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National Alliance to End Homelessness

The Race to Watch: New Orleans

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | No Comments

This past week, I morphed into one of those annoying people who can’t get off their cell phone. No, I wasn’t playing a game or even checking facebook, but I still spent at least an hour a day obsessively refreshing twitter. This week, the National Alliance to End Homelessness held its annual conference in Washington, D.C. I couldn’t quite hear the presentations from an hour away in Baltimore, so I relied on the almost 1600 attendees — the most the conference has ever seen — to keep me updated.

To many, this probably doesn’t sound like a great use of a sunny week in July. It is surprising then, that the overwhelming message I took from an event on poverty, mental health, addiction, hunger, HIV/AIDS, veterans, and youth homelessness, was one of hope.

If you didn’t spend your week as I did, let me be the first to break the news: we’re in the middle of an underdog story. In my opinion, the big winner this year in the Race to End Homelessness, was New Orleans, Louisiana. A city I’ve criticized in the past for its frightening statistics when it comes to general homelessness, chronic homelessness, and veteran homelessness, NOLA has done something remarkable — changed their trends.

In 2005, New Orleans suffered one of the worst storms in recent history when Hurricane Katrina descended. The storm destroyed, among other infrastructure, much of the city’s affordable housing and service programs, leaving many homeless. An already serious problem in the city worsened, propelling NOLA to earn the title of the city with the second highest rate of homelessness nationwide.

Nearly eight years later, many former New Orleans residents are still displaced or struggling to recover, but homelessness has decreased significantly. Chronic homelessness has decreased by 47 percent in the city since 2009, and in some parishes this number is as high as 79 percent. Martha Kegel, the Executive Director of UNITY of Greater New Orleans and Stacy Horn Koch, Director of Homeless Policy in New Orleans write that, “New Orleans is on track to become one of the first cities to eliminate the long-term homelessness of people with disabilities, in line with the federal plan to end chronic homelessness by 2015.”

How did New Orleans surge ahead in the race? Kegel and Koch credit extra emergency vouchers, the city’s 10 year plan to end homelessness, and support from Mayor Landrieu as the key factors that have led the city to find and help those affected by Katrina. Service providers target the most vulnerable people and attempt to house them first. Search teams comb vacant buildings to find people dwelling inside and connect them with housing and services. When the storm displaced the city’s population, outreach teams went looking for them.

Numbers for  New Orleans are not quite back to pre-Katrina levels, but with 2,337 people experiencing homelessness today, things are much better than in 2007, when over 11,000 people were without housing in the city.

We can — and should — celebrate the progress happening in Louisiana. More importantly, we can learn from this comeback story. Each city faces a unique set of challenges when it comes to ending homelessness, but if New Orleans can move from one of this county’s worst natural disasters to end homelessness by 2015, there is nothing stopping the rest of us from making strides in the Race to End Homelessness.

A Future Without Hovercars, or Homelessness

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | No Comments

Ten years seems like a long time. If we go by the promises made in Back to the Future II , we should all be using hover boards in about two years. In a movie about time travel, the future is open to endless possibilities. Maybe it was this feeling of confidence in the future that motivated teams in 243 jurisdictions to create Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness. With a buffer of a decade, a lot seems feasible.

Baltimore adopted its Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness in 2008, promising homelessness would be “rare and brief” a decade later. As we approach the halfway mark on the plan, some data suggests homelessness is actually increasing. Something is obviously not working, but what? And how can it be fixed?

The campaign to have cities adopt these plans originated with the National Alliance to End Homelessness in 2000. They provide support and tips for creating a Ten Year Plan, and even offer some simple ground rules. They’ve gotten over 200 cities, towns or whole states to adopt these plans, with mixed results.

Philadelphia pledged to end homelessness by the year 2010. They developed a comprehensive plan to make this goal a reality, yet there are still people experiencing homelessness there. New York and Los Angeles both have plans in place to end homelessness by the year 2016 and have seen some positive results, but these cities still boast the largest groups of people experiencing homelessness in the country.

When a city writes a ten year plan, they generally look at national models and perhaps what other cities are planning. After the plan is on paper, the communication seems to slow. Instead of just looking 10 years off into the distant future, perhaps we can learn from looking around us to see what other cities are doing to make changes.

Chicago has seen a 12 percent decrease in its homeless population by using a housing-first model, and Denver has reduced chronic homelessness by 36 percent by coupling housing with mental healthcare. What works in one city might not work everywhere: not every city has as many abandoned row homes as Baltimore, as many homeless people as New York City, or as large a percentage of its population experiencing homelessness as New Orleans. Still, a sharing of ideas might spark the right formula for programs and policies that can work in at least one other area. Each city fighting on its own for the end of homelessness is one thing that is definitely not  working. Better communication is necessary to really change homelessness.

Will we achieve hover boards before we end homelessness in any city in the United States? A lot could change in 10 years if we can sustain the support and focus needed to make systematic changes to the way a city approaches homelessness – but only if we share ideas about what works.

Up Next: Housing Economic Policy

Photo credit:  The Kobal Collection