Continuing the Conversation: COVID Underscores Homelessness as a Policy Choice
Q&A with Jeff Olivet (Part 2)
Jeff Olivet is the executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH). He has worked to prevent and end homelessness for more than 25 years as a street outreach worker, case manager, coalition builder, researcher, and trainer. He is the founder of jo consulting, co-founder of Racial Equity Partners, and from 2010 to 2018, he served as CEO of C4 Innovations. Throughout his career, he has worked extensively in the areas of homelessness and housing, health and behavioral health, HIV, education, and organizational development. Jeff has been principal investigator on multiple research studies funded by private foundations and the National Institutes of Health. Jeff is deeply committed to social justice, racial equity, gender equality, and inclusion for all. He has a bachelor's degree from the University of Alabama and a master's degree from Boston College.
Belinda Juran/Paige Warren: It’s been almost a year since our last conversation about the Biden Administration’s “All In” strategy to prevent and end homelessness. A number of trends have since transpired that would seem to represent headwinds to progress: a worsening housing shortage and corresponding increasing housing costs; dramatically increased levels of immigration; and the expiration of eviction protections that had been enacted during COVID. To what extent have these challenges required a pivot in either USICH’s overall strategy or individual tactics?
Jeff Olivet: Homelessness is a public health crisis, and those issues that you mention are some of the biggest contributing factors. Unfortunately, most of those trends are not new. Our overall strategy has been and will continue to address all of them in part by building more homes and making all of them more affordable. Furthermore, the pandemic showed us that homelessness is a policy choice. At the height of the pandemic, we as a nation chose collectively to invest in housing and wraparound support for people without a home and in new systems that prevent homelessness. We created emergency rental assistance and expanded the child tax credit and provided lower-income people with direct cash assistance. With those new resources, we flattened the rise in homelessness that started in 2016 and prevented another rise between 2020 and 2022. Unfortunately, as those programs expire, we are seeing homelessness rise again.
What we need now is for Congress to once again invest more in what we know works: housing, health care, and all the things we saw were so effective during the pandemic at preventing people from losing their homes.
So, we are certainly in a crisis, but homelessness is always a crisis. It's a crisis at the individual level for the person experiencing the trauma of it. It's a crisis at the societal level for the systems contributing to it. It requires the same urgency, creativity, and resources that we bring to pandemics, tornados, and other disasters.
Juran/Warren: Where has there been good news over the last year, and what can we learn from it?
Olivet: As I travel around the country, I see good work happening in all kinds of places where we see people every day moving out of homelessness and into housing.
While there's been a national rise in homelessness, places like Houston, Dallas, Newark, and Chattanooga are really bucking the national trend and seeing the numbers go down, particularly for people living outside and unsheltered. They are showing their communities what we at USICH already know: Homelessness is solvable.
At the federal level, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) helped more than 420,000 peopleovercome or avoid homelessness in 2023. The Veterans Administration set a goal of housing 38,000 veterans in 2023 alone, and they blew their goal out of the water by housing more than 46,000. Additionally, the White House put a Housing Supply Action Plan in place that has put the nation back on track to build more apartments than in any of the last 50 years. Lastly, we've seen the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) expand the number of states that can use Medicaid to cover the short-term cost of housing to help people experiencing homelessness recover from a mental health or substance use disorder. And we built the foundation for a national eviction prevention system.
So, despite the national numbers, there's a lot of work being done and a lot to be hopeful about.
Juran/Warren: Relative to history, there is an emerging recognition beyond those that specialize in housing (“housers”) that the country is facing a severe undersupply of housing and a focus around innovation, including everything from zoning and land use to construction techniques and materials. Are you seeing this making its way to the homeless end of the housing spectrum?
Olivet: That's right. It is critical that we incentivize and make it easier for developers to build affordable housing. In the 1970s, we had a surplus of 300,000 affordable housing units. Today, we have a shortage of seven million. I would also add that we still see tremendous resistance to new affordable housing from housed neighbors. The developer can have the funding package put together, and the wealthy neighbors say, “No, not here.”
What some people do not understand is that when your neighbors are doing well, that’s better for everyone. Helping people move off the streets and into homes benefits the health of full communities – not just the unhoused. We need everyone in this nation to shoulder the collective responsibility of making sure that everyone is housed.
Juran/Warren: You referenced Houston as one of several locations making progress locally. Are their approaches scalable?
Olivet: The approaches used in places where we’re seeing real progress are absolutely scalable. And the recipe is pretty straightforward: housing and wraparound support for everyone who needs them. That's what ends homelessness. And you can scale that in all kinds of ways, even in tough housing markets.
The other thing that we're seeing begin to emerge is a real and critical focus on prevention in some communities; it’s also scalable. For every person who overcomes homelessness and moves into housing, more than one person loses their homes and experiences homelessness. Until we prevent more people from losing their homes in the first place, we have no chance at ending homelessness.
Juran/Warren: How does the national “All In” strategy engage with local jurisdictions?
Olivet: Cities and states are using it as a roadmap to create their own plans that align with our goals and strategies.
Additionally, “All In” has helped focus federal technical assistance and support for states to achieve important goals highlighted in the plan. We have a group of senior regional advisors who focus all of their time directly helping mayors, providers, and other local leaders implement those strategies.
“All In” also spurred the White House and USICH to launch ALL INside, which is a focused effort in seven jurisdictions around the country to help people move off the streets and into homes. We do that by cutting red tape at the federal level and by embedding a federal official in those communities. We've seen communities like Denver already making historic progress in a matter of months – getting a thousand people off the street, into safe places, and on the road to permanent housing.
The plan has spurred HUD's investment of nearly half a billion dollars in unsheltered and rural homelessness, some of which went to the ALL INside communities.
Juran/Warren: In 2023, the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) Benioff Center for Housing and Homelessness published the largest study on homelessness conducted in over 25 years. Appreciating that it was focused specifically on the State of California, were there any “Aha!” moments? Did its findings align with our current national policy?
Olivet: The UCSF statewide study is the most significant research on homelessness in 30 years. It's incredibly powerful. And I think it aligns very well with the focus we have at the federal level. What it does is bust a lot of myths out there about homelessness. In particular, it absolutely destroys the myth that everybody without a home is coming to California because of great services or housing. It's just not true. People are homeless, for the most part, in the place where they're from. These are Californians – friends and neighbors who fall into hard times, lose their homes, and can't afford the rapidly increased cost of housing.
The increasing cost of housing as a driver of homelessness is another thing that UCSF really shores up, showing that if people only had a little bit of financial support at a critical time – a few hundred dollars a month – they would have avoided homelessness. That’s an incredibly powerful finding, and one that teaches us something about what it would take to prevent homelessness from happening.
Juran/Warren: Did the study identify gaps that we should be providing programming around or areas we should be emphasizing?
Olivet: For folks who have been in the field for a long time, the study powerfully affirmed things that we've already known. But it certainly documented it powerfully.
Another gap the study showed was just the tremendous challenge people have is when they're wrestling with mental health and substance use issues and they're trying to access care. There simply aren't enough treatment beds available and there aren’t programs for them to get to. That means the number of people who want help with these serious issues and cannot get it is a real crisis.
Juran/Warren: One thing that was personally striking in the study is the percentage of the homeless population (approximately 20%) coming from an institutionalized prison setting and lacking transition support. While I appreciate the diversity of backgrounds in this population, the fact that such a high share derives from one source raises the question: Does this represent “low hanging fruit” in terms of potential impact?
Olivet: These critical moments of transition are an incredible opportunity to catch people before they fall into homelessness. The number of people who leave jail or prison and end up in the streets or in the shelters is just tremendous. And the travesty is we basically know who these people are before they're homeless. This also happens with foster youth and people discharged from hospitals and mental health or substance use facilities. We need to shut down these pipelines into homelessness.
Good work is happening in this area. The Department of Justice and HUD are working on re-entry housing programs. HUD and HHS are engaged around youth homelessness prevention and supporting young people coming out of foster care and/or rejected by friends and family often for their sexual orientation. President Biden has proposed guaranteed vouchers for every youth aging out of foster care. We need Congress to fund that. We're putting proposals on the table. Now, we need bipartisan support for those proposals.
Juran/Warren: The legality of homeless encampments is currently under review in by the US Supreme Court. What is the administration’s position on homeless encampments?
Olivet: The court will decide what is legal – but what is legal is not necessarily effective or right. Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules in the Grants Pass case, laws that make homelessness a crime are ineffective, expensive, inhumane, and far too often lead to unintended, even deadly, consequences. When local leaders have a choice between passing bans on sleeping in public – even for people who have nowhere else to go – or investing in housing and services that help people move off streets and into homes, the choice is clear: housing and support – not handcuffs – solves homelessness. USICH recently released new guidance – 19 Strategies for Communities to Address Encampments Humanely and Effectively. We urge communities to use evidence-based strategies to collaboratively, equitably, and humanely make housing, health care, and other support available to all who need it. Sometimes, health and safety factors call for encampments to be closed before that happens, and when it does, the process of closing an encampment must be implemented in a humane and trauma-informed way, and the goal must be to connect every person to housing and services to help them overcome and avoid future experiences of homelessness.
Juran/Warren: Are you seeing philanthropy supporting innovative solutions in the homeless space?
Olivet: The term “public-private partnership” gets thrown around a lot, but it’s key in a real, deep way. The federal government can bring a lot to the table in terms of resources and programs. But we need the nimbleness and innovation of the corporate sector, of philanthropy, and of the faith community, to really drive change that then teaches back to the public sector what to scale up. I think that's the feedback loop that we need to apply more to homelessness, and even more specifically to homelessness prevention.
Currently, we see a lot of philanthropic money beginning to focus on homelessness prevention including guaranteed basic income pilots and direct cash transfers to young people experiencing homelessness to get and keep housing.
We also see philanthropic dollars going to support flexible funding pools that can provide people a few hundred dollars at a critical moment when they need it for a car repair or rental assistance or utility payments. This will address exactly what we talked about earlier with the California study about the need for earlier, smaller interventions.
Philanthropic dollars have been critical to spur that kind of innovation, and my hope is that the public system will then learn from it – at the county level, at the state level, and at the federal level.
Juran/Warren: You’ve commented before we all have a role to play in solving homelessness, and you likened it to asking an emergency room to “fix” obesity. Can you be specific about what do you mean?
Olivet: When you think about health systems, they’re multi-faceted. We need emergency rooms because they keep people alive when they've had a gunshot wound or a heart attack or a car accident. But we also need a primary-care system that stabilizes people's health for the long-term. And we need long-term care when people have had a real health crisis or have ongoing chronic health issues.
If you take that parallel over into homelessness, the homelessness system is the part that keeps people alive. It's the shelters, the outreach teams, the street medicine teams, the crisis workers who find people at often the lowest moments of their lives, helping them back into housing and providing wraparound supports.
Then we've got those longer-term systems that we need more of: safe and affordable housing, case management and supportive services, job support, health care – including mental health and substance use treatment – because we know that that's the real solution to helping someone move from homelessness into housing.
But we also know that is not enough. We need to prevent homelessness before it happens.
So, when I say we all have a role to play, what I mean is that the outreach workers and the shelter system and those doing the emergency work can’t do it all.
We need to fix many different systems starting with the housing system. Government certainly has a role to play. But so does the faith community. So does the business community. So do local elected officials. So do neighbors and small business owners. We can solve this, but we can only solve it if we're working on it together and not pointing fingers at each other.
This is not a partisan issue and never has been. Our only interest is in what works for the people struggling on the streets in every community and it is not one size fits all, but will require compassion, creativity, and good government.
About the Authors:
Belinda Juran was a 2020 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) Fellow whose social impact is focused on her adopted hometown of Lowell, MA. Before ALI, Belinda served as partner at WilmerHale, a global law firm where she co-chaired the technology transactions and licensing practice group and the life sciences practice group. Earlier she was a software engineer, engineering manager and consultant at various software and hardware companies. Belinda is a board member of both the International Institute of New England, which supports refugees and immigrants in the eastern Massachusetts and New Hampshire areas, and the Pollard Memorial Library Foundation, which raises funds to support Lowell’s public library. She also serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the University of Massachusetts Lowell School of Education, the Lowell Early Childhood Council, UTEC (which helps proven-risk young adults achieve social and economic success), and the Free Soil Arts Collective (which amplifies the voices of artists of color).
Paige Warren serves as the Assistant Commissioner Portfolio Management and Customer Engagement for GSA’s Public Building Service. In this role, Paige oversees the strategy, planning, policy, and capital investment of the largest leased and owned real estate portfolio in the nation – 370 million square feet, spanning 8,800 buildings across 2,200 communities. In 2023, Paige returned to public service believing that our nation is at an historic time with a once-in a lifetime opportunity to deploy public resources to lead on some of the most pressing social issues of our time: the more just and equitable economic development of our urban areas, the sustainability of the built environment, and the innovation evolution of workforce and workplace solutions. In 2021, Paige Warren served a Harvard ALI Senior Fellow. Prior to ALI, Paige had a distinguished career in financial services at the nexus of business, government, and neighborhoods. Over the course of her 17-year tenure in the investment management arm of Prudential Financials' investment management arm, Paige served in various senior roles including Global COO and Head of Strategy, President, and Portfolio Manager. Much of Paige’s career was spent in affordable and public housing development and finance. Prior to joining Prudential, Paige built and led a federal governmental organization to preserve the physical condition and restructure the debt of the nation’s affordable housing portfolio. Paige is currently the vice chair of the board of trustees and chair of the finance subcommittee at The Washington Center, a non-profit, higher education-adjacent organization whose mission is to enhance the pipeline of diverse talent and to build more equitable, inclusive workplaces and communities. She is an ESG FSA Credential-holder and holds a certification in ESG Investment from the CFA Institute.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.