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Fourth, because each person who is homeless is an individual, with individual needs, the solution to housing people who are homeless starts with a “by-name-list.” A by-name-list is what people who work in this field call a list of each person in our community who is experiencing homelessness. With a by-name-list, we can stop talking broadly about “the homeless” and start talking specifically about “Fred,” a homeless veteran who has a beloved dog and would need housing that allows him to keep his pet. It allows us to find a specific housing solution for “Andrea,” a homeless mom with two young children who has been sleeping with her family in her car. We can find housing for “Javier,” who is homeless and has a job, but doesn’t make enough to find housing that he can afford. We also need to help “Steve,” who is struggling with behavioral health issues and has become dependent on alcohol to self-medicate.
The point is fundamental: We need to stop talking about “the homeless.” We need to talk about each person who is experiencing homelessness. Then we can help each person get housed.
For the past three years, we’ve been assembling our by-name-list here in Santa Fe. There is a community-wide coalition of partners—the S3 Housing Initiative—that has been working collaboratively and cooperatively to implement a comprehensive strategy to end chronic and veteran homelessness. (You can learn more about S3 here: https://s3santafehousinginitiative.org.)
Building the by-name-list is the first step, and it takes a lot of ongoing work to do the outreach and earn the trust of people who are homeless. Right now—and the list does change as we contact and add more people—according to the data in our system, we have 192 chronically homeless households (individuals, families, and young people), and 22 chronically homeless veterans in Santa Fe.
Outreach has shown that the people who are homeless in Santa Fe are overwhelmingly from Santa Fe. These are our friends and neighbors, former students and co-workers who have had their lives go sideways and are now struggling to find a place to live. Overwhelmingly, they tell us that if there were a safe, secure, and stable place where they could live, they’d welcome the opportunity to be housed.
For the past four years we’ve been working to create those safe, secure, and stable housing options. The City worked in partnership with non-profits and philanthropies, helping to buy the Santa Fe Suites hotel. More than 120 people now live there, with wrap-around services. When COVID hit, we created a shelter at a dorm at Midtown. Called Consuelo’s Place, it now offers housing, food, and medical care to about 60 people who were formerly homeless. The Lamplighter Inn is being purchased to provide another option for housing.
Currently, efforts are underway to find more housing that could offer shelter to people who are homeless. It could come in the form of another hotel or motel; it could be a safe encampment site, like the one in Las Cruces; it could be a combination of a shelter, like Pete’s Place, with other services and housing options built into it.
While we’ve been working to address the needs of our homeless residents, we’ve also been heeding the calls for help from residents and businesses who have had to deal with homeless people camping, living, and sometimes misbehaving in their neighborhoods. For example, the new leadership at Pete’s Place, in collaboration with the Santa Fe Police, have done much more to clean up Harrison Road. It’s not perfect, but it’s better.
Now that we’ve entered a different phase of COVID, the City will be issuing a new policy on encampments. We need to offer people in encampments an option—a place they can legally and safely move to. That’s why we are looking at increasing the supply of housing and considering a safe encampment site. But we also need to clear encampments that are dangerous for the people who live in them and unacceptable to the people who live near them. We need both: more housing options and more enforcement.
Homelessness is the most complex and challenging issue in urban America. It touches so many different needs. We need more housing and more types of housing. We need more services, including mental and behavioral health care. We need earlier intervention, before people even become homeless. We need more outreach, like the City’s Alternative Response Unit, which goes out to meet homeless people and seeks to help them, instead of sending police.
And we need more empathy, compassion, understanding, and patience. The people whose homes now have homeless encampments near them, the people whose businesses are often the sites where homeless people sleep, they deserve empathy and support every bit as much as those experiencing homelessness.
The good news is, in more than a dozen cities across the country, homelessness has been brought down to zero. The former Mayor of Rockford, Illinois, was on the same panel I spoke on in Reno. He talked about what it took to get Rockford to zero homelessness.
It took everyone working together. It took agreement that everyone cared and that everyone had a role to play. It took hard work and persistence. It took looking the problem in the eye without blame or anger. Most of all, it took humanizing the issue— “There but for the grace of God go I.”
As I've noted, according to our current data, we have 192 chronically homeless households and 22 chronically homeless veterans living in Santa Fe.
Santa Fe, what do you think? Can we find safe, stable, and supportive housing for our fellow residents who are experiencing homelessness? Can we get to zero?
I know we can. I know we will.
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