Housing Command Centers

Housing Command Centers can be successful in any community that has solid funding, ideally including a flex fund, a centralized unit acquisition team, a robust base of homeless assistance providers with strong case management capacity, and an identified decision-maker with influence over existing systems and an appetite for thinking differently. With these pieces in place, it is also crucial to maintain a reliable database of people and their needs to be able to understand progress toward re-housing in real time. Organizations such as Community Solutions have created a blueprint for using data to drive action toward ending homelessness through Housing Command Centers. Their Built for Zero initiative includes nearly 150 participant cities committed to the goal of reaching functional zero. A key component of Community Solutions’ methodology is “assembling an accountable, community-wide team,” or a Command Center, to ensure that each agency or organization feels the necessary level of accountability and is able to leverage quality data for impact. With several jurisdictions implementing this approach, it has become evident that a successful Housing Command Centers include three core components:

Focus and Prioritization From Senior Leadership: As national homelessness rates continue to rise, systemic improvements are needed to remove bottlenecks and accelerate the re-housing process. This type of system redesign requires significant focus from leadership combined with resources, as was the case in Denver and Cleveland. Mayors Johnston and Bibb announced comprehensive initiatives focused on homelessness, holding themselves accountable to numeric goals. Cities taking a more active role signals their acceptance of responsibility for the issue and provides greater credibility to the response. Disaster response efforts prioritize rapid, coordinated action to secure housing for those affected, and the homelessness crisis demands a similarly structured, housing-first approach. If communities can swiftly re-house individuals after disasters, they should apply the same urgency and methodology to homelessness, without waiting on solutions for the larger affordable housing crisis.

Collaboration to Wield Collective Power: Homelessness is a multi-faceted issue and requires collaboration across numerous entities including, but not limited to, government agencies, service providers, and private landlords. As is typical in emergency management and disaster response, however, some hierarchy is needed to expedite decision-making, meaning that there needs to be a person in charge of building trust and relationships and ensuring coordination across service providers, landlords, and the public sector. Clutch Consulting, a group born out of Houston’s success, helps communities designate roles for different teams and establishes workflows for successfully and expediently re-housing individuals. By-name data is also crucial for effective coordination and response so that disparate entities can keep track of each individual and their specific needs.

Flexibility to Iterate and Adjust: Each community faces unique challenges, and an effective Housing Command Center must adapt and refine its approach through small-scale trial and error. Cleveland, for example, spent a month piloting its program before launching its HCC and started with people experiencing chronic unsheltered homelessness, while Denver set an initial six-month re-housing goal, which they then built upon with a second year-long target. Houston’s response started with veterans’ homelessness and broadened from there. Best practices suggest beginning with larger encampments to concentrate resources and address the broadest range of needs, ensuring the system has been tested to scale effectively. It is also best practice to have a local team negotiate with landlords to assess a fair price for the units and to have a flex fund when possible to address smaller miscellaneous needs that enable successful permanent rehousing.

The Path Forward

With these three core components, and an influx of one-time funding for system redesign followed by sustained funding, a Housing Command Center can serve as a powerful tool to effectively reduce homelessness. Though a robust HCC approach requires significant investment, it is important to consider that cities are already paying the cost of homelessness, not only by having people living outside, but through hospitalization, medical and emergency room treatment, incarceration, emergency shelter, and mental health service costs. As a recent study in Dallas and Collin counties found, these costs amount to roughly $43,000/year per person compared to the estimated $26,000/year per person it takes to permanently house someone through the Housing Forward HCC. Keeping the cost of inaction in mind along with successful rehousing numbers can help make the case for sustained funding for Housing Command Centers. Treating homelessness as an emergency brings necessary focus and urgency to accelerate the outflow of people from homelessness into stable housing, eventually outpacing the inflow of people into homelessness.