Introduction
‘Making Homelessness History In Colorado’ provides a framework for efforts to address homelessness in Colorado today and a vision for the future. It introduces a series of guiding principles with key goals, cross-cutting approaches, and a list of proven solutions that communities across Colorado have successfully implemented that can be replicated elsewhere.
Our hope is that this document successfully weaves together many of the different conversations underway in Colorado while also building on the foundation of effective strategies and solutions at the local, state, and federal levels. It has been created with input from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA), the Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS), the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy & Financing (HCPF), community stakeholders, and those with lived experience from throughout the state.
Whether it’s due to getting sick, losing a job, or family conflict, homelessness can happen to anyone. We also know that due to historic and ongoing racism, not all racial and ethnic groups experience homelessness at the same rate. People of color, particularly Black and Native Americans, are disproportionately represented and impacted at virtually every phase of the experience. The homeless response system, which triages, supports, and re-houses people experiencing homelessness, must identify and respond to racial disparities.
This page serves as a playbook to address these challenges in order to meet the needs of those experiencing homelessness whether they’re Veterans, families, youth, seniors, those fleeing domestic violence, individuals with complex physical and behavioral health needs, or those exiting incarceration. Across these populations and regardless of the precipitating event or circumstance, we know that homelessness ends in a home.
Collaboration is critical to the successful implementation of this playbook. If you have any feedback, positive or negative, please contact Nellie Stagg (nellie.stagg@state.co.us), Director of Homeless Initiatives within the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, Division of Housing. Thank you for your commitment to making homelessness history in Colorado.
The Vision
Our vision is that everyone in Colorado has a safe, stable, and affordable place to live. Together we can create a future where homelessness is rare and brief when it occurs, and no one gets left behind.
The Issue
- Homelessness is a result of individual adverse circumstances colliding with inadequate systems. Solving the complex problem of homelessness requires a system that can continuously tackle the problem at the individual, systemic, and structural levels.
- Homelessness is a dynamic, ever-changing problem. A homeless response system needs to know who is experiencing
homelessness, what they need to exit homelessness, how that population is constantly changing, and what is working. Emergency events like fires, floods, storms, and public health crises should inform the design of the homelessness response system. - There is no one-size-fits-all solution to homelessness. Every individual or family experiences homelessness differently. Ending homelessness requires the availability of diverse, proven solutions that meet a variety of needs as well as respond to and address a history of systemic racial inequities.
- It takes an entire community working together to tackle a complex problem. No single individual, agency or organization can solve homelessness alone. A strong homelessness response system is built on partnerships across agencies, organizations, and community leaders.
- We need to act now. The health and well-being of our neighbors are at stake.
The PlayBook
The Urgency of Now
Homelessness is a big problem, but not one too big to be solved when an entire community comes together.
- 9,600+ Coloradans reported experiencing sheltered or unsheltered literal homelessness on a single night in January during the 2019 Federal Point-In-Time Count snapshot.
- 23,000+ students identified as experiencing homelessness, doubled up, or unstably housed by school-based McKinney-Vento liaisons during the 2018-2019 school year.
- 53,000+ individuals covered by Colorado’s Medicaid system in 2019 were without stable housing.
The discrepancies between these data sources are part of what motivates us to encourage every community working to end homelessness in Colorado to collaboratively develop a multi-sector, real-time, by-name list of people experiencing homelessness in their communities and use that list to rapidly test and implement strategies to reduce the number of people experiencing homelessness.
Guiding Principles
- We understand homelessness ends in a home. We are addressing gaps in affordable housing and breaking down the barriers that stand in the way of affordable homeownership and rental opportunities.
- We agree on a shared goal. We aim to help more people and to drive that overall number of people experiencing homelessness down. Collaboration around this shared goal of ending homelessness — not just managing it — is necessary to make this a reality.
- We work off a full picture of who needs support. Data allows us to understand the scale of the problem and whether our activities and investments are reducing the number of people experiencing homelessness.
- We invest in what works. We ensure that the solutions we offer are those that are proven to work. Decades of evidence have proven that certain philosophies and interventions work — we are building a system that can deliver and target those solutions to those who need it.
- We work toward a more equitable future. Homelessness is inseparable from the social systems that create it. By applying a racial equity lens across all we do, we can identify, interrupt, and eliminate racial disparities at every stage of homelessness.
Housing and supports are foundational for the safety, health, and wellbeing of Coloradans. Housing is one of the best-researched social determinants of health, consistently found to improve health outcomes and decrease health care costs. We may not be able to prevent everyone from experiencing a housing crisis, but we can build a system to ensure that homelessness is rare and quickly resolved when it occurs.