A jog through the woods near her home brought Sharon Bulova face to face with homelessness in Fairfax County, Va., one of the nation’s most affluent counties.
Photo courtesy of FACETS
Penny Gross, Fairfax County, Va. supervisor, gives remarks at the event “Giving Back to Get People Home” last August. It was organized by a partnership including Fairfax County’s Office to Prevent and End Homelessness (OPEH) and sponsored by Target. Dean Klein, OPEH director, is seated, lower right.
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One of the places I discovered close to me was a little homeless camp,” said Bulova, who chairs the county’s Board of Supervisors. “It was just two tents in the woods that no one would have noticed had they not been on foot.” Soon, she would begin leaving bags of groceries nearby, periodically, and eventually meet one of the men — a Vietnam vet, street-named Hippie.
For her, it “put a face” on the issue, relatively small though it is in the largely suburban county of almost 1.1 million people. The county currently counts 1,549 homeless residents — 14-hundredths of a percent of the population.
“These are real human beings who have real stories, and who have real life situations that have caused them to be without a home,” Bulova said, “and that’s not OK. And I want Fairfax County to be a place where we reach out to people who are in trouble and need help.”
Perhaps counterintuitively, given the recent recession and slow recovery, the faces of homelessness in Fairfax have become fewer. Since 2008, Fairfax County and the neighboring small city of Falls Church (pop. 12,000) reduced their total homeless population by 16 percent and homeless families by 19 percent.
The county’s successes — along with dramatic reductions in Alameda County, Calif. — have caught the eye of the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), which spotlights best practices. It recently profiled Fairfax’s accomplishments in a Community Snapshot. Alameda County was written up in 2010.
Alameda County (pop. 1.5 million) had a point-in-time snapshot of more than 5,000 homeless people in 2003. By 2009, that number had declined by 15 percent to 4,250, and family homelessness was down 37 percent.
“That’s why we like to focus on places like Alameda and Fairfax, because that’s an example of where things worked,” said Nan Roman, executive director of NAEH. “These places have brought the numbers down. Even though it’s flat nationally, there are a lot of places where it’s gone up.”
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, released last month, overall homelessness increased by a scant 1 percent nationally from 2009 to 2010 — even during a period of high unemployment, an economy sputtering in recovery and a foreclosure crisis whose aftershocks continue to be felt.
For subpopulations, including individuals, the homeless not in shelters, and persons in families, rates also rose modestly: 0.75 percent, 2.76 percent, and 1.61 percent, respectively, according to NAEH.
Roman said some of the credit for these “fairly flat” increases goes the $1.5 billion in federal stimulus dollars to prevent homelessness and provide for rapid re-housing during the recession — and a softening of the low-end rental market for a few years. The Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP) that was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in 2009, is a three-year program that ends next year.
Fairfax County received $2.46 million directly by formula; community-based programs also received funding through HPRP’s allocation to the state. Two Alameda County agencies and eight cities within the county and received $12.1 million for homelessness prevention and rehousing.
But an NAEH official said not all communities that received HPRP money saw a decrease in homelessness, and the expectation was that the funding would prevent “dramatic increases,” not lead to decreases.
In Fairfax, county officials say their success is due, in part, to the county’s 10-year plan to end homelessness, adopted in 2008, and the coalition of groups that is implementing it.
Similarly, in Alameda County, officials credit a collaborative, coordinated effort called EveryOne Home.
Fairfax County
In Fairfax County, a one-bedroom apartment can fetch just north of $1,100 per month, according to Dean Klein, director of the county’s Office to Prevent and End Homelessness (OPEH) — affordable to someone earning $22 an hour. But Klein said 80 percent of the county’s homeless families earn less than $14 per hour. As a result, the county’s efforts also address the need for employment.
Photo courtesy of FACETS
Two people stop to view a housing services provider’s display at the Fairfax County, Va. Government Center during an event to help the homeless.
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Among key initiatives in the county, NAEH highlighted a focus on permanent housing and a standardized intake screening tool. Previously, many homeless-serving nonprofits had used varying intake procedures. Klein’s office, created about two years ago, was charged with coordinating housing options in concert with nonprofits, faith communities, foundations and corporations.
Since then, it has focused on acquiring and preserving affordable housing units, and converting transitional housing into permanent supportive housing for families. The effort is overseen by the Fairfax-Falls Church Partnership to Prevent and End Homelessness.
Klein’s office helped facilitate the conversion of transitional units owned by Good Shepherd Housing and Family Services, a local nonprofit, to 47 units of rapid re-housing and permanent housing for families — helping people move directly from shelters to permanent housing, without the “transitional” step.
Shannon Steene, Good Shepherd’s executive director, said there was some resistance on the part of his staff, volunteers and board members. “They didn’t necessarily understand what this was, and change wasn’t necessarily good.
“But when you can, instead, get them to focus on what do we — really want to have happen in the (entire) community — that helped grease some of the skids for positive change,” he said.
Michael O’Reilly, former mayor of the Fairfax County town of Herndon, is chairman of the governing board of the Community Partnership. Two county supervisors are members, Bulova and Catherine Hudgins.
Before the 10-year plan, O’Reilly said, agencies with the same laudable goals could find themselves competing for federal and state grants.
That’s changed under the umbrella of the county’s coordinating role, according to Kerrie Wilson, president of Reston Interfaith, a shelter, transitional housing and affordable housing provider in Fairfax for some 40 years.
Under this new approach, her agency took the lead, partnering with other nonprofits in the county, to win a state homeless prevention grant that brought an additional $500,000 into the county to be distributed to all the partners.
“The federal stimulus dollars that came out allowed us to put some of that into play, get a jumpstart particularly in the area of prevention and rapid rehousing, and build a good foundation and success base on which we can now keep moving,” Wilson said.
Alameda County
Alameda County was among the first U.S. communities to create a multi-system, collaborative plan for ending homelessness, according to NAEH’s Community Snapshot.
In 2004, the county — along with the cities of Oakland and Berkeley and nine other partner agencies — created a Countywide Homeless and Special Needs Plan, which came to be known as the EveryOne Home plan. In 2008, EveryOne Home was transformed into a community-based nonprofit to coordinate and implement the plan. Elaine de Coligny is its executive director.
EveryOne Home serves as a single-point entry system for the county, allowing the program to stretch its dollars, according to Sabrina Balderama, a program associate.
De Coligny added, “Rather than each city within the county designing and funding their own program, we did a single program that was countywide. It has the same intake procedure, the same assessment tool, the same qualification for the households to get in.”
From 2005 to 2009, 512 permanent housing units were created using a combination of 125 “place-based” housing units and 386 vouchers. As in Fairfax County, many units that had previously served as transitional housing were converted to permanent housing.
Other initiatives that NAEH highlighted include creation of a Homeless Outreach and Stabilization Team (HOST) that provides mental health services for mentally ill, chronically homeless persons. To prevent homelessness, the county created a Priority Home Partnership using stimulus dollars. It uses the county’s 2-1-1 hotline number for centralized screening and intake of those at risk of homelessness. After being assessed, families in a housing crisis are referred to a Housing Resource Center — of which there are several throughout the county — where they can receive housing stabilization services and financial assistance.
EveryOne Home is a community-based organization, doesn’t deliver direct services, and gets its operating funds from the county and several cities therein.
“The reason we are a community-based organization and not located within one department of government is that we wanted to make sure that all the agencies that sponsored the writing of the plan continued to stay invested in the implementation of the plan,” de Coligny said.