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February 2017
Policy&Practice
5
I
always thought I wanted to start a
shelter. I knew from a very young
age—14—what I wanted to do with
my life: work with people experi-
encing homelessness. “I know how
to end homelessness,” I thought. “If
people can just come into my shelter,
I’ll provide everything they need to
not be homeless.”
I have since abandoned that dream
of owning a shelter. Not because it was
too hard or because I didn’t have the
skill to make it happen, but because
homeless shelters are not the way to
end homelessness.
Really, if you think about it, that way
of thinking is so backwards. Instead
of focusing on the real issue, or the
person’s needs, I was focusing on my
abilities. I thought that if I could estab-
lish a shelter and the structure that
was needed to live independently—
like completing chores by a certain
time, going to bed by 10 p.m., waking
up by 6 a.m., and never losing one’s
temper—and the residents could prove
themselves to me, I would be teaching
people to be “housing ready.” Then, if
they succeeded in the shelter, I could
refer them to transitional housing.
Transitional housing was sometimes
an apartment but sometimes the same
living environment with a two-year
time limit and strict rules to follow
and checklists to accomplish. Then, if
they proved that they were “housing
ready” there, they could be referred to
permanent housing. And meanwhile,
that whole time, the person is still
living in homelessness.
And, what does that mean—to be
“housing ready”? In all honesty, as
one of my colleagues told me, we were
trying to make people show that they
lived like us. “But,” she said, “it turns
out people are pretty good at defining
locally
speaking
Why Housing First?
By Emily Kenney
See Housing First on page 28
and meeting their own brand of
success if you let them.”
So I no longer want to own a shelter.
But I do want to support people by
helping them define their own brand
of success.
It starts with two big concepts:
Housing First and Coordinated
Entry. Housing First flips the paradigm
from “housing ready” to one that
endorses first giving people their own
apartment and then providing supports
for their success. Research shows com-
munities that embrace Housing First
have found that clients do better and
it’s cheaper. (Check out the
Mother
Jones
article
1
or Gladwell’s article
2
for
more information.) Our Milwaukee
County Housing First pilot project
revealed that, after one year, it cost an
average of $30/day to house people
and 99 percent of people housed kept a
lease for the full year.
Coordinated Entry supports people
by bringing together multiple agencies
to work in a coordinated system of
services rather than expecting clients
to gain access to multiple agencies on
their own. It enables agencies to better
meet the needs of all clients and to pri-
oritize critical needs.
The basic tenets of Coordinated Entry
are these: a single prioritized list of
clients based on a standardized assess-
ment and coordinated staffing, case
planning, and a program placement
component to meet individual needs.
Coordinated Entry utilizes the resources
the homeless service system has in place
to the fullest benefit of each client.
We have made many strides toward
positive system change in Milwaukee
County. We can already see the differ-
ence it is making for some of the people
whom we used to assume would never
be housed. However, we can’t just
stop here. Recently, we had a client,
let’s call him Jim, who received per-
manent housing right away. He had
been homeless for years, and we were
hoping that permanent supportive
housing would work for him. However,
he was still actively hearing voices that
caused him to tear up his apartment,
very literally, including tearing down
the walls and tearing up floor boards.
Photo courtesy of Housing First Milwaukee