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South Texas College of Law Houston Alumnus Leads Charge to End Homelessness in Houston

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“Houston is on track to become the first city in the nation to effectively end chronic homelessness,” said South Texas College of Law Houston alumnus Marc Eichenbaum ’08.

Eichenbaum is Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner’s special assistant for homeless initiatives. In this role, he manages the city’s response to homelessness and helps coordinate a coalition of more than 100 partner organizations that comprise The Way Home, an initiative to reduce homelessness in the Greater Houston region. While this may seem like a tall order to some, Eichenbaum’s confidence is – like every action he takes – based on hard data.

When the program began under Mayor Annise Parker in 2011, Houston had the sixth-largest homeless population in the U.S., with more than 8,500 homeless people in shelters and on the streets on any given night. Since then, the city has reduced that number by an average of 15 percent annually, and in June 2015, the coalition announced the effective end of veteran homelessness in Houston.

With numbers like this, it is no surprise the program has gained national attention, becoming a model for other large cities. Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, New Orleans, Orlando, and San Antonio have sent delegations to the Bayou City to uncover the secret to Houston’s success.

“It takes patience, political will, a lot of money, and the effective persuasion of different organizations to look beyond old concepts and try something new,” Eichenbaum said.

The first step was to centralize the fragmented efforts of over a hundred nonprofit, governmental, and private organizations to create a streamlined and efficient homeless response system.

“We had dozens of shelters, health service providers, and outreach programs who were focused on the homeless population, but they weren’t really collaborating,” Eichenbaum said. “And in many cases, they were actually competing against each other for government and private funding.”

To effectively remove this barrier, local stakeholders created the Houston/Harris County Continuum of Care, known as The Way Home – a federally recognized, collaborative governance body that service agencies and funders can join.

The Way Home has committees that focus on different segments of the homeless population, including youth, families, chronically homeless individuals, and veterans.

Funding entities pool their resources together, and The Way Home’s Steering Committee distributes funds in accordance with the coalition’s collective priorities and performance standards, allowing the member organizations to concentrate their efforts for greater impact. The city and local funders have incentivized membership in The Way Home by directing all of their homeless funding to the initiative.

“There is power in numbers,” Eichenbaum said. “The Way Home centralizes and organizes local efforts to maximize our collective impact.”

The Way Home’s first order of business was to reassess the priorities of homeless intervention and determine the most effective means to reach their goal. This is where the secret comes in.

Traditional models focus on managing an individual’s immediate, basic needs: food, shelter, and medical attention. Eichenbaum said data shows the problem with this model is threefold.

“For one, providing supportive services on the streets is highly ineffective and cost-prohibitive. Secondly, when the goal is simply feeding people and giving them a bed for a night, we are merely managing the issue with Band-Aids and lose sight of the end game: solving the issue with permanent solutions. There was an organizational culture among both funders and service providers that inadvertently valued volume over substance. You know, ‘Hooray, we served 1,000 more people this year than we did last year!’ But, our focus should be on reducing the number of people we serve – because that means we are creating sustainable solutions to keep them off the street.”

The third issue is economic. The average chronically homeless person costs taxpayers over $40,000 per year in the form of things like emergency room visits, jail stays, ambulance rides, and temporary shelter, which means Houston was spending more than $100 million per year to support the chronically homeless, which only accounted for about one-quarter of the region’s homeless population.

Eichenbaum noted, “It is actually more expensive to merely walk by the homeless on our streets than to house them. By placing the chronically homeless into housing with supportive services, we can cut costs by up to 70 percent.”

Armed with this knowledge, The Way Home uses a data-driven “housing first strategy,” which focuses on immediately placing homeless individuals in housing without barriers first, then offering an array of support like job placement, medical care, behavioral counseling, and rehabilitation services.

“What was have found is, when individuals are placed in a stable housing environment on their own accord and without requirements, they begin to make more rational decisions, overwhelmingly accept the services they need, and are less likely to return to homelessness,” Eichenbaum said.

Teams from various agencies, embedded at shelters and on the streets, use a centralized, real-time electronic system to triage, assess, and connect clients to supportive housing and income opportunities. The standardized assessment establishes the direct cause of an individual’s homelessness – such as unemployment, mental health issues, or domestic violence – identifies their specific needs, and determines the best intervention needed to end their homelessness.

Focusing on the most vulnerable first, The Way Home places individuals into one of over 10 communities developed for the formerly homeless, or in thousands of market rate units throughout the city, with landlords who have agreed to work with the program. Either way, housing options are fully funded.

Next, clients meet regularly with case managers from area nonprofits who connect them with supportive services tailored to their needs. One such program is Income Now, a partnership with Workforce Solutions that pairs those experiencing homelessness with employment counselors who are specially trained to help them find jobs that meet their current skill set.

“Job training programs are great, but they require time,” Eichenbaum said. “We are focused on getting people into positions where they can make an income starting right where they are, then building them up from there.”

The results are impressive. The program has placed over 3,600 chronically homeless individuals into permanent supportive housing, 93 percent of whom are still housed a year later and nearly 90 percent of whom remain housed after two years.

Eichenbaum, however, is keen to avoid getting too comfortable with this success. There is work yet to be done.

Major priorities include expanding the Income Now Program, exploring ways to make The Way Home’s initiatives more scalable, and joining local law enforcement in the fight against synthetic marijuana, which is notoriously marketed to young people and the homeless because of its low cost compared to other street drugs. New challenges continue to present themselves, but Eichenbaum thinks Houston has what it takes to meet them.

“Our system is a prime example of the power of public and private partnerships and the ability of local governments to lead social transformation by setting policy priorities, focusing on collective impact, and providing leadership. We are moving in the right direction,” he said. “We just have to keep the wheels turning and stay solution-focused.”


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