Permanent supportive housing remains the most effective strategy in combating homelessness, and communities around the country have found ways to locate housing developments in scattered neighborhoods. These developments have a record of success for both the residents and the neighborhoods.

The TYP can point to success in our own community, and Lyons and Martin underscore some of it:

Jon and his team have done a very good job of working with agencies to align their services to avoid redundancy and more effectively move folks toward getting the help they need. They are working effectively with faith-based organizations to make sure that assistance for the homeless leads folks to a path toward personal responsibility rather than enabling a culture of dependency.

Stephanie Matheny, of Citizens for the Ten-Year Plan, adds in the comments below the op-ed, that

In addition to the successes mentioned in the editorial, there are approximately 300 people who were chronically homeless who now have an apartment and a case manager because of the TYP. There are an additional nearly 300 people who were at-risk of becoming homeless, but who were able to remain in housing through the TYP’s homelessness prevention efforts. These quiet successes are easy to overlook.

Credit for these “quiet successes” rightly belongs to the people who do the work on the ground. Partners like Volunteer Ministry Center, Knoxville-Knox County Community Action Committee, The Salvation Army, Knox Area Rescue Ministries, Catholic Charities, to name a few, provide the housing and case management support that helps people move off the streets and into housing, keep their housing, and begin to rebuild their lives in the community.

We’re grateful for the support, and and for the support given by so many of Knoxville’s people to the organizations that make it possible for people who’ve been trapped in homelessness to make such significant changes.

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.