Housing First takes aim at Fort Collins' chronic homelessness

Kevin Duggan
The Coloradoan
Jake Book and Haley Crider panhandle on College Avenue in 2016. A new Housing First initiative is aimed at collecting data on homeless people and their specific needs to better connect them to resources.

Everyone knows homelessness is a problem in Fort Collins. But how much do we know about the homeless people in our community?

What do the homeless need, other than the obvious: housing? How can local service providers that work with the homeless help them find housing and meet those other needs?

A relatively new initiative aims to answer those and other important questions. The idea is to better serve the homeless and assist them in finding housing stability and the benefits that come with it by better understanding their specific situations.

Administrators of the local Housing First initiative have already begun collecting data on community members who have been homeless for at least six months.

The focus is on people who live in Fort Collins, not the travelers and transients who pass through town when the weather is fine and are the most visibly homeless.

The city’s “chronic” homeless population has ranged between 300 and 350 people the past five years, according to a recent presentation to City Council. The Housing First project will attempt to contact all of these folks and document their circumstances.

Information to be collected could include a person’s housing status as well as whether that person needs home health care, a job, transportation, or assistance filling out forms to access Social Security or veterans benefits.

Using that data, program administrators hope to connect individuals with the types of housing and services they specifically need to get out of homeless and stay out, Holly LeMasurier, director of Homeward 2020, told City Council.

“We will be able to quantify and monetize and more specifically, hopefully actually resource these things so we will be ready for successful housing placements,” LeMasurier said.

Working with local service agencies and landlords, Housing First hopes to connect individuals with housing providers based on the level of support clients need.

An element of the housing first concept is removing barriers to finding appropriate housing, such as screening out people with requirements for sobriety, employment or decent credit history.

“Our project will really strive to build positive landlord and tenant relations and then monitor their relationship as that person is moved into housing,” LeMasurier said.

That could include weekly check-ins to see if things are going well, she said.

The data will be regularly reported to the community beginning in October. The program will post an online dashboard on homelessness without identifying individuals to protect their privacy.

The Housing First Initiative is a partnership between Homeward 2020 and the Sister Mary Alice Murphy Center for Hope.

Homeward 2020’s stated mission is to make homelessness “rare, short-lived and non-recurring.” The Murphy Center, which facilitates collaboration among various agencies that offer programs and services to the homeless, has the same goal.

Homelessness is a complex and multi-faceted issue. Working with private and governmental funders and the community, Homeward 2020 and the Murphy Center just might get closer to their lofty goal by emphasizing housing first.

Kevin Duggan is a Coloradoan senior reporter covering local government. Follow him on Twitter, @coloradoan_dugg and on Facebook at Coloradoan Kevin Duggan.