Housing First is the cornerstone of our Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness.
Americans have offered help of many kinds to homeless people. One kind of help we’ve offered in most places is the opportunity to gain access to some sort of housing. Usually, that access was conditioned on the homeless person jumping through various kinds of hoops: kicking an addiction, gaining employment, completing this or that kind of program.
Meet all the milestones, and housing is your reward.
That’s not what we’re talking about here.
Housing First operates in the belief that homeless people can best address and correct the issues that contribute to homelessness if they first are housed and provided with the supportive social services they need to stay successfully housed. This is also called Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH).
So who’s doing PSH in Knoxville? Our whole homeless services community is committed to the approach. Volunteer Ministry Center’s is the designated agency for PSH, and you can read about their success in this editorial by Greg Johnson.
VMC has housed 76 people so far in 2007. Those people have signed leases and are paying rent, some with the use of housing subsidies from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Agency in charge of public housing in the USA. Some of VMC’s clients have moved into employment, and are paying part, or all, of their rent with money they earn themselves. In other words, they’ve become stable, and now they’re reintegrating into society. They’re becoming contributors. Producers.
Other agencies contribute significantly to PSH’s success. KARM is by far our area’s largest emergency shelter provider. And the Salvation Army focuses on helping people make the transition from shelter living to permanent housing. Ending chronic homelessness is a team effort, and our area has a fantastic team.
We’ve still got a long way to go. Ours is a Ten-Year Plan, and we’re just finishing up year two. But the people in this community who work with the homeless are working together to help those people break their destructive cycles. May we see much more of the same in 2008.