished, but they didn’t make some groundbreaking discovery. They were applying (effectively, very much to their credit) someone else’s ideas.
So what changed? Where did the political will come from to commit so fervently to addressing this issue?
These are the questions we answer in today's ensemble:
Are we even close?
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