HOUSTON — The apartment complex where Teresa Eddins now lives is so quiet that “you can hear a pin drop” at night, she says — a stark contrast to the constant noise she withstood while living beneath a bridge two years ago.
She was one of the first people who moved into a former hotel in Houston that served as a center to help homeless people navigate their way to more stability. She credits the transitional housing facility and programs launched as part of “The Way Home,” the large Texas city’s nationally recognized homelessness-reduction strategy, for the fact that she now lives in an apartment she loves, alongside her adopted dog, Violet. It’s also where she decided to tackle her alcoholism, getting sober.
“You don’t ever want to be in those shoes under a bridge — going through a hurricane, going through the cold, going through the winds, going through hot weather, you name it,” recalled Eddins, 63, of her life in 2021, while sitting on her living room couch. “It’s a nightmare. It really is.”
New Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has invoked Houston as “the best model in the country” and an inspiration for his own plan to move the city’s homeless population off the streets in much larger numbers than his predecessors achieved, starting with 1,000 people by the end of this month. To better assess just how well Houston’s system has worked, The Denver Post visited the city and spoke with the leaders responsible for its 11-year-old strategy — as well as both people who have been helped and those who are still waiting for a hand up.
The Post found that while broad elements of Houston’s plan are similar to Johnston’s emerging playbook, there are key differences in the approaches and the timelines. Houston’s focus is on getting people into permanent housing while Denver largely is relying, at least for now, on temporary options.
Metro Houston’s leaders built the political will, along with reprioritizing the city and federal money long poured into homelessness, to pursue a uniform strategy with the area’s nonprofit providers. The city has weathered sometimes-fierce neighborhood pushback against new homeless housing, but The Way Home has been lauded by homeless advocates as a data-driven prototype for success.
Houston’s system places some hurdles in front of people who are homeless before they can get into permanent housing, and the system isn’t perfect: Street homelessness is still part of the landscape, especially among people who struggle with addiction or mental health problems.
But as city leaders from across the country try to build momentum for real change, they’ve looked for lessons from Houston’s reduction of unsheltered homelessness by about 63% in a decade.
“You can design a better process, and Houston did,” said former Mayor Annise Parker, who began leading the strategy shift in 2011.
On a warm early October afternoon, downtown Houston, the center of the nation’s fourth most populous city, wasn’t devoid of homeless people, but visible signs were far less apparent in the bustling core than they are in Denver. Tents were set up in a couple of places and small clusters of people were living under highway overpasses, but those largely were occurring a good distance from retail storefronts and businesses.
In and near downtown Denver, entire blocks this year have had tents and personal belongings scattered along the sidewalks, sometimes in front of businesses or apartment buildings — though the city has cleared several under Johnston’s House 1,000 initiative, with their residents relocated to hotels temporarily.
Houston’s progress has hit some snags. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey’s destruction pushed more people into homelessness. And during and after the pandemic, the economic pressures facing most cities, including rising rents — even in relatively affordable Houston — resulted in more people living outside after the city had achieved its lowest level of street homelessness.
In the last two years, through October, the city “decommissioned” more than 113 encampments where a combined 700 or so people lived, said Marc Eichenbaum, the special assistant for homeless initiatives to current Mayor Sylvester Turner.
What enabled those moves was the opening of the city’s navigation center, first piloted at a hotel — where Eddins passed through — and then, at the start of this year, moved to a converted former school with 100 beds spread in dorm-style bedrooms. Eichenbaum said federal pandemic aid helped pay for the nearly $7 million facility, which serves as a place for residents to stay while providers find them more permanent housing options. The nonprofit group Harmony House operates it.
Photos of past guests line the walls in the hallway, many of their faces beaming. That’s how Eddins said she felt when she walked into the first navigation center in late 2021, after leaving the bridge.
“I felt like I was in heaven. It’s like your feet are lifted up off the ground,” she said.
From crisis point to maximizing “the life boat”
A dozen years ago, Houston’s homeless population was at a crisis point, ranking as the sixth largest in the country. The annual point-in-time count for the Houston region found an estimated 8,538 people, or 1 in every 300 residents, were homeless — more than half of them unsheltered.
The next year, in 2012, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development named Houston a priority community for addressing homelessness. The designation brought federal funding and technical assistance, along with a mandate to follow a research-supported strategy called “housing first.”
That meant getting people who were chronically homeless and living on the streets a place to live as quickly as possible, ahead of all other concerns. Support services such as addiction treatment or mental health counseling — if the tenants wanted them — would follow. The model, which has its critics, is based on the concept that people can’t meaningfully change their lives if they don’t first have a safe, stable place to live.
It didn’t take much to get Parker on board. She’d already seen the fruits of a federally backed program that Houston participated in, successfully moving 101 homeless veterans into housing in 100 days — an initiative the city would later scale up.
Parker, the mayor from 2010 to 2016, says not every aspect of Denver’s developing homelessness strategy under Johnston can look like Houston’s, though Johnston also is aiming for a housing-first approach. But Parker believes every U.S. city can significantly reduce its homeless population by learning from the sustained improvements in Houston.
“In dealing with housing and homelessness, we’re all passengers in the Titanic,” Parker said, analogizing the sinking ship to cities’ attempts to get everyone housed in the face of larger societal forces. Among those are an insufficient supply of affordable housing; too little access to mental, behavioral health and substance use treatment; and inadequate supports for young adults leaving the foster care system.
“What I was able to do in Houston is maximize the use of the lifeboat,” Parker said.
And she had a lot of help. All the players from local governments and nonprofit groups came together to assess what was working and what wasn’t in metro Houston’s past approaches. That included service providers having to “put some of their egos aside” and altering their programs’ approaches, said Mike Nichols, CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County.
The coalition was appointed by a steering committee as the lead coordinating agency. Having a nonprofit lead came with advantages, Nichols said, such as being able to raise money from private donors, recruiting volunteers who could donate their professional services, and advocating for housing solutions on multiple fronts. Nonprofits also can pivot quickly during crises, such as the pandemic, without as much political interference.
“This is a model for solving social problems,” Nichols said of Houston’s homeless response system. But, he added, “this doesn’t happen overnight.”
Parker said she took advantage of the powers given to her office to push initiatives. She said she tried to follow the data and to ensure everyone understood the plan — and if providers wanted a piece of the city’s allotment in federal funding, they had to follow it.
“At that point, I just brute-forced it and used up a lot of political capital,” she said.
Programs see success — along with challenges
With more programs now in place, Houston’s The Way Home includes rapid rehousing options for people who need short-term assistance, often due to economic conditions, and who don’t have a disability preventing them from working. And it provides permanent supportive housing for the “chronically homeless.”
It’s this latter group that’s targeted for the most help, but they also face high hurdles. Not just anyone can get in line for an apartment. And once there, a small portion of their income contributes to the rent. In Eddins’ case, she pays a portion of her Social Security money.
To be considered chronically homeless under federal funding guidelines, a person must be able to prove that they’ve experienced homelessness for at least a year continuously, or for a combined 12 months over the course of three years, and also have a disabling condition.
Outreach workers from several participating agencies and partners use a standardized assessment to rank each client’s needs. The goal of the system, according to the coalition, is to ensure that “any door is the right door” — meaning that a person goes through the same intake process, and has access to the same housing or other help, no matter which provider they come in contact with.
The Way Home also offers programs aimed at shoring up families facing housing instability to prevent them from becoming homeless.
Before a bus took Eddins from the small bridge encampment to the navigation center two years ago, she’d spent nearly four months living under the structure, she said. She has had medical problems since she was young, and after her parents died, she lost the home she had shared with them and spent years living in various temporary accommodations.
She ended up under the bridge in 2021 after being discharged from a hospital following treatment for a problem with her bladder, she said.
Four other people were living on Eddins’ side of the bridge at the time. One person had left before outreach workers could take him to the navigation center, while another left the center and went back to living on the streets, according to The Way Home’s data-tracking system. The other two, like Eddins, moved into permanent housing and remain housed.
“I’m extremely proud of myself,” Eddins said of her newfound stability in an apartment, one that’s full of plants that spill out onto the balcony.
She and the others are among the success stories the homeless coalition cites for The Way Home’s continuum of programs. In 2022, about 81% of the people who were placed in permanent housing remained housed after a year. In rapid rehousing programs, the data shows, 83% of people who were placed had not returned to homelessness within two years, and at least two-thirds of them ended up in permanent housing after their time-limited stay ended.
Getting people enrolled requires significant legwork. For several hours on an October day, Fernando Torres and Otha Rice drove around to various parts of the city, trying to track down specific people they’d been assigned through their outreach work with an organization called Avenue 360.
As they made their way through the city, Torres reached in his pocket, grabbed his phone and texted a man he’d been working with for months on getting his documentation ready to get into permanent housing. But he couldn’t reach him. He tried to call him — no luck there, either.
So the outreach workers drove to an encampment known as “The Grove,” where at least 100 tents were scattered across a grassy area downtown, just blocks from Minute Maid Park, the Houston Astros’ stadium.
With a photo of the client in hand, they struck out.
Later, Torres was able to find another person he was helping to verify his 12 months of homelessness so the man could get on the list for permanent housing. The man met Torres at a convenience store, where the clerk attested that she had known the man to be homeless for at least three months. It was progress.
They drove the man back near the street where he was staying. The white outreach van, labeled “Street Outreach Mobile Unit” with a red, blue and yellow wrap depicting houses, made multiple stops that day, including at an underpass where the workers searched for a client. The outreach workers also met new people living on the streets or under bridges, listened to their stories and figured out whether they could connect them to programs for help.
Addressing homelessness and its complexities is a challenge for many cities, and Rice said part of the problem is that “people are dealing with it like it’s a political issue, and it’s not. It’s a humanitarian issue.”
Navigating through local resistance
But Houston’s mayors have run into plenty of local politics as The Way Home has developed. Local resistance has also been a challenge at times for nonprofit leaders whose organizations build affordable and supportive housing.
Most recently, the opening of the city’s navigation center in Houston’s low-income Fifth Ward neighborhood was delayed because of neighborhood pushback.
“People don’t want this in our community — we’re up against enough,” resident Sandra Edwards told the City Council last year, according to the Houston Chronicle. The people in the low-income neighborhood were already struggling, she said.
City leaders put a pause on the project as they called community meetings and promised improvement projects in the neighborhood as part of the development package. They also promised that any services available to formerly homeless people in the center also would be offered to community members in the area.
That reduced some of the opposition, but others stood firm. The center opened early this year.
“Even after educating folks, there are going to those folks who will never change their mind,” said Eichenbaum, Mayor Turner’s special assistant for homeless initiatives. “And so then it takes political will to say, ‘I’m going to go in a direction that not everybody is 100% supportive of so I can get everybody the results that they want.’ ”
In Denver, Johnston has weathered neighborhood opposition to plans for a series of temporary micro-communities of tiny homes or other shelters. His House 1,000 plan also is making use of former hotels.
Denver’s position now, with Johnston declaring homelessness an emergency, shows how progress can recede over time as new challenges arise — in this case, the city’s skyrocketing rents as people flocked to Denver in the 2010s.
Officials and providers in Houston recalled viewing Denver’s data-driven approach to homelessness as a model more than 15 years ago. Joy Horak-Brown, the executive director of an affordable housing development nonprofit called New Hope Housing, said she visited Denver in 2007 and remembered stopping by old apartments above retail spaces that had been made available to the homeless.
Now it’s Denver and its neighbors that are sending delegations to Houston.
Over the last three years, Denver’s homeless population increased by more than 48.5%, according to the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative. The city’s 2023 point-in-time count, which occurred over a single day in January — and which advocates say likely misses people — reported 1,423 unsheltered people in Denver, with another 4,395 in various forms of shelter. Metro-wide, the respective totals were 2,763 and 6,302.
Johnston, who took office in July, has pledged to end street homelessness in Denver by the end of his term in 2027. But while temporary solutions are rolling out, few details have been fleshed out publicly for later plans for permanent housing.
Getting people into permanent housing
Houston officials have commended Johnston’s ambitions, but they say both temporary and permanent housing should be in place to maximize the impact.
“The Catch-22 is that building temporary facilities is on the assumption that you have long-term housing for them to exit and go into,” Eichenbaum said. “… Putting people into a temporary facility takes lots of resources, time and money — and you’re not getting any reductions in homelessness” without the permanent housing.
In an interview, Johnston countered that Denver was making progress on that front, securing 500 housing vouchers through a partnership program for people who will transition out of the micro-communities. The city also is developing plans to provide more rapid rehousing — paying at least some portion of a person’s rent for three or four months to help them recover financially until they can become self-sufficient.
“Those are the times you need the most services,” Johnston said. “It’s once you’ve applied for that job, gotten it worked for three or four weeks, saved some money, reconnected to your family, gotten some help for your mental health needs — now you’re ready to actually go out to your own unit.”
Still, he acknowledged that in higher-rent Denver, finding permanent housing for people who leave shelters will be the biggest challenge.
In Houston, some of The Way Home’s programs are aimed at spurring more permanent housing — including new apartment complexes — while others enlist existing apartments and homes scattered across the area.
The coalition and its partners established the “Landlord Engagement Team” in 2019 to work with rental owners and property managers. The coalition pays market-rate rents, with the cost covered by vouchers and a portion of a tenant’s income.
About 70% of the properties signed up are multi-family buildings or communities, and the other 30% have individual landlords, according to the agency’s data. There are still too few available rental units to meet the demand in a tight market, but officials say it’s an important part of Houston’s response.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when college campuses closed, Jamil Hasan found himself in a predicament: He was losing money on vacant apartment units that he previously had no trouble filling. About 80% of the more than 70 apartment units he and his wife had acquired and renovated near Texas universities sat empty, a situation that persisted as college students returned to classes remotely.
Then Hasan learned about the coalition’s landlord program.
“My model was a perfect fit,” he said. Now most of his properties, which are split-level homes divided into apartments, have a mix of formerly homeless tenants and students.
Denver’s mayor has a similar idea in the works. His administration last month announced a $400,000 partnership with a nonprofit called Housing Connector that uses Zillow and other tools to find apartments in the city that are open. Plans call for the organization to reach out to landlords and negotiate lease rates and contracts for those willing to house formerly homeless people.
Cara Conrad, one of Hasan’s tenants in Houston, said the housing program changed her life. She’d been homeless for more than three years — a trajectory she attributed to multiple factors, including being sexually assaulted as a child, addiction problems, time spent in jail, medical challenges and family losses.
She got help, and in July she was able to get a housing voucher.
“It’s still emotional,” Conrad said. “I’m really proud of myself. … I had to go through a lot to get to where I am right now.”
Conrad said she’s not going to do anything that would jeopardize it and put her back on the streets. Talking about her apartment and the new stability she’s found, she mentioned her favorite spot: her bedroom closet.
The first thing she did when she moved in, she said, was hang up a shirt — taking satisfaction that she finally had found a safe place for her belongings.
