What’s in a name? How other communities fight homelessness

Homelessness. I wish we didn’t have to talk so much about it, but it’s been the elephant under the bridge for everyone recently.

It’s really easy to get angry and point out what isn’t working, and much harder to find things that work. According to some reporting in the New York Times, there are now “nine communities in the United States have reached a rigorous standard known as ‘functional zero’ for either veteran or chronic homelessness.”

These are places like Rockford, Ill. (population of 152,000) and New Haven, Conn. (population of 129,000). I put the populations in there, because I think it’s important to show these nine aren’t super small towns of 20,000 people where everyone knows everybody else. These are cities we’ve all heard of.

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So a few questions straight away. First, what are they doing? Second, has anyone from our city reached out to these cities that are at functional zero?

I’ll answer the second part first, I doubt it. I hope that the answer is no, because if we have reached out to communities that are solving homelessness and then not changed, that’s even worse in to me.

So back to my first question, how did they do it?

Well, the simple answer is they treat homelessness the same way we eradicate a disease like small pox. These communities — which spend far less than King County does — get all the important players in the same room at the same time and share real time data to solve homelessness.

Jennifer Jaeger is Rockford’s community services director. She told the Times:

Every person who is homeless in our community that we are aware of goes on our by-name list.

Then we get everybody in our community who works on the issue, whether it’s veteran or chronic or youth homelessness, and we bring them into a room. So if we’re working on veterans, we’ll have the V.A., the local veteran agencies, mental health agencies and substance abuse agencies, and we’ll sit down with the list and say: ‘O.K., John Smith is No. 1. Who’s working with him? How do we get him housed as fast as we can?’ And we go literally name by name. It makes a huge difference because they stop being ‘the homeless’ and become people we all know. And we become very vested in making sure John Smith is housed and safe and has the services he needs to stay housed.

That’s it? Just assign each homeless person to the proper agency one-by-one? But that’s so simple and straight forward.

Just like most important things in life, the answer is simple but difficult. If you put a name and a face on each person, and then ask who is helping that individual, and hold them accountable, things improve. But that requires that you leave your politics and ego at the door, and that’s something our local leaders find almost impossible to do.

It goes without saying that this is not how things are done around here. As we found out recently, local officials go out of their way to not share information between agencies.

But we should all be encouraged that there are solutions out there. We just need continue to pressure local leaders to do things that work.

You can hear “What are we talking about here?” everyday at 4:45 p.m. on 97.3 FM.

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