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"At the most systemic level, no one is responsible for homelessness. Not anywhere in the nation. No one says this is my job. Which is why shit doesn't get done and everybody blames everybody else."

- Jennifer Loving, Executive Director, Destination: Home

Shawn Liu:  Team Lead

North Florida, South Georgia Housing and Urban Development-Veterans Administration Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH) 

Shawn Liu first heard about the 100,000 Homes Campaign at a regional Veteran's Administration (VA) conference in the summer of 2010. Margiotta was one of the speakers on best practices and talked about Housing First and her success in Times Square.  She immediately had Liu's ear.

Liu found what Margiotta said very compelling.  Four themes in particular stood out:  

• The success of Street to Home in Times Square 
  
• The Campaign was aligned with the VA's focus of housing high-need, chronically homeless veterans
  
• The idea that chronic homelessness was a crisis 
  
• Magiotta's approach resonated with Liu's personal values about ending homelessness 
  

Housing Readiness:  The Basis of Previous Approaches 

Liu was exasperated by previous approaches, most of which center around the idea of Housing Readiness.  People who were homeless went through different stages of housing, from emergency to transitional to permanent.  At each stage, they needed to demonstrate their readiness, which according to Liu, often involved moving from addiction to sobriety.  

_{Source:  Adobe Services (Reprinted with permission)}

While homeless, people often found it extremely difficult to "get clean" in order to start receiving services.  "If you don't have insurance or Medicaid, we expect people to get healthy without a cure. So what we've found over the years is that some people can jump through those hoops but people who have the greatest needs, they couldn't and they ended up staying homeless the longest."

Jumping Through Hoops To Prove Housing Readiness

"They provided excessive barriers for people who were kind of un-virtuous. 'If we like you we'll provide you services, but if we don't like you, you're stuck being homeless.'"
- Shawn Liu, Team Lead

100 Homes Jacksonville 

When Liu brought up participating in the 100,000 Homes Campaign with his organization, everyone was on board as long as someone else could take the reins. So he decided, "If I want to have it happen, let me just go ahead and do it." Liu secured support from the VA, his leadership, and the local homeless coalitions.  "It's really easy to get people on board when [I ask them to make a small] contribution and it's not going to be too much of a time sink for them."

In 2013, Liu took the lead in organizing 100 Homes Jacksonsville, supported by a consortium of 20 nonprofits and organizations. Although the consortium had already existed, Liu focused on strengthening existing ties: "Basically it was the same thing but getting them to think and collaborate in a different way."

The goal was to house 100 people experiencing chronic homelessness in 100 days. Liu had suggested 200 to coalition members, who countered with the target of just 100.  Liu agreed, citing that he wanted to avoid analysis paralysis. "There is value in accepting the arbitrariness of it all. It gets you out of the gate."

What Liu Learned from the Campaign

Although Liu was motivated to bring the 100,000 Homes Campaign to his community, almost everything about it felt like a big challenge.  Several components of the Campaign helped inspire Liu to tackle those challenges:

Focus on Data

In addition to highlighting the importance of data, the 100,000 Homes Campaign provided Liu with both data support and encouragement to continue focusing on data. Liu was able to have clarity about the groups with which he needed to be working and the sources from which he needed to gather data: "Otherwise we are leaving stuff on the table if we are not collecting data from everyone."  Getting housing placement data on a weekly basis helped Liu identify which interventions  were working and with which groups they were effective.  

By the end of the 100,000 Homes Campaign, Jacksonville had housed over 750 homeless people.  

A Chicken F'er

Liu received a chicken f'er award in December 2013 and recalled the honor:  

"This giant chicken figurine arrives...It was like an internal club and it's such a vulgar story to tell anyone. It was a very distinct honor because we knew that we worked for it."

         Shawn Liu

   Jennifer Loving

“Becky did a great job and helped reinforce that what we wanted to do was not crazy. Early on, what was happening in other communities went a long way, especially with some of our decision makers.”

Jennifer Loving was the executive director of Destination: Home, a convening organization that worked across multiple sectors to reduce homelessness in Santa Clara County, California. Her organization had set a priority to focus on chronic homelessness shortly before she met Margiotta. Loving immediately recognized the mutual goals and realized, “there's no other easier way to get a whole institution of people moving than to have an external validator say that this was the right thing to do." Loving invited Margiotta to visit and “help put a larger frame around the issue, so that folks [in Santa Clara] felt like a part of something bigger.”

Loving was familiar with the concept of Housing First and thought that the principles and tools that the 100,000 Homes Campaign were using made a lot of sense. She adopted the Homeless Registry and Vulnerability Index and went about establishing a local team. “We had key representation from San Jose, the largest city that has the most homelessness in our county, and representation from the group the represents the homeless non-profit providers.” She also raised local dollars to do a Registry Week. 

Using the information gathered during their Registry Week, Loving and her team solicited new funding: "We started with about $300,000 and were able to leverage another $150 million invested into this system over five years. That money was raised locally, apart from 100K Homes." In fact, Loving’s team turned the initial funding they secured after the Registry Week into permanent support of $4 million annually.

Housing 1,000

The goal that Loving’s team set was to house 1,000 people experiencing chronic homelessness over the course of the 100,000 Homes Campaign. They called their local effort "Housing 1,000." Loving explained how she was able to apply the larger Campaign framework to empower her team’s efforts:

Prior to connecting with the Campaign, Loving had already started addressing chronic homelessness in Santa Clara County. While it was difficult to say what progress was specifically due to the Campaign as opposed to efforts already underway, she was thrilled that it "all fit together very, very well." Loving had been working to convince multiple stakeholders that their traditional approaches were not working: "Shelters and soup kitchens manage homelessness. To actually end homelessness, [we] had to disrupt the system and 100,000 Homes helped us disrupt it. And then flip it on its head and shift from managing it to ending it." According to Loving, the way to win stakeholders over was to engage them with new funding to do things differently. The Campaign helped with that as well because Loving could say, "Hey, we're doing this national thing. Look, come be part of it."

A Local Business Case for Ending Chronic Homelessness 

The approach that Loving took was that homelessness was not a charity.  Instead, it was a business case with financial arguments. While this was not necessarily true for every homeless person, it was universal for the persistently homeless. Loving opined, "You will never solve these problems if you just want everyone to give a shit. There's too many things to care about. And there's fatigue." The way to get people to care was to talk about responsibility and financial impact.  

Santa Clara County:  $520 Million/Year on Homeless Residents 

Santa Clara County commissioned a local study which concluded that it could save $520 million annually.  A significant outcome of the study was that the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors put a $950 million housing bond on the 2016 November ballot, with $750 million earmarked to address homelessness.

Loving noted, "The state of California talks about $2 billion for the whole state. We're talking about $950 million just for here." Voters approved the bond by a narrow margin.⁶

Competing with Other Communities

Jennifer Loving explained how fun competition with other communities participating in the 100,000 Homes helped her team reach as many people as possible.

Also a Chicken F'er

Loving also received the prestigious chicken f'er award.  She was honored by the distinction because it signified that "you were really ending some homelessness." Among the communities participating in the Campaign, "if so and so was a chicken f'er, we all knew what that meant. I knew that rooster was on behalf of our tribe of people." Loving even gave a colleague a pair of rooster cuff links.  She described her own metal rooster as "frankly one of my most prize possessions in my office. If my office were on fire, I would probably grab my phone and my rooster. I love my rooster."