Homeless Camp Sweeps Can Harm Health. Here's a New Way.

In response to managing the homeless crisis, several Safe Rest Villages have emerged throughout the city. These are small, individual units on city-owned land, separate from nearby neighborhoods. There are currently seven active Safe Rest Villages in the city and they have created 350 transitional housing opportunities for the local 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.

Inside Safe addresses the significant homelessness crisis in the city by traveling to encampments and offering people hotel rooms to stay in where they are connected with permanent housing and other necessary resources, like mental health care. Hotel rooms provide people with a safe space to heal and rest while working with a case worker to find housing. The initiative has so far moved 1,373 people into hotel rooms and 77 of them have moved into permanent housing.

Reinstitute is a global non-profit, focusing on lowering homelessness across the world. The organization works with communities, both rural or urban, and constructs a “100-day challenge” to gather various groups and resources together to make a consequential change in homelessness in 100 days. The program has seen great success across the U.S., most recently housing 1,852 people following a campaign in California.

The city of Tucson and Pima County are using a network of cooling centers, repurposed shipping containers and street outreach teams to protect unhoused residents and people living in substandard housing from deadly summer heat. The coordinated response, which includes trauma-informed staff training, heat-relief kit distribution, and an annual planning summit, is helping reduce heat-related deaths in the region.

Efforts from the local Housing, Health and Human Services Center helped make Bergen the first — and one of the few — U.S. cities that have reached functional zero for chronic homelessness. Through providing counseling services and helping those in need access care and other resources like employment, the Center has helped several people secure housing, nearly eliminating long-term homelessness for veterans and those struggling with conditions like addiction and other mental illnesses.

The Eden Village tiny home community helps to provide people without homes a place to live. Tiny homes communities allow municipalities to build more dense and affordable housing for the people who need it most. All the homes in the village are “permanent supportive housing,” meaning residents may live in their homes for the remainder of their lives as long as they follow the rules set forth by the community.

Community of Hope offers day shelter services and intensive case management for unhoused residents in the Las Cruces area. In the fiscal year 2020-2021, the program served 3,263 people, connecting them to affordable, income-based housing solutions.

For social service agencies, prioritizing well-being requires new procedures and a framework for understanding holistic wellness. The Full Frame Initiative has partnered with agencies in the states of Massachusetts and Missouri in an effort to bring categories of well-being into their purview. The Initiative uses five metrics—safety, mastery, social connectedness, and access to resources— to help align social systems, ranging from courts and juvenile corrections to homeless housing services, with social needs so that agencies can better assist their communities.

While any attempted solution to homelessness is admirable, it’s the ideas that include community that may be the most successful. This is the concept supported by Stephanie Sena, a professor at Villanova who has dedicated her life to bringing “best practices” of homeless communities to Philadelphia. Still in the early stages, this community model would attempt to beat homelessness by bringing people together - not only giving a roof and a bed. Ideally, the community aspect would make the solution sustainable.