(Illustration by Raffi Marhaba, The Dream Creative)
America’s homeless response system has been called “the emergency room of society,” conjuring images of a space where the focus is on urgent intervention—finding shelter or managing encampments—rather than trying to prevent crises from happening in the first place. But what if we think instead about homelessness as a point on a continuum that encompasses many states: housed and unhoused, permanent and temporary, stable and unstable, affordable and unaffordable? What if we see being unhoused as a condition that is shaped by many forces and systems outside an individual’s control, and therefore amenable to system reforms that might actually prevent emergency situations, while also providing clear routes out for those who do end up in crisis?
That’s the perspective taken by the funder collaboration Funders for Housing and Opportunity (FHO), and it drives FHO’s growing emphasis on very affordable housing (meaning housing that’s affordable to those with very low incomes) as a solution to homelessness. That sounds obvious, but too often homelessness is addressed in a silo, separate and apart from efforts to bring housing justice to a system that, for too many people, creates barriers to stable, affordable, healthy homes.
Several of FHO’s members, including the authors of this article, have extensive experience in addressing the unhoused end of the housing continuum—from funding direct services for people who have lost housing, to supporting efforts to change eviction policies and practices, to investing in the development of new supportive housing. We all come to the challenge of homelessness from different starting points, based on our organizations’ interests in related issues such as renters’ rights, immigrant and refugee rights, re-entry after incarceration, the rights of people with disabilities, domestic violence, and hate crimes. However, given that housing is the platform for most successes in life, we find value in breaking down the silos among funders and across sectors as FHO begins to address America’s housing crisis. We hope the following lessons help other funders and social change leaders find ways to collaborate across sectors and silos on housing solutions.
1. Put housing first.
Housing is the solution to homelessness. Getting into safe, stable, affordable housing—without any requirements beyond those faced by any other renter—gives people who are unhoused the solid foundation they need to begin to address other issues, such as physical and mental health, education, employment, economic security, or substance use. In fact, since outcomes in all these areas are so interrelated, none of our other investments and interventions will likely succeed or endure if people become or remain unhoused.
A Housing First approach attends to the most fundamental need first. One model often targeted to people with chronic illnesses, disabilities, mental health challenges, substance use problems, or recent incarceration, is to fund programs that provide immediate access and long-term rental assistance for permanent supportive housing, which enables people to be housed while also receiving intensive case management and help with health care, getting a job, and other issues rather than waiting until they have “graduated” from service programs before being housed. Another approach is to fund programs and organizations that provide short-term help to people experiencing homelessness with identifying, renting, and moving into affordable housing, along with case management and services.
Numerous studies have shown that giving people more autonomy, choice, and control in this way makes it easier for them to participate in the supportive services that will enable them to remain housed. Research has found that almost 90 percent of people placed in permanent supportive housing were still successfully housed over a year later. Services have a greater impact when not required as a condition for being housed and are more cost-effective because housed individuals are less likely to use emergency services. No one organization or sector can implement a Housing First approach on its own, but through coordinated efforts across sectors, we can effectively get people into homes and on the path to thriving.
2. Think through a systems lens and work toward systems change.
While housing services that meet the immediate needs of people experiencing homelessness are critical, on their own they merely treat the symptoms of a deeper systemic illness: lack of affordable, safe, and stable housing that all people deserve as a basic human right. In Homelessness is a Housing Problem, Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern of the University of Washington report that structural factors in local housing markets, such as the cost and availability of rental housing, are more powerful drivers of homelessness than individual renters’ vulnerabilities.
Thinking systemically means recognizing the connections between housing, homelessness, and everything else. The affordable housing crisis stems from supply shortages and rents increasing at a much faster clip than incomes but also inflation and the skyrocketing cost of living. Homelessness and affordable housing are not just coastal, urban, or blue-state problems; more Americans are experiencing housing insecurity in more parts of the country where affordable housing was once thought plentiful.
This interconnectedness gives all funders a reason to collaborate on investments to address homelessness and housing affordability, whether or not they are explicitly “housing” or “homelessness” funders. Each area of work complements the others by bringing a different set of partners, networks, strategies, and resources to the collective table. In addition to funding collaboratively, FHO finds that supporting collaboration among different organizations enables us to address several parts of the housing or homelessness response system at once. For example, as COVID-19 spread in 2020, and urgency grew to prevent even higher rates of homelessness, racial equity in housing was at risk of taking a back seat to public health concerns and operational challenges.
In response, FHO made a three-year, $450,000 grant to support a collaboration involving the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Housing Justice Collective, the National Alliance to End Homelessness, National Health Care for the Homeless Council, National Innovation Service, National Low Income Housing Coalition, Urban Institute, and two former directors of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness to co-develop numerous resources for decision makers in the states, counties, and cities that receive funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. They produced an Equity-Based Decision Making Framework to serve marginalized populations affected by the pandemic and economic fallout, plus more than three dozen other resources on designing and implementing homelessness response systems.
3. Elevate and support the contributions of people who have experienced homelessness.
No one knows better than a person who’s been unhoused what toll it takes and what stands in the way of becoming permanently housed. Sadly, a lot of such knowledge exists: Seven million extremely low-income renters in America can’t find affordable homes, and in January 2020, even before the COVID-19 pandemic wrought havoc on renters and mortgage holders alike, more than 580,400 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States. Unless we include some of them as co-designers and co-implementers of solutions, we’re doomed to perpetuate the systemic failures that got us here in the first place. In fact, the wall of the silo separating people who experience homelessness from the people funding, planning, and delivering solutions is one of the largest and most important to break down.
Increasingly, funders are trying to incentivize grantees to involve people with lived experience in solving various social concerns and to work with them as strategy and grant advisors—and sometimes as co-designers, partners, and decision makers. Homelessness may be one of the toughest social concerns to address because those who are unhoused are especially vulnerable and require the support of multiple sectors to succeed. Still, we’ve had some successes. As part of developing the Framework for an Equitable COVID-19 Homelessness Response, for example, National Innovation Services (NIS), a corporation that partnered with government agencies and nonprofits to design more equitable public systems from 2019-2022, designed and facilitated a working group of national and local policy experts, advocates, direct service providers, and people serving the communities most impacted by the pandemic.
At the recommendation of the working group, NIS then held 10 listening sessions with unhoused participants from communities that have been marginalized because of race, incarceration, disabilities, involvement with public systems, or status as LGBTQ to hear what they most need and want, and to learn what solutions do and don’t work for them. The team created briefs summarizing the ideas and suggestions generated by each group of people with firsthand experience. The themes identified in those early listening sessions informed the framework’s overall direction, resulting in resources that include guidance videos, podcasts, and a webinar on partnering with people with lived experience to design and implement homelessness response systems.
4. Prioritize young people.
Youth homelessness often flies under the radar because most of the approximately four million young people between the ages of 14-24 who experience some period of homelessness each year aren’t in shelters or on the street. More often, they’re spending a night, a week, a month, or longer on a friend’s couch or squatting in a vacant house or other temporary, unstable accommodations. While youth homelessness happens at roughly equal rates in urban, suburban, and rural areas, to whom homelessness happens is by no means equally distributed. Young people of color, young people with histories of involvement with child welfare, juvenile justice, and behavioral health systems, and LGBTQ+ youth experience homelessness at much greater rates.
Young people often struggle to find their place in homelessness and social support services. As a result, we need to be intentional about including and designing programs specifically for them. We need to create systems of care that align with their needs and priorities. To do that, we need to incorporate their voices and give them direct leadership opportunities. A growing cross-sector movement is using more equitable approaches to address youth homelessness. For example:
- Point Source Youth is a national nonprofit that implements programs that center youth choice and empowerment such as subsidized rent and case management for rapid re-housing and services aimed at reuniting families, repairing relationships, and building acceptance. The organization also provides advocacy, technical assistance, and training to service providers, funders, youth, allied movements, and policy makers seeking to end youth homelessness.
- Another national nonprofit, True Colors United, focuses on LGBTQ young people and collaborates with communities and service providers to prevent youth homelessness. It conducts advocacy at all levels of government; provides training, education, and technical assistance; and collaborates with young people to ensure that youth-led policies, systems, and protections are in place.
- A Way Home America is a national coalition of homeless youth providers, advocates, researchers, government agencies, philanthropists, and young people working to end homelessness for youth and young adults, especially those who are BIPOC and LGBTQ.
To help funders better support these and other efforts to prevent and end youth homelessness, Funders Together to End Homelessness (a close partner of FHO) created Funders Network for Youth Success, which provides “learning and action” resources on how to support specific elements of this work, as well as opportunities for funders to network, connect, and engage in advocacy.
Looking Forward
We live in a precarious time when the number of unhoused people is increasing every year, and the burden falls mainly on people of color, who constitute about 60 percent of the US homeless population even though they represent only 39 percent of the total US population. The good news is that the field of programs and services for unhoused people is pivoting toward housing justice, a way of thinking about systems and structures that includes racial and economic justice for marginalized people.
As system leaders, policy makers, program providers, and the funders who support them try to fix the systems and structures that drive homelessness, they will increasingly need to work outside of their individual silos. In particular, those who don’t think of themselves as working in this field need to see how homelessness and housing relate directly to their priorities. The link between “housing funders” and “health funders” is just one example: Since people who experience chronic homelessness require housing before they can be treated for their physical or behavioral health ailments, those of us working on health equity have a nexus point with those focused on creating a healthy, responsive housing system that helps unhoused people connect to permanent housing and the services they need in a timely way.
We need to keep building philanthropic unity so that funders’ resources are coordinated and mutually reinforcing. As FHO’s work reminds us, power doesn’t solely lie in the amount of money invested (though adequate funding is necessary) but also in the strength of a shared strategy and voice. As new voices come into this complicated and messy field, collaboratives like FHO provide the solidarity, support, and space for learning we need to break down the silos that separate us. Our grantmaking alone isn’t going to end homelessness, but where we sit in the housing ecosystem, whom we support, and how we operate as funders can make a big difference.
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Read more stories by Seyron Foo, Raji Hunjan & Amy Kleine.