In America, Houston did marvelous work, moving 25,000 homeless people from the streets into homes of their own.
While homelessness is a problem and the issue is not over, Houston, America’s fourth-largest city last July set out to help the homeless. A lady by the name of Ana Rausch took the huge initiative with her team on the northwest side of Houston. She had a dozen outreach workers to help her.
Houston has gotten this far by teaming with county agencies and influencing scores of local service providers, corporations, and charitable nonprofits — organizations to work in unison and together moved the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and without first requiring them to wean themselves off drugs or complete a “12-step program or find God or a job”. A true work of grace.
The homeless lived in tents and cardboard lean-tos. The people were living in homeless shelters, often called out for trespassing, but, rather, were given a home, and the vice president of Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless, Ms. Rausch was on a mission to move them out and find them homes.
Ms. Rausch’s team, and a few camp residents, pointed out the nearby fast food outlets, the Shell station with a convenience store, and the Planet Fitness, where a $10 monthly membership meant access to showers and outlets for charging phones.
Ms. Rausch and her colleagues had been working with Harris County officials, as well as with the mayor’s office and local landlords visiting the encampment and talking to people living there, so that now, as tents were being dismantled, the occupants could move directly into one-bedroom apartments, some for a year, others for longer.
It is a long hard effort and over the last ten years, Houston, the nation’s fourth most populous city, has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses. Ahuge section of them has remained housed after two years and the homeless percentage in the Houston region has been cut by 63 percent since 2011, according to the latest numbers from local officials.
Ten years ago, homeless veterans, one of the categories that the federal government tracks, waited 720 days and had to navigate 76 bureaucratic steps to get from the street into permanent housing with support from social service counselors. Today, a streamlined process means the wait for housing is 32 days. It is their goal for Houston to be the first big city to end chronic homelessness.
One in every 14 Americans experiences homelessness at some point, a population that is mostly Black. Eliminating homelessness would involve dealing with racism, reconstituting the nation’s mental health, family support, and substance abuse systems, raising wages, expanding the federal housing voucher program, and building millions more subsidized homes.