Houston program to curb homelessness featured on CBS

Houston’s plan to end homelessness in the city, the Coalition for the Homeless-run Housing First initiative, was featured in a segment on “CBS Sunday Morning,” during which leaders touted it as a model for the nation.

The Housing First program began in 2011, when the city went all-in to try to reduce homelessness by more than half in four years. The initiative, still in place after more than 12 years, was dedicated to providing housing for unhoused individuals in Houston before focusing on other next steps, which could include recovery or looking for stable work.

Mandy Chapman Semple, an author of the nationally recognized program, was interviewed during the Sunday segment. Semple now travels the U.S. helping other major cities work on reducing the number of inhabitants with no stable place to live.

“The idea that if you have no permanent place to live, that you’re also going to be able to transform and tackle complex mental health issues, addiction issues, complex financial issues? It’s just unrealistic,” Semple told CBS correspondent Martha Teichner.

Since the program’s inception in 2011, more than 30,000 people have been housed in Houston, a 63% reduction in the unhoused population. That’s a stark difference from 2011 when Houston was a city with the fifth-highest population of unhoused residents, 8,500 men, women and children were homeless that year, a surge of 25 percent from 2010.

The success is a testament to the city’s shelters and homelessness reduction nonprofits working together to log people in their system and get them into furnished apartments. The partnership called “The Way Home” encouraged independent organizations to combine their resources and work together, instead of working in a silo, which sometimes resulted in redundancies and inefficiencies.

National acclaim

The program has since received many national accolades, including an in-depth New York Times article in 2022 titled “How Houston Moved 25,000 People From the Streets Into Homes of Their Own,” which lauded the program as having made “remarkable progress” toward ending the city’s homelessness crisis after COVID-19.

And a couple years prior in 2020, an investigation by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Arizona’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism compared and contrasted Houston and San Diego’s similar initiatives to end homelessness. In the story titled “Two cities tried to fix homelessness, only one has yet succeeded,” the data-based conclusion was made that Houston’s approach came out on top, due to a combination of better organizational structure and a clearer plan for financial sustainability.

Others have debated that in some ways, Houston is a city poised for success in a housing first program because lack of zoning regulations and urban sprawl help keep costs low for developers who can build apartment buildings with hundreds of small apartments (the studio featured on “CBS Sunday Morning” was 320 square feet) for a fraction of the cost in other cities.

In a New York Times opinion piece from November about the program, opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof questioned whether urban sprawl, which has historically been controversial, could have benefits.

“I was forced to reassess how I weighed the trade-offs when a school friend, Stacy, froze to death while homeless in Oregon. I wondered: If we accepted more sprawl, would she have found cheap housing and survived?” Kristof wrote.

Battling evictions

And while the program has seen considerable success compared to other cities in the U.S., there are still quite a few kinks, one of them being that some unhoused individuals are getting evicted after they were housed through the program, showing failing safeguards meant to protect against being forced to vacate a residence.

A Houston Chronicle story from December followed this trend focusing on the life of a veteran Navy officer named Stephen Lockhart, who was housed in 2018 by the city, but died two months after an eviction in 2022. His family struggled to understand how he could have been evicted, when a rent of only $1 per month was expected from him, and there were safeguards in place to make sure that if he was behind on his rent, his support system would be able to step in and help before it was too late.

Lockhart had been housed in the Travis Street Plaza complex, dedicated to housing veterans in the 150 units available. In recent years, other veterans faced evictions like Lockhart’s from the complex.

The story showed that a series of bureaucratic issues with paperwork, tracking individuals who graduate from the voucher program and apartment inspections were partly to blame for these evictions, a data point which the city of Houston did not track as of December.

Then there’s the price tag of the program, which had been fueled by an efficient use of federal COVID-19 relief funds, which will have mostly all been completed by 2024, causing Houston to face a steep fiscal cliff. The conversation about where funds will be sought for the Housing First initiative is ongoing, but the former president of the Coalition for the Homeless, Michael C. Nichols, told Kristof in his opinion column that the end of federal relief funding would pose “a huge problem” for the housing program.

Still, the number of unsheltered individuals continues to fall in Houston, as CBS documented Sunday morning, leading some residents, like Army veteran Julie Blow, who was featured in the program, to “‘feel like a teenager” with hope for a housed future.