What causes homelessness?
Homelessness is a complex issue with individuals, Veterans, youth, and families facing various challenges that cause them to become unhoused. While individualized challenges can cause a person to enter the homeless response system, we know these challenges tend to fall into three specific categories.
What Solves Homelessness?
The All Neighbors Coalition has made measurable progress reducing homelessness through aligned investments, shared accountability, and strengthened partnerships. Our work integrates homeless outreach, behavioral health providers, and law enforcement under one strategy to engage individuals sleeping outside, connect them to shelter, treatment, and housing pathways, and maintain closure of encampments after people were brought indoors.
Our coordinated street response teams engage individuals sleeping outside and immediately connect them directly to services, shelter, treatment, and housing. This strategy includes:
- Coordinated Street Response –Teams assigned to each geographic zone work across the region to proactively engage people who are unsheltered and facilitate an immediate connection to supportive services aligned to their needs.
- Targeted Hotspot Resolution – Each geographic zone has hot spots where concentrations of individuals’ camp. These areas are mapped and prioritized, with scaled resources for rapid resolution (creating permanent pathways off the street for residents) to target the largest concentrations of regular sleepers quickly.
- Shelters Equipped to Resolve Homelessness – Based on assessment of needs, every household brought to shelter is supported from day one to follow a stabilization plan which helps them on an accelerated pathway toward recovery and self-sufficiency.
- Specialized Response for Complex Needs – Coordinated solutions are designed for people with most severe mental health and substance use issues. Weekly meetings with first responders, hospitals, behavioral health specialists, and outreach teams support real time actions to connect people to stabilization pathways, including institutional care where needed.