This interview was conducted by Contributor Vendor Shawn L. with assistance from Judith Tackett. It was produced with the help of The Contributor’s Vendor Leadership Team members: Lisa A., Keith D., Shawn L., and Pedro L.
Rosanne Haggerty is the President and CEO of Community Solutions, a national organization that assists communities like Nashville in their efforts to build systems that end homelessness and offer housing solutions for their most vulnerable residents.
Community Solutions is known for leading large-scale initiatives starting with the successful 100,000 Homes Campaign, which ended in 2014. Their current campaign is called Built for Zero. Haggerty sat down with The Contributor ahead of her visit to town to attend the 2025 State of Homelessness Symposium on June 4.
How did you get involved in homelessness?
I first got involved in homelessness when I volunteered full time for the year after I graduated from college at a shelter for runaway and homeless young people in New York City. I had imagined it would be a one-year experience. But I was just so distressed by the fact that there could be homelessness, and that it was increasing in our country that I kept with it.
What is Built for Zero?
Built for Zero is an operating system. It’s a way of communities actually pulling together all of the different activities and resources and information they have to get to the single goal of reducing homelessness month over month. And it’s a way we help communities coordinate everything that needs to come together to get that outcome.
When we look at overall homelessness numbers over the past few years, Chattanooga, Knoxville and Memphis seem to have reduced homelessness. Nashville numbers have increased. What are cities that have seen reductions done differently?
The cities that see reductions are the ones that are coordinating in the tightest, most aligned way around a shared goal.
They’re all rolling in the same direction. They know people experiencing homelessness by name in real time, so they know what’s working and they can adjust more quickly. It’s that discipline of the team that translates into reductions. Even when they don’t have all the housing they need, they still make progress.
When you talk about the team. Who are you talking about?
The essential members are always the CoC*, the major providers, even if they’re not receiving federal funding, the VA for veteran homelessness, the Public Housing Authority, and usually the Mayor’s Office or [the county] if it’s more of a county system. So you’ve got government, the large not-for-profits, the CoC, and then the very critical agencies that manage housing and other support resources.
*CoC stands for Continuum of Care and encompasses community members who work together in a specific geographic area to implement a system to prevent and end homelessness.
We don’t have an overall shared goal in our community about how we end chronic, Veteran or other homelessness. Our system seems like it’s rudderless. Where is a good starting point when you come into a city like Nashville to help right the ship?
We’ve had a long relationship with Nashville, and there have been some governance changes here along the way.
But whether Nashville or any community, a good starting place is who are the key leaders I mentioned and getting them in the same room around, “Let’s do this!” And everyone has to sign on to the goal, and how it’s going to be measured, so there is that shared accountability for how to move forward.
When we only help the most vulnerable people, how do we interrupt the cycle of homelessness for everybody else?
This is the key question. I mean the end game really is how does a community have a housing system that works for everyone, that has effective prevention, [where] it’s really clear and easy to find help when there’s a crisis, and that the crisis gets resolved, not kicked down the road.
What Built for Zero has really focused on is how do you build systems that work at the population level, not just the lucky folks who get help from a good program. The idea is, how do you create a system that works for everyone?
We see an increase in criminalization of homelessness nationwide at all levels of government. What programs have you seen that provide a successful alternative to locking people up?
Actually, communities that work in this aligned way, they have their police also supporting [this work]. Police officers are [often] the most unhappy people about the criminalization of homelessness. This is not what they signed up for.
And so if you have a community saying, “Here’s our plan. Here’s our intention,” you do have to build in all the alternatives. Say folks have taken over a public park. That’s not appropriate. But you have to actually be in problem-solving mode here. What is the alternative that has to be provided? It’s not necessarily the police department’s job to provide it. But they should be part of understanding and advancing the shared strategy.
Tennessee has been the first state to make it a felony to camp on public property. We see this approach across the nation. What can we, who have lived experience, do to counteract these policies?
Plainly advocacy. And there is also a job that has not been done well anywhere — maybe with the exception of Houston — of really educating the public about the fact that there are solutions, and we have choices here.
These types of bills criminalize everything and they succeed in a vacuum of information. If you’ve got your representative saying, “There is nothing else to be done but arrest people.” Then people who don’t spend their time thinking about what the alternatives could be are like, “Well, [if] that’s what my representative says.”
We have to get a lot savvier and more deliberate around communicating what the alternative looks like and not speaking to the choir, to all of us who are already involved with this issue, but who are the other folks whose voices get heard in communities? People who go to the city council meetings. People who are very active in civic matters.
Some of the next steps we collectively need to take is to build these new coalitions of allies, of folks who care about their communities, who don’t know what to think, and who have been told that this is a public safety issue, not an issue of people needing housing.
High staff turnover and funding barriers link us constantly with new people whom we do not trust. Are there other cities that you feel have created a solution for that?
Such a good question, and this is a problem everywhere because wages are low, turnover is high. Some of what this question raises is what people, who are the public, are also frequently asking, [which is], “What should I do when I see [homeless people]?”
You’d think by now we would have figured out what is a reliable, single [point of contact] — if not a person, then an institution – that will be able to be responsive to people who need help and to people who are calling on behalf of people who they see needing help. Companies have figured this out in terms of good customer service. Maybe you’re pointing to something that is more solvable immediately than insisting that people who work in homelessness services be properly paid. You know … what institution in a community could be accountable for like, “We’ll have the answer for you.”
You think we would have figured that out. But it’s a huge gap, both for people trying to get an answer to a question like, “How do I re-up my voucher?” to people saying, “I just saw someone in distress. How do I make sure that he or she is connected with help?”
How can people with experience of homelessness be heard and truly integrated into the decision-making process?
Many communities — in fact, we have funded some of these positions across our Built for Zero network — they have either a panel or a design process where people who are experiencing homelessness are part of the strategy setting or part of the improvement team, and part of the Built for Zero coaching as well.
It might not be the heads of the agency [who have lived experience], but if those heads of the agency say, “We’re going to do this. We’re going to share the goal. We’re going to be accountable.” Then the folks on their team [who] do the work, in that group, it’s important to have people with lived experience of homelessness who can say, “No, no, this is how it actually works. This is how it would work in a much smarter, more respectful and equitable way.”
So it’s that implementation circle. That’s the place where you really want to have folks with lived experience being able to actually reveal the truth of how things work and make sure that there are changes that represent improvements.
We often see Consumer Advisory Boards or similar groups be formed and feel they are used as meeting a check mark for some funders. What do we need to think about if we’d like to make changes to truly integrate voices like you described?
I think that’s always the risk that they’re tokenized. But I tell you, most smart service providers or any type of product developers, they know that the most valuable thing they have is if they go do customer research.
If they say, “Alright, I’m designing a wheelchair.” Do you want to have someone who uses a wheelchair to test it and say, “Oh, this is uncomfortable.” Or “The hand break would be better if …”
You’re going to be able to develop better services and products if you take seriously the experience in the design of services or interventions.
Leaning into the process of surfacing that kind of input and doing human-centered design looks a lot different than the meetings we’ve all been to where you’re checking the box to show somebody who lived on the street was at the meeting, so it’s all good.