Homelessness Can be Ended; Santa Clara County Has The Formula

When faced with a plethora of social issues, there are some that seem solvable and some that do not. For decades we thought of homelessness in a worthy but unsolvable category. If we could ease human suffering, we thought we were doing the best we could.

But several years ago we, like many other communities, embraced Housing First, a best practice solution. It promotes permanent supportive housing, which means including health care and other services individuals need for stable lives. Our local data currently shows an 84 percent success rate for formerly homeless people maintaining this housing after one year. These are the same men and women who had been on our streets for decades and often considered “too hard to house”. Click here for the full op-ed.