During the past few months, I’ve been spending a lot of my working time diving into the topic of homelessness prevention.
I read about prevention programs. I participated in webinars. I joined a learning cohort. I interviewed a few people. And finally, I co-produced a radio show on homelessness prevention, which you can catch on the This Is Nashville Podcast online at wpln.org.
At the end of 2022, I already designated a column to the topic of Diversion and Prevention, but since then the conversation seems to have heated up. With COVID dollars starting to run out while our homelessness population still has increased by 9.3 percent over the past two years (per our local Point In Time Count), it’s easy to see why there is interest in stemming the flow into homelessness.
Let’s begin with what homelessness prevention is.
Over the past few years, I’ve been engaged in discussions about different definitions of homelessness prevention, eviction prevention, and diversion. In my last column, I outlined the National Alliance to End Homelessness’ explanations as follows:
- Homelessness prevention serves extremely vulnerable people who are about to lose their housing;
- Eviction prevention serves low-income people who have received an eviction notice; and
- Diversion serves people who have lost their housing and are facing imminent entry into shelter or sleeping outside.
But now, the conversation about homelessness prevention seems to have broadened. Here is a definition Stephen Gaetz & Erin Dej of the Canadian Observatory of Homelessness offer in their Homelessness Prevention Framework:
“Homelessness prevention refers to policies, practices and interventions that reduce the likelihood that someone will experience homelessness. It also means providing those who have been homeless with the necessary resources and supports to stabilize their housing, enhance integration and social inclusion, and ultimately reduce the risk of the recurrence of homelessness.”
They suggest that homelessness prevention should include interventions that benefit individuals as well as target broader structural reforms.
Community Solutions is a national nonprofit that leads a movement called Built for Zero to support communities in their quest to end homelessness. Community Solutions has created its own homelessness prevention framework and is distinguishing Housing Insecurity, Homelessness Prevention and Coordinated Homelessness Prevention as follows:
- “Housing insecurity is a measure of how close a person or family is to being homeless, determined by factors such as being behind on mortgage or rent, making multiple moves, living in a shelter and experiencing homelessness.”
- “Homelessness prevention refers to policies, practices and interventions that reduce the likelihood that someone will experience homelessness. It also means providing those who have been homeless with the necessary resources and support to stabilize their housing, enhance integration and social inclusion, and ultimately reduce the risk of the recurrence of homelessness.”
- “Coordinated Homelessness Prevention (“Coordinated Prevention”) [is] a community-wide approach that uses common risk screening criteria to identify people who are housing insecure, including people at greatest risk for literal homelessness, and then offers immediate, coordinated access to Housing Problem Solving and prevention-related resources, including prioritized access to assistance for people with more urgent prevention needs.”
Community Solutions is working with Nashville providers on veteran homelessness (since 2018), family homelessness (since 2022), and recently added communications assistance, encampment strategy support, and coordinated prevention to the list. Facilitators from Community Solutions do not take the lead. Rather, they convene local leaders and help them form core coalitions around each focus area, then help evaluate data and offer support to develop strategies to set concrete goals that will drive the overall homelessness numbers down.
For example, they help manage and evaluate the quality of our By Name lists, which allow us to know everyone in our community experiencing homelessness in as close to real time as possible. The goal is to examine who enters the homelessness system, who exits, who returns, and who becomes “inactive,” which means no provider has been able to connect with them for at least 90 days.
Looking at the data is helpful to understand why homelessness prevention must be at the forefront of our conversations if we truly want to end homelessness. In a recent meeting of Nashville providers, which focused on seeting strategic goals to address family homelessness, we examined data Community Solutions shared with us based on the Family By Name List. Granted, we may not have reached the highest data quality yet with the data I present here, but it is strong enough to give us a solid indication of what’s happening in Nashville.
We learned that in 2023, the average monthly inflow (meaning families who became homeless and ended up on the By Name List) was 80 families. At the same time, the average monthly outflow was 79.6 families. But we also know that 37 of the 79.6 families were placed in housing. For the remaining families, they were marked as “inactive” in the database because we could no longer reach them. They basically disappeared. Some may have found housing on their own; others may have moved to another area; and some may show back up in the database at a later time. If they reappear, they’re taken off the “inactive” list and are considered homeless in our community again.
Another category when we’re looking at the “inflow” of homelessness are those families returning from housed situations. The monthly average last year was seven families who returned after being assisted with housing. Those seven families each month are definitely candidates for prevention services because we know where they were housed. We could also talk to them to find out what caused their renewed homelessness and then examine if a little extra support could have made a difference.
Let’s discuss what prevention services could look like. When I spoke with Chad Bojorquez, Chief Program Officer of Destination: Home, a nonprofit based in San Jose, Calif. Bojorquez said the Homelessness Prevention System in Santa Clara County focused mainly on three prevention strategies: temporary financial assistance, legal support and case management and other services.
The average cost of preventing homelessness is approximately $7,400 per household over an extended period of time. And that is the prevention cost in one of the highest rental markets in the country! That average prevention cost is definitely lower compared to what it would cost the community if the same household would have become homeless. In other words, providing services while people are homeless including moving them from homelessness to permanent housing costs significantly more than preventing it to begin with.
Here is my attempt to put this into perspective. In 2023, the National Alliance to End Homelessness updated their cost of homelessness fact sheet. There they outline that based on federal grant programs, the annual cost of an emergency shelter bed is about $8,067 more than the annual cost of a federal housing subsidy. In other words, the cost difference alone is more than it would have cost to prevent homelessness in the highest rental market in the country. Clearly, prevention costs anywhere in the U.S. are lower than the cost to end homelessness.
And we have not even spoken about what the disruption of losing stable housing does to people emotionally, mentally and physically. A single mom with lived experience educated me recently about the emotional, mental, and physical toll an eviction notice can take on a person. She said she did not understand why our community is not more invested in prevention.
“Why is it that we have to wait until we already have a late fee on our record before we can even access some rent assistance programs?” she asked and added that usually people know days before the first of the month that they will not be able to pay their rent.
Tennessee has also just toughened their eviction laws. Tenants used to be able to delay their eviction for 15 days by either requesting a continuance or disagreeing with the charge that they are behind in rent. Starting on July 1, that delay was reduced to seven days. People now have one week less to either come up with the money they owe, negotiate a deal with their landlord, get a lawyer or find and relocate to a new apartment. If they want to appeal an eviction, they have to deposit a year’s worth of rent. Based on the average rent in Nashville, that comes easily to $14,000-$15,000. If renters who are evicted had that money, most of them likely would not have been evicted in the first place.
Bojorquez, the leader from Santa Clara County, said since 2017, their homelessness prevention effort helped more than 7,000 unique families. Then when COVID hit, their prevention system was already in place, which enabled them to assist another 25,000 families during the pandemic. Currently, they have about 800 households enrolled in prevention programs and are aiming to serve another 1,700 new households this year.
Destination: Home serves as the backbone to build the prevention system and has been coordinating with 19 direct service providers. They consider themselves an incubator of innovative programs. Now that the Santa Clara homelessness prevention system is established, Destination: Home is moving local coordination over to the county government. They believe with this move they can sustain the effort long term.
But Destination: Home is not done yet with homelessness prevention systems. Bojorquez shared that they are currently in the preliminary stages of talks with the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness to explore whether their organization can enter into a partnership to identify 10 communities across the country and help them develop their own homelessness prevention systems.
I told him that I wanted to stay in touch with him to talk about Nashville when it was time. But keep in mind, our community is already working with Community Solutions to support us in establishing a coordinated homelessness prevention system.
I am hopeful that we will soon manage to connect some of the pieces we already have in place, such as the Eviction Right to Counsel project that is co-led by the Legal Aid Society and the Nashville Hispanic Bar Association. Metro Council recently approved another year of funding to keep the program going. An early independent evaluation conducted by an organization called Stout estimated that approximately 30 percent of the households participating in Eviction Right to Counsel would have likely ended up homeless if not for the program.
And as a final word, Bojorquez said they partnered with the University of Notre Dame to conduct a randomized control trial over three years and found that vulnerable households who don’t receive immediate financial assistance are three times more likely to become homeless than those who received prevention support. In addition, Santa Clara’s homelessness database (their Homeless Management Information System) shows that only 7 percent of the households that had received prevention assistance showed up as homeless two years after leaving the prevention program.
Prevention works and is necessary if we are serious about ending homelessness.