Black Mayors Visit Innovative Temporary Housing Complex in LA

San Francisco officials converted an abandoned school on the Mission’s skid row into a special kind of shelter with the means to take chronically homeless adults from the street and entire encampment communities, then navigate them into housing, without the traditional, degrading rules and regulations of other shelters. It’s become one of the most closely watched homeless-related projects in the country, and Seattle is one of the cities looking to potentially replicate their model to help address the homelessness crisis.

School districts in Washington State are required to identify students experiencing homelessness and enroll them into a state program in which the district pays for the students' transportation and covers the cost of other necessities with allotted federal funds.

A study on four homeless individuals showed that they cost thousands of dollars, plus hours of city officials' time. Outreach Fort Collins aims to decrease these numbers by recognizing the importance of relationships and checking in on homeless individuals as a neighborhood resource for people to turn to if there is a concern (rather than calling the police).

Homes for All Veterans, a program within the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Human Services, recently began training volunteers to walk the city's streets in search of homeless veterans, with the goal of effectively eliminate veteran homelessness by the end of the year. If successful, advocates say the push to end veteran homelessness could be the first step in addressing the city's larger, chronically homeless population.

The Community Health Center of Southeast Kansas and its subsidiary Building Health act as safety nets for uninsured people experiencing homelessness by expanding the definition of healthcare to also include housing, serving about 85,000 people a year. By providing wraparound care and services from help finding housing to legal assistance and education, the groups’ combined efforts helped shrink the rate of uninsured, unhoused people from 16% in 2020 to about 12% now.

Los Angeles County social workers are using AI to find people at risk of homelessness before they become unhoused. Instead of traditional programs that wait for people to seek help themselves, this technology is more preventative, allowing social workers to provide assistance ahead of time. The program launched in 2020 and has since served over 400 people.

The Salt Lake City Public Library employed in-house social workers and built out an area in the library dedicated to providing a variety of resources for people experiencing homelessness and anyone else looking for support. The staff helps people find individualized paths forward, and partner organizations host office hours for things like harm reduction services and workforce services.

The Denver Basic Income Project provided people experiencing homelessness with no-strings-attached monthly stipends that they could spend however they’d like. At the end of the pilot, twice as many participants were in stable housing, more of them were working full time, and the nights that participants spent in shelters decreased by half.

A guaranteed income program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, provided 130 single caregivers who made below 80% of the local median income with $500 cash payments, no strings attached. The 18-month program, Cambridge Recurring Income for Success, helped participants increase their savings, cover emergencies, and spend more time with their children.

In Minnesota, Hennepin County is using a housing-first approach, working with individuals on their specific needs, and focusing on the most vulnerable populations first to reduce the number of people experiencing homelessness in the county.