Suppose the gutters on your roof are backed up and overflowing. You can’t stop the rain, because nature. What can you do? You could unclog the drain. Or you could continually enlarge the gutters so they can hold more and more water.
When it comes to homelessness in St. Louis, some seem to want to enlarge the gutters.
As I wrote in January, the consensus among providers in the city’s homeless response system has been that St. Louis doesn’t have enough shelter beds. Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier of the 7th Ward told me that this month, she plans to introduce an unhoused-policy bill. Reportedly, it will propose, inter alia, the easing of restrictions on creating new shelters. (She declined to give specifics until the bill is filed.)
There’s an understandable logic to expanding shelter space, especially when an arctic blast envelops St. Louis, as one did in January.
Yet fewer unhoused people would need a shelter bed on frigid nights if our system were better at rehousing them in the first place.
Expanding shelter space is certainly not how the city of Houston achieved its remarkable 62 percent reduction in homelessness over the past decade, according to major players in that effort. Rather, they built a coalition of providers relentlessly focused on moving the unhoused directly into housing—permanent supportive housing, for the most part, with some rapid rehousing. Houston’s north star is “housing first,” an approach with an evidence base so robust, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)—the primary funder for providers—richly rewards the cities that get good at it. The animating idea is that unhoused individuals respond best to wraparound support while living in their own housing, not while living in a shelter.
After my first piece on this subject came out, responses flowed in from providers, City Hall officials, and residents. A common objection was this: St. Louis can’t mimic Houston’s success because we don’t have enough affordable housing.
“I honestly don’t think we can get to that point without [building more],” Toni Wade, chair of the city response system’s governing board, told me. I heard something similar from the office of Megan Green, president of the Board of Alderman. Her spokesman, Yusuf Daneshyar, told me that St. Louis may be a decade away from supply meeting demand, and that until it does, “shelters will continue to play a critical role in helping individuals find relief.”
There’s certainly reason to believe that a boost in affordable housing would help on the prevention side. HUD basically says this. So do the researchers Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern in their fantastic book Homelessness is a Housing Problem.
But does it follow that St. Louis cannot shrink homelessness until it has more affordable housing?
“What you heard is what you’ll hear in every single city,” said Mandy Chapman Semple. She is seen as the architect of Houston’s strategy and, as co-founder of Clutch Consulting Group, has worked in various cities, including ours. She said that she has no reason to doubt the St. Louis’ 2023 affordable housing report, which identified a shortage, but she insisted: “I can 100 percent guarantee that St. Louis has enough units for what I’m describing.”
What she described is how Houston has helped high-need individuals get into permanent supportive housing. These folks are, by definition, chronically homeless. St. Louis city had 298 people in this category in last year’s count, 53 of whom were living “unsheltered”—for example, in tents or under overpasses.
Houston thinks in terms of “slots,” Chapman Semple explained. Each slot consists of (1) a unit in the private market, (2) a rental subsidy, and (3) a wraparound-services package. As for the unit, what matters is not affordability, because the rehoused person won’t be paying the rent; the federal government will be. (More on that in a second.) Rather, what matters is availability. And St. Louis has that. The average rental vacancy rate in St. Louis in the first three-quarters of 2023 was 8 percent. That’s not as high as Houston’s 11 percent. But it’s still in the highest third of the country’s 75 largest metros.
True, vacant doesn’t always mean available. Private landlords can refuse to rent their empty units to folks being rehoused. So Houston has locked down its slots by sweetening the deal for landlords, said Ana Rausch, the vice president of program operations at Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County, the lead agency in her region’s response system.
For instance, Houston’s system will pay an incentive fee that the landlord gets to pocket. In exchange, the landlord will agree to terms such as holding off on eviction and waiving the deposit and criminal background check. For landlords leery of property damage, Houston offers a damage mitigation fund, sourced by philanthropic dollars. Most landlords don’t even tap into it, Rausch said: “Just the safety of having it seems to work.” Houston’s system even has staff whose main task is to find amenable landlords, engage with their concerns, and create a system-wide portfolio of units in which to rehouse people.
The financial bedrock of Houston’s approach, though, is the HUD housing choice voucher. This is how Houston pays the rent in its slots. (There’s a long waitlist for vouchers in Houston and in St. Louis, but housing authorities in both cities have carved out a preference so that unhoused people can “jump the line.”) Each year, cities across the U.S. compete for this voucher funding. Those that excel at housing-first policies can not only renew their award from the previous year but also win incremental boosts. By obsessing over how to rehouse people, Rausch said, Houston grew its annual HUD award from $25.4 million a decade ago to $59.6 million today—an increase of 134 percent. St. Louis, meanwhile, saw an increase of 31 percent in the same period, going from $11 million to $14.5 million.
Yes, certain parts of St. Louis’s system have tried some of Houston’s tactics. But no, as a system, we haven’t had the same success.
Rausch said Houston got good at housing-first policies in large part because it set up a central repository of data that’s reliable and timely. That, in turn, was enabled by the creation of a backbone organization, which cultivated political and provider buy-in plus an ability to quarterback all of the players into working as a team. The HUD competition rewards such accomplishments, too. I’ll write more about them in future editions.
So far, St. Louis’ system has no such data and no such backbone entity, said Anthony D’Agostino, CEO of St. Peter & Paul Community Services. Rehousing takes a long time, he adds, and our homeless population seems to be swelling, so in the short term, the emergency inclement-weather shelter space must expand or become more efficient. A lack of beds in a cold snap, D’Agostino said, is “a recipe for death.”
Chapman Semple agreed that some shelter beds are necessary. Even warm-weather Houston has them. Still, she argued, investing in shelters gets you one thing—more open shelter beds—whereas investing in rehousing gets you two things: more open shelter beds (because some become freed up) and rehoused people. Certain observers and providers in St. Louis haven’t bought into this, she said, “because they don’t know how to rehouse people.” The communities that succeed at rehousing do so incrementally, she says; those that assume it’s impossible—whether because of the affordable housing market or anything else—never get anywhere.
“The response system can’t fix the affordable housing crisis,” she said. “But what we can do is make sure people aren’t homeless.”
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