This story was originally published on ARCHITECT's sister site, Affordable Housing Finance.
The White House and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness have launched a new initiative to address unsheltered homelessness in the country.
Called ALL INside, the initiative will focus on reducing unsheltered homelessness in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, the Phoenix metro, Seattle, and the state of California.
USICH and its 19 federal member agencies will partner with state and local governments for up to two years to strengthen and accelerate local efforts to get people off the streets and into homes where they can recover from the trauma of homelessness and rebuild their lives.
“The ALL INside initiative treats homelessness as the urgent public health crisis that it is with urgency and collaboration,” said USIHC executive director Jeff Olivet during an event announcing the program.
He stressed that the issue cannot be solved by a single system or jurisdiction.
“Homelessness is a multisystem failure that requires multisystem solutions,” Olivet said. “To end homelessness, we must fix our systems and not blame people being failed by them. To end homelessness, we must work together, and that’s exactly what this initiative will do.”
In announcing the new effort, the Biden-Harris administration said it will:
- Embed a dedicated federal official in each ALL INside community to accelerate locally driven strategies and enact system-level changes to reduce unsheltered homelessness;
- Deploy dedicated teams across the federal government to identify opportunities for regulatory relief and flexibilities, navigate federal funding streams, and facilitate a peer learning network across the ALL INside communities; and
- Convene philanthropy, the private sector, and other communities to identify more opportunities for support and collaboration.
A number of federal agencies are also being called in. For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will help communities to use regulatory flexibilities to speed up the processes enabling residents to move into properties as well troubleshoot barriers to connecting people to rental assistance and other housing programs.
The Department of Health and Human Services will provide technical assistance to help communities leverage Medicaid to cover and provide housing-related supportive services and behavioral health care.
ALL INside is a key part of All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, which set a bold goal to reduce homelessness 25% by 2025.
Homelessness has been on the rise since 2015, experiencing an overall increase of 3%, according to the new “State of Homelessness: 2023 Edition” report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
In 2022, counts of individuals (421,392 people) and chronically homeless individuals (127,768) reached record highs in the history of data collection, reveals the report.
This story was originally published on ARCHITECT's sister site, Affordable Housing Finance.
