Press Room

When the authors of Fort Worth’s 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness set a goal of creating or identifying 544 permanent supportive housing units for homeless residents by year six, some observers thought that an overly ambitious target.

Yet on Thursday, just three months into the first year of Directions Home, officials announced that 112 people have moved out of homelessness and into apartments.

This amazing achievement is a testament to what can be achieved when people coalesce around an issue. The voices of city and county elected leaders have joined with those from the business, educational, healthcare, social service and faith-based communities to embrace a shared vision to make chronic homelessness a rare, short-term and nonrecurring event in Tarrant County.

Housing vouchers funded by city and federal dollars are being used to provide apartment keys for 200 vulnerable and chronically homeless people in Fort Worth.

If you’re keeping score, that’s 200 vouchers through the Directions Home program added to 105 HUD-VA vouchers, 37 Continuum of Care vouchers from the Tarrant County Homeless Coalition, plus whatever expansion of local programs results from new money available from the state. Otis Thornton, the city’s homelessness coordinator, said the new money could fund as many as 100 additional rent vouchers.

Thornton said officials with the Fort Worth Housing Authority report that many landlords prefer working with Directions Home residents because someone is constantly checking on them to help them live up to the terms of their leases. It appears that the "supportive" part of permanent supportive housing serves the clients and their landlords.

Recognition of the successes of the Fort Worth plan extends well beyond the county line.

"Fort Worth has a great planning document in its 10-year plan and is doing a very good job of implementing it," said Ken Martin, executive director of the Texas Homeless Network.

"There are cities in Texas and around the nation where 10-year plans were put on the shelf and they sit there. Fort Worth didn’t do that. Its success is because people wanted to make sure it’s used — the mayor and city council, county leaders, Thornton, [Executive Director] Cindy Crain with the Tarrant County Homeless Coalition and all the members of the coalition.

"You can’t implement something as comprehensive as a 10-year plan unless you have a buy-in from a wide spectrum of the community."

The people receiving keys to their own apartments were identified through surveys as some of the county’s most medically vulnerable individuals. In the eight months prior to obtaining housing, 57 of the 112 people housed in the first three months of the initiative had been to the emergency room 179 times. And in the year before they obtained housing, 41 of the 112 accounted for 101 hospital admissions.

Safe, affordable, accessible housing combined with healthcare, mental health assistance, substance abuse counseling and job training programs means formerly homeless people can live stable and productive lives, neighborhoods and businesses do not have to contend with concentrations of unsheltered homeless people, and communities are able to redirect resources to other priorities.

We all win.