Houston Has Successfully Housed Over 25,000 Homeless People By Giving Them Their Own Apartments

Houston Properties

Houston is considered the fourth-most populated city in the United States, but they have managed to reduce the rate of its homelessness by 63% over the last ten years. In this aspect, it has made them the best performing major city during that time as well.

By using the “housing first” approach, which focuses on getting homeless people into one-bedroom apartments as quick as possible, allowing people to think and worry about their other issues such as jobs, mental health issues, drug addiction, and others later on, it was able to reach these wonderful and sustained results of providing more than 25,000 homeless people with homes.

The idea behind it came from Michael Kimmelman who writes for the New York Times, explaining that ‘if someone’s already drowning, it doesn’t help to teach them how to swim first.’


Despite this particular method having a number critics, it’s still paying off. According to the local news, which reported on this particular story, claim that a large majority of the homeless folk living in Houston that have been rehoused this way, have managed to remain in their houses for over two years.

According to a national survey conducted from 2007 to 2020, there was a 31.6% drop in homelessness statewide, which has mostly been driven by the success of the city of Houston, while the homelessness issue in Austin is still on the rise.

In an interview with Houston’s mayor, who has been in service since 2016, Sylvester Turner told KHou11, “The goal that I have set is to get us down, in a sense, to zero homelessness in the city by the end of next year. The challenge right now is getting the units.”

What Turner and his team are trying to do to reach their goal is to bring homeless service and low-income housing providers to unite and work in unison to reach this target. And this is no easy feat considering that there are more than 100 different organizations, both private and public, and big and small, that have all banded together to get the job done. These organizations also include homeowners associations, churches, landlords, the Houston Housing Authority, food banks, the Department for Health and Human Services, and many more. Together, they have formed what is known as the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County.


One example of a success story is that of a former homeless woman, Terri Harris, who had been living under an overpass in a homeless encampment. She went from living on the streets and basically fighting for survival, to “rising excitedly onto her tiptoes and turning the key” of her new small apartment which the Coalition had coordinated as quickly as possible to fill with basic needs for everyday living.

Although there are those that still criticize Houston’s supportive housing assistance, since it uses taxpayer-funded monetary support to place the most vulnerable and continually homeless people into new apartments, as well as helping them with rent, to food, to bus fare, yet Houston has proven to be one of the only ones that has made significant progress from all the cities that former President Barack Obama had targeted during his term through a number of homeless reduction strategies.

You can see how this story developed on KHou11 in the video below.

 

 

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