(film reel clattering) - Welcome to Ethnic Media Services' weekly virtual news briefing.

[computer music jingling] I'm Sandy Close, Ethnic Media Services director.

Homelessness ranks among voters' top concerns in cities across the country.

Today, we look at three cities that have made impressive gains in addressing the crisis.

Bakersfield, California; Houston, Texas; Columbus, Ohio.

Speakers on the front lines of providing services and advocacy will address the strategies they think worked, whether they're replicable in other cities, what challenges they see looking forward.

Our speakers include Mary Scott, executive team leader of the Open Door Network in Bakersfield; Catherine Villarreal and Ana Rausch of Houston's Coalition for the Homeless.

Now I turn the briefing over to today's moderator, journalist and author, Jaya Padmanabhan.

Jaya?

- Thank you, Sandy.

Welcome, journalists and media colleagues.

Homelessness is a topic that affects each one of us in big and small ways.

And, today we're looking at solutions to tackle this complex health, social, economic, political, and environmental problem.

So, we have a full slate today, and much to cover, so let's begin with our first speaker.

Mary Scott from Bakersfield, Kern County.

Mary is recognized as a leader in the movement to end homelessness in Kern County.

In our conversation recently, she mentioned that homelessness is a community issue and she will be expanding on that.

Mary?

All yours!

- Hi.

My name is Mary Scott, and I'm the client services director at the Open Door Network, formerly known as the Bakersfield Homeless Center, and the Alliance Against Family Violence.

I have been working with the homeless population for the past 17 years.

I started out as an AmeriCorps volunteer, working with homeless children.

And later, I worked as frontline staff providing intervention, mentorship, and wraparound services to homeless people transitioning back into the community as an aftercare case manager.

During my tenure, I promoted from direct staff to executive leadership.

I have had the opportunity to design, develop, implement, and manage programs for the aftercare and housing departments within our organizations.

I have worked with survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, people experiencing mental health crisis, people suffering from addiction.

And, I have been privileged to work alongside of collaborative leaders and frontline staff who are willing to put their boots on the ground and work hard to end homelessness in Kern County.

As an executive leader of the Open Door Network, I am pushing for change and continued success in our homelessness services system.

In March of 2020, Bakersfield, California ended chronic homelessness in Kern County.

We accomplished this because we changed our mindsets and our beliefs.

We now believe homelessness is not an individual issue.

Homelessness is a community issue.

Let me tell you a little bit about Kern County.

Kern County is located in the San Joaquin Valley in central California.

It covers 8,000 square miles of land.

We are well known for producing agriculture, crops, and oil for our nation.

Due to our large and varied landscape, we have several unique populations of homelessness.

Our homeless population is diverse and scattered over mountains, deserts, farmlands, river beds, abandoned buildings, cars, and shelters.

There are many faces to homelessness, and this is a call to action.

Homelessness can be someone like you or me.

Most people are one check away from homelessness.

This can be due to the lack of income, employment, and support.

Bakersfield is the largest city providing services for the surrounding rural communities in our county.

In the same county, many lack the transportation to receive these services.

So, the question is how did Bakersfield end chronic homelessness?

It was a community issue that required a community effort.

We built relationships with our housing authority and our homeless neighbors.

We partnered with our city, county, private businesses, and other community members.

Our leaders and our frontline staff in the Homeless Collaborative are awesome.

And, they are courageous.

They are not afraid to first fail in order to ultimately achieve success.

Some of our continued challenges are, we lack affordable housing.

We have a 2% vacancy rate, and we identified 1,603 unduplicated homeless individuals in our 2022 PIT count.

It is also a struggle finding landlords and property owners who are willing to rent to our clients who have little to no income.

Some of the strategies we use to solve homelessness are our By-Name List.

We approach solving homelessness by subpopulations instead of an entire census.

For example, we have five By-Name Lists: chronic homeless, veterans, youth, family, and elderly.

These subpopulations have their own unique barriers.

And, we case conference across organizations for each individual's status and barriers.

Their barriers then become our responsibilities.

This ensures they don't slip through the cracks while they are in our coordinated entry process system.

We also have innovative housing tactics.

We partnered with our housing authority for housing vouchers, low-income units, and the Homekey program, known as the Milestone Project.

That is refurbishing motels and turning them into permanent housing units.

We also have landlord engagements with housing locators, master leasing of units, Padmission software, which is our version of Zillow for our clients, flexible spending programs to eliminate housing barriers and landlord incentives for renting to our homeless population.

We provide housing interventions that are tied with aftercare services that provide mentorship, wraparound services, and we make sure that our people are not alone during this challenging transition back into independent living.

We are also preventing homelessness on the front end of the spectrum through our diversion program to ensure homelessness is brief, rare, and non-reoccurring.

Bakersfield, California has experienced success because we meet our people where they are.

And, remember, we changed our mindset and our beliefs, too.

Homelessness is not an individual issue.

Homelessness is a community issue.

Thank you.

- Thank you, Mary.

A couple of questions come to mind.

First, let's talk about what does chronic homelessness mean?

And, what do you mean by ending homelessness?

- So, "chronic homelessness" is when someone's been homeless for one consecutive year.

And then, also if they've had four episodes of homelessness, and they have a documented disability.

So, that's the definition of chronic homelessness.

And, ending homelessness for us is providing supportive services with permanent housing for them.

And, like I said, we have put ours into subpopulations in order to end homelessness.

And so, far we have ended chronic homelessness.

- And, you know, it is said that Bakersfield is the first county in California to end chronic homelessness.

And, the idea of functional zero was offered.

What does "functional zero" chronic homelessness mean?

- So, "functional zero" is when you have reached three or fewer persons who are homeless, and they're now housed.

So, it's not exactly zero, but it's three or fewer people.

And, that has come with the partnership of Built for Zero with Community Solutions who have partnered us and who is very innovated and provided support to us to end homelessness.

- How long does it take for a person experiencing chronic homelessness to be housed in Bakersfield, Kern County?

- So, actually with that, it varies.

Sometimes their barriers may come from them not having social security cards, identifications.

So, we do have to work towards that.

So, so far, homelessness?

It does vary.

Sometimes it can go from 120 days, to, the most, about 225 days.

That's from the time of engagement on the street to the time of permanently housed.

- Could you expand a bit about the By-Name List?

It's a fascinating idea that, you know, you put names, and you're kinda-?

Could you talk more about that?

- Yes!

So, the By-Name List is basically taking your whole entire list of homeless people that you come encounter with.

We basically keep a census of those names, and what we do with this By-Name List, instead of looking at this list and people becoming numbers to us, we personalize it, and these people become names.

And, since we do case conferencing as organizations, rather than by ourselves, we have divided them into subpopulations.

We currently have five of them.

So, we'll have those who are chronically homeless with the definition I gave earlier.

We have them on one list.

We have a veteran's list.

Then, we have a youth list.

We also have our elderly list, and a family By-Name List.

So, basically what we do, we'll case conference with the different organizations.

And, we will go one-by-one to each person to find out what it is that this service provider is providing, where their status is, what are their barriers, and as organizations, we case conference, and their barriers become our barriers.

And, we start taking responsibility, and, you know, practicing solving homelessness with each person.

And, that's what we did.

And, that's how we accomplished it.

- Okay.

We will move on to our next speakers who are from Houston.

Ana Rausch and Catherine Villarreal are from Houston's Coalition for the Homeless.

Their work was written up in a June 14th article in the New York Times with the title: "How Houston moved 25,000 people from the streets into homes of their own."

Catherine and Ana, please go ahead.

- Hello, everyone.

My name is Ana Rausch.

I am the vice president of program operations for the Coalition for the Homeless.

I have worked in the nonprofit sector for over 20 years, and over half of that has been in homeless services.

I really care about this because to me, everyone deserves-- it's part of human dignity.

Everyone deserves a roof over their head and food in their bellies, and so this work is very important.

I'm gonna introduce you to my coworker, Catherine.

Go ahead, Catherine.

- Hi, everyone, I'm Catherine Villarreal.

I'm the director of communications for the Coalition, in Houston.

I've been with the organization, and working on the issue of homelessness for a little over two years, but I've been working in what I would call public interest communications for the better part of the last decade.

I was interested in the issue of homelessness specifically, because I think because we have been able to make progress.

But, unfortunately, there are a lot of issues out there that feel really intractable, and it can be hard to know how to help.

But, here in Houston and in other communities, as we're seeing today, we are making progress, and able to help people get from homelessness into housing.

So, being able to make that progress in a meaningful way is really gratifying.

I'm gonna quickly introduce our organization, and our system, and then I'll hand it over to Ana to get into some more of the particulars.

So, Ana and I work for the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County.

We're a 40-year old nonprofit.

We're celebrating our 40th anniversary this year, and we're a systems level organization.

I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second, but it means we're not a direct service provider.

We have a little bit of a different role, and we are the quote/unquote "lead agency" to The Way Home.

And, "The Way Home" is our name for the local homeless response system in Harris County, Fort Bend County, and Montgomery County.

So, a very large geographic area down here in Southeast Texas.

But, "The Way Home" is more than a hundred different partners, including direct services providers, also governmental agencies, and mental health authority, all different kinds of folks working together to end homelessness in our region.

And, as Ana's gonna talk about, it is that partnership that has been so crucial in the progress that we've been able to make in our community ending homelessness.

And, just to paint-- to give you a little bit of an analogy about what our role is, what the coalition does, I'd like to draw an analogy of an airport.

Okay.

So if you think about an airport, there are airlines which provide services to their customers and customers are familiar with airlines like Delta, United, or Southwest.

Then there are the behind the scenes operations of the airport itself.

Everything that helps the process run smoothly, that customers might not think about as much, but are equally as important to get passengers safely to their destination.

So, if we apply that analogy to homelessness, if someone is "making the journey" from homelessness to housing, the direct service providers are like the airlines who interact the most closely with clients and help them along the way.

And, that's agencies that people are more familiar with in our community that are sort of the "public facing" brands that help people experiencing homelessness.

More than a hundred provider partners in The Way Home.

And, the Coalition for the Homeless that Ana and I work for is more like the airport.

We run the behind the scenes processes that help get people from homelessness into housing.

And, if you take all the partners working together, that's The Way Home.

So, that just might be a helpful tool for thinking about, well, what is it that the Coalition for the Homeless does in this process?

I hope that summarizes it for you.

And now, I'm gonna turn it over to Ana to talk more about the situation in Houston and what we've been up to.

- I love that analogy!

Definitely love it.

So, little bit about what we've been doing since 2011.

Back then, we had the sixth largest homeless population in the country, which was almost 9,000 individuals experiencing homelessness.

Homeless service providers were spending millions of dollars, but leaving a lot of money unspent.

Homeless service providers were also operating in silos with no collaboration, talking to one another.

We were not looking at our data to make sure that the decisions we were making were in line with what the community needed.

And, our recidivism was very high.

At that time, we were identified by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development as a priority community, and that's not a good thing.

It meant that we needed a little bit of help.

And so, we were provided with some technical assistance to get everyone together.

We all agreed that we needed to do a better job.

Here in Houston, we really have a "help thy neighbor" mentality due to the many natural disasters that we have, hurricanes, flooding.

And so, we always want to help one another.

We want to help your neighbor.

And so, our partners and funders, we all came together to identify the common goals for the homeless response system.

The end result is the structure that we have today with the Coalition for the Homeless as the lead organization.

We have a Continuum of Care Steering Committee that oversees the process for everything we do.

And now, we have an integrated network of providers that are coordinating to achieve maximum impact.

Because of this, our first five year strategic plan that started back in 2012, we ended veteran homelessness in 2015.

We created over 2,500 units of permanent supportive housing.

And, we've been able to slash our homeless numbers in half.

This year, our 2022 homeless count results: 3,124 individuals are experiencing homelessness; 1,622 of those are residing in a shelter.

And then, 1,502 individuals are living unsheltered or on the streets.

We are still seeing that a lot of people that are identifying as Black or African American are disproportionately represented, making up about 52% of the total population experiencing homelessness, but only 20% of the Harris County population in which Houston sits.

This is a slight decrease however, from 2021.

It was at 56.4%, and then this year was at 52%.

So, what have we been able to achieve?

How do we know that we've moved the needle?

Well, since 2011, we have decreased our overall homelessness by 63%.

Chronic homelessness, we spoke a little bit about that earlier.

We've decreased chronic homelessness by 69%.

And, we actually hope to declare "functional zero" pretty soon.

We have decreased family homelessness by 82%.

When the pandemic started, the COVID resources that came into our Continuum of Care allowed us to serve almost 10,000 individuals in two years.

It also allowed for the rollout and of an encampment decommissioning program that has demonstrated proven results in placing individuals living on the streets into housing.

And, that's something that's real-- that they discussed in the New York Times article, which we're very proud of.

So, overall we have housed more than 25,000 people since 2012.

Most of those individuals stay housed.

Our permanent supportive housing success rate is over 95%.

How do we do this?

Well, we continue to have a shared vision of the really the only way to end homelessness is with permanent housing and supportive services.

We use the Housing First model.

That means that we take someone from the streets and we put them into a place.

And then, once they feel safe, they have a roof over their head, they have food in their belly, then they can begin to focus on the issues that might have led to them becoming homeless.

You can't expect someone to try to find a job if they're living under the streets.

You can't expect someone to take their medication if they don't have any place to keep it.

And, we really do all of this with all of our partners.

There's no way we could do this alone.

It's all about collaboration.

We work with our local government, with our jurisdictions: the county, the city, the mayor's office, the judges' office here in Harris County; more than a hundred nonprofit service providers, like Catherine mentioned, both- all of our public housing authorities, actually.

And so, we've been able to do all this by working together, talking to one another, no longer working in silos; looking towards, you know, the future and doing it together.

Focusing on what are the strengths of certain organizations so they can do it best.

And then, those that can do one thing can do it one way.

And, those at other organizations can do something better instead of everyone trying to do it all at one time and no one really doing it effectively.

So, we're very proud of our work.

Right now, what we're gonna do focusing on next, we've decommissioned over 57 encampments.

And, because we have housed so many individuals over the last two years of the pandemic, we used to have a pretty great affordable housing market here in Houston.

We had a lot of market rate units that still met the HUD FMR, "fair market rent."

However, because we have housed so many individuals, a lot of those vacancies have been filled, and it's gotten to the point where there's really not many vacancies left.

And, even some of the properties that we've worked with have sold to investors because they're more profitable now, since they're at close to 100% occupancy.

So, the availability of one-bedrooms, especially because the majority of the individuals that we've housed over these years have been singles or couples.

And so, we just don't have enough of those to go around.

So, we have an entire landlord engagement team that does a fantastic job of, you know, recruiting landlords.

And so, we have a work group now, because again, working together, we try to identify where we can go next to identify landlords to work with the system.

And then, of course, after the COVID pandemic ends, what are we gonna do?

What are we gonna do with these permanent housing programs that we've identified?

So, we are constantly looking ahead, two, three, four, five years in the future to figure out the sustainability of our homeless response system and putting our resources into permanent solutions.

- Thank you, Ana.

That was fascinating.

And, Catherine, thank you for that metaphor.

I have-- well?

Sandy has a question.

Texas is a super red state.

Has there been a political backlash?

- No, I don't think-- not at all; not in Houston.

Houston is very diverse, and we don't see a lot of the issues that you might see in some areas of Texas.

Catherine, what do you think?

- Yeah.

I would say, as Ana was saying, we have a really close working relationship with the city, Mayor Sylvester Turner, as well as Harris County.

And, our-?

Let's say, our governor doesn't quite believe the same things that we believe when it comes to addressing homelessness.

And, some of y'all might be aware that there was a law passed at the last meeting of the Texas state legislature that essentially criminalized homelessness.

That was seeking to kind of crack down on encampments.

And, I will say, we do not share that belief.

We do not believe that that is an effective way to prevent or end homelessness.

We know that the right way to address homelessness is to put people into permanent housing, as we've been talking about.

And, we think cracking down an encampments that way just moves people around.

It doesn't solve anything.

And so, that's why we are so glad to have the support of the city and the county.

And using, as Ana mentioned, an approach to decommissioning encampments that involves offering a permanent housing option to everybody.

- One last question.

Pilar?

Pilar Marrero.

- Sorry, I wasn't able to unmute.

Okay!

Thank you so much for the briefing.

Wonderful briefing, Jaya.

My question is how do you deal with the community?

So, we see sometimes resistance from the communities where you place the formerly homeless.

There is a plan here in LA.

Somebody presented a plan here in LA to create a new homeless center in a former Sears big store in Boyle Heights where I live, which is in East LA.

And, the communities, a lot of people in the community were just upset.

They don't want it there.

So, how do you deal with those communities and those issues?

LA's housing, homeless population keeps going up.

- I would say for me, I like to present facts, right?

So, you know, we can say that individuals that are experiencing homelessness are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrate the crime.

It's a stereotype that people that are experiencing homelessness are, you know, drug addicts and out to do no good.

So, that's one thing.

Just look at the facts.

An example that I use in my own neighborhood, there was, you know, a group of individuals living peacefully, unsheltered in a small encampment behind some wooded areas.

I knew they were there.

I had gone many times with outreach teams to engage with them.

They never bothered anyone.

No one knew they were there except the service providers.

And then, new construction happened.

They cleared the wooded area away, and some stores and stuff were gonna be put there.

And then, you could see the tents.

And then, all of a sudden, the neighborhood just exploded.

A bunch of my neighbors were freaking out because it was near a movie theater and the kids were gonna walk by.

And so, I just said, 'you know, 'they've been there for years and they never bothered anyone.

'And, you never knew that they were there.

'And now they're there, and you're saying something's gonna happen?'

Has something happened the past five years?

No.

So, it's all about educating people and trying to help them understand that it's just a stereotype.

These are human beings, and you don't want them on the streets.

Some people complain because people are living on the streets.

It's unsightly.

These are human beings; they deserve dignity.

They don't deserve to be sleeping on the floor, on the ground with, you know, animal droppings and feces.

So, let's just do some kindness to our neighbors and help them.

- Thank you, Ana and Catherine, and thank you to Ethnic Media Services.

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