Homelessness is a solvable problem when approached with sustained commitment and investment. In many communities, myriad organizations and departments are addressing various aspects of this complex, multi-faceted challenge. Insufficient coordination and inadequate resources to meet the scale and depth of the challenge have created a broken system. As a result, the re-housing process often moves too slowly or stalls completely, leaving over 274,000 people across the U.S. sleeping outside on any given night. Cities and local leaders are on the frontlines of this crisis, and they possess the capacity to bring people inside and provide them with tailored support to break the cycle of homelessness.

A Housing Command Center (HCC) is a model used by some localities to tackle this challenge; it applies many of the same disaster response and emergency management practices typically used to support large groups of people abruptly in need of housing. The HCC model enhances coordination between the key players – outreach workers, local government, private landlords, law enforcement, and social service providers – to address people’s specific needs and provide housing as quickly as possible. This tool outlines the steps to build an effective HCC that brings together disparate pieces of the housing and social services ecosystems, leverages existing resources, and organizes a focused emergency response to quickly re-house individuals experiencing homelessness and connect them with needed supportive services.

The Challenge This Tool Solves

In most communities, the process of accessing permanent housing once homeless is slow, difficult, and disjointed. Individuals and families experiencing homelessness may need to navigate numerous systems and organizations, all of which may have differing eligibility requirements. This can force those experiencing homelessness to waste valuable time navigating complex processes to qualify for aid, and they are still likely to end up on wait lists, especially when housing units may already be in short supply. A “Housing Command Center” or “Housing Central Command” enables people to be re-housed quickly in either transitional or permanent supportive housing through a defined workflow and intentional coordination. The process empowers outreach workers with the resources, in partnership with the city and housing providers, to match individuals or families with housing units that meet their bespoke needs. HCCs utilize a “Housing First” approach, prioritizing getting people into housing to enable a base level of stability before addressing other issues related to behavioral health, substance abuse, employment, or other challenges. By examining the homelessness response system comprehensively, HCC leadership can identify bottlenecks and roadblocks and map a smoother, more successful process that keeps all the interested parties around the table.

Types of Communities That Could Use This Tool

The core elements of this tool could benefit any community when appropriately tailored to local circumstances. An HCC can be most immediately impactful in places with large encampments as ideal implementation starts with concentrating resources, building trust with those experiencing homelessness, testing the system across a wide spectrum of needs, and quickly adjusting and iterating. In Denver and Cleveland, it was critical that the cities had “unit teams” able to find existing vacant units – whether in the private market or in temporary non-congregate shelter options such as hotels or micro communities – so that outreach works could provide housing options as part of their initial engagement with people living in encampments. Nearly every community, small or large, has a dedicated system of government and nonprofit organizations in their “Continuum of Care” for homelessness services; a Housing Command Center can work in all of these places by taking a more urgent, systems level approach to how a community organizes around and adapts to its homelessness needs.

Expected Impacts of This Tool

Through this model, communities can achieve “equilibrium” or “functional zero” homelessness, where the number of people exiting homelessness consistently exceeds the number entering homelessness. When people do experience homelessness it is short-term, making homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring.