It's frustrating how close we could be to ending homelessness

Implementing a few key data gathering steps has functionally driven homeless populations to zero in some American cities with the guts to make progress on this humanist issue.

Basically all you have to do is count every night.

Each piece of the data gathered during intake plays importantly into the system maintaining a functional zero state.

Functional Zero - Community Solutions

Functional zero is a dynamic milestone that indicates a community has ended homelessness for a population and sustained this progress.

Community Solutions

Achieving functional zero with a specific homeless population means a few things:

1. Homelessness is rare and brief
2. Cities and counties are operating off of a full accounting of homelessness at all times
3. The community is working toward equitable systems, starting with a focus on race and ethnicity
4. Finally, all of these achievements are sustained over time, even as local conditions change

Enough experiments have been conducted that demonstrate quite clearly that if commitment to an intake process that gathers by-name data and work quickly on that data to resolve the emergency, the necessary steps to close the larger gap will be more easily identified, but more importantly, immediately financially justifiable.

There's not enough houses

This is nothing new, we know.

There’s a massive housing shortage across the U.S. Here’s how bad it is where you live

Hundreds of cities and towns are seriously short of housing, both homes to buy and rentals, according to a new study. It’s the main reason that home prices and rents are so high.

NPRChris Arnold

Houses were once plentiful across the U.S. Now half of cities don’t have enough homes.

Home prices are skyrocketing amid a shortage of properties — a crisis spreading to once-affordable towns across the U.S.

CBS NewsAimee Picchi

Housing Breaks People’s Brains

Supply skepticism and shortage denialism are pushing against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes.

The AtlanticJerusalem Demsas

Homelessness should never be a sustained or reoccurring problem; if it is, and tent cities certainly are, something is seriously wrong with your ability to provide for basic needs. The first step to housing everyone is ensuring homelessness is rare & brief. If there's not enough houses for people there can be nothing but this.

I'm not going to say the state or municipality needs to build homes, but it sure as stone needs to ensure the supply of housing matches or slightly exceeds the need. If this isn't true you have not an emergency of a few people left homeless because of a rare house fire, easily housed temporarily in dedicated facilities, but sprawling and random large scale rot of people living far below a standard easily attainable by the industry and wealth that surrounds us. Industry and wealth that labor has created and billionaires stolen. This is not as easily addressed by ready built facilities, these people need homes.

Build them or figure them out.

I haven't even mentioned the veterans.

Anyone familiar with working in or around homeless populations understands the sick duality of a facet of American culture; doublethink reverence and disgust for the military and veterans. We don't account for much opportunity outside of binary good/bad, and so it's the same with our veterans. Those familiar with the homeless I have previously appealed to know why this is an important subject; veterans are disproportionately represented among homeless populations.

7% of the total US population is a military service veteran. That's about 1 in every 14 people.

Of all homeless people, vets make up 13%. You only have to find 8 to find 1 vet.

Veteran Homelessness

How many homeless veterans are there? Although flawless counts are impossible to come by – the transient nature of homeless populations presents a major difficulty – the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates that 40,056 veterans are homeless on any given night. Over the c…

National Coalition for Homeless Veteransmoduet

Just do it