Each day, Raleigh taxpayers collectively spend between $38,000 and $98,000 on homelessness-related services, the equivalent of two to five years’ worth of rent.
Under a new pilot program, that amount could be slashed to just $24,000 per year to pay for one person to cover the cost of their rent and case management services while they get back on their feet.
On Tuesday, Raleigh’s city council learned about some of the early successes of a program called Bringing Neighbors Home, which the city launched in May.
Modeled after similar programs in Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Oklahoma City, Bringing Neighbors Home is providing 45 households, including two families with children, apartments and case management services from local partners.
Once a team was assembled, volunteers spent the fall connecting with residents of an unsheltered encampment on Goode Street on the Dix Park property, engaging with them and enrolling them in the pilot through the end of the year. In January, the city decommissioned the camp and all 45 participants have moved into housing or have a housing plan in place through their case manager.
Emila Sutton, the City of Raleigh’s Housing and Neighborhoods department director, said this approach is making an impact in terms of participants’ wellbeing via rapid rehousing and direct housing assistance.
“The approach demonstrated through the pilot would get Raleigh to what we call functional zero for unsheltered homelessness, which means that homelessness is rare, brief and non-recurring,” Sutton told the council. “Instead of just displacing people, we are providing real- solutions housing, first and foremost, with the right supports in place.”
The Dix Park encampment was chosen due to elevated health and safety concerns at the site, Sutton said, and the city is expected to open the long-awaited Gipson Play Plaza children’s playground at the park this spring. Local partners providing case management and outreach services include Healing Transitions, Oak City Cares, the city’s ACORNS unit, and Alliance Health.
Sutton emphasized that the program’s focus on the root cause of homelessness—a fundamental lack of affordable housing—is the key to its success.
While “people attribute homelessness to mental illness, drug use, welfare, weather, and a host of other factors,” Sutton said, research shows that “the only credible link is housing market conditions.” In other words, places where rents are higher, and housing is less abundant, have higher rates of homelessness than places where rents are cheaper, with more vacancies. These places inevitably end up spending more on medical treatments and ER visits, emergency sheltering, mental health services, and incarceration.
District B city council member Megan Patton asked if further funding for the program was being included in the upcoming budget and said she would “love to see a continuation of the program baked in.” Sutton said her department is still identifying resource gaps in the program.
“We’re really in, still, the refining and discovering and … learning stages of the project,” Sutton said. “We want to make sure that these 45 residents have what they need in order to remain stable.”
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