South Alamo Regional Alliance for the Homeless, the nonprofit agency tasked with coordinating San Antonio and Bexar County’s homelessness response system, has a new name: Close to Home.
In addition to being a bit of a mouthful, the old name used dated language about “the homeless” population, Close to Home’s Executive Director Katie Vela Wilson told the San Antonio Report earlier this week.
“We’ve really focused on person-centered language as we’ve evolved,” Wilson said. “When you limit someone to being a ‘homeless person,’ you’re not recognizing them and their humanity. … It means that their housing situation is how you’re defining who they are, which isn’t helpful for the stigma about the population.”
Close to Home has nearly doubled its annual federal funding since it started applying for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care Competition Awards in 2016. Earlier this year HUD granted the nonprofit, which distributes funding to various local service organizations, more than $17 million as part of its annual funding round. The federal agency then granted an additional $14.5 million as part of a special batch of funding specifically to serve unsheltered people.
“They have strengthened the coordination of our partners, brought new resources into the community and led critical initiatives to create sustainable solutions for homelessness,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said in a pre-recorded video played during the name announcement at Mi Tierra Cafe.
The “alliance” piece of Close to Home will continue and Wilson hopes it will expand.
The nonprofit itself is called Close to Home and the broader community-wide coalition to end homelessness will now be referred to as the Alliance to House Everyone. In recent years, agencies in Dallas and Houston have also rebranded in similar ways.
“The hard work continues,” Nirenberg added. “Close to Home and the Alliance will be working together on implementing new solutions to address unsheltered homelessness, preventing homelessness for families, and continuing the work to expand housing options for people experiencing homelessness in desperate need.”
The Close to Home name better represents the nonprofit’s mission “to ensure everyone has a place to call home,” Wilson said. “It’s also an issue that’s close to home for many. Anyone can find themselves in [an unhoused] situation whether it’s due to job loss, health issues, domestic violence or abuse.”
Another layer to the new name, she added, is that “the solution will be ‘close to home’ if we’re truly going to solve [homelessness]. It’s going to take every city council district, every small municipality, focusing on developing housing options for people that they can sustain.”
It’s been an emotional few months inside the Close to Home office since Billy Mahone III, the nonprofit’s senior director of strategic planning and partnerships, died suddenly in July.
“This [rebranding] is part of Billy’s legacy,” Wilson said.
The board will also be incorporating Mahone’s “all-in” approach to service and advocacy into its core values later this year, she said.
“Ultimately, we all have to stay focused on housing to address this issue for the long-term. Quick fixes won’t do it,” Wilson said. This will include holistic work on the systems that can lead to homelessness, as well as increasing the region’s affordable housing stock and economic mobility.
Addressing causes of homelessness
The new name also signals a refocus on public education and messaging.
“Homelessness is not just a personal trouble, it’s the result of systemic issues and pressures that are much bigger than the individual,” Wilson said.
The Strategic Plan to Respond to Homelessness in San Antonio and Bexar County set several five-year goals, including of cutting unsheltered homelessness in half by the end of 2025.
The number of unsheltered individuals has remained relatively flat since the end of 2022, hovering at roughly 1,500 people and spiking to 2,500 earlier that year, according to Close to Home’s dashboard that tracks progress toward the plan’s goals.
Recent investments may be starting to stabilize the tide.
San Antonio’s $3.7 billion fiscal year 2024 budget invested $17.4 million to support homelessness prevention programs, outreach workers, shelters and more cleanup operations at encampments across the city.
This year, more than $31 million in municipal bond funding and other federal money was allocated to house people experiencing chronic homelessness, building on other affordable housing projects and initiatives.
Two permanent supportive housing projects — Towne Twin Village and Hudson Apartments — started welcoming formerly unhoused individuals earlier this year. The community’s strategic plan also calls for more housing that offers recovery, mental health and case management services.
“You can’t reduce homelessness without having housing available that people can move into … that’s part of the bottleneck that we’re seeing,” Wilson said. “We need our best thinkers and our business leaders and the whole community to engage with this higher level discussion so that we don’t end up at a crisis point like a lot of other major cities have.”
But low-income families and individuals living on the brink of homelessness are not the only ones struggling to find affordable housing.
“Our employers in San Antonio are struggling with their employees not being able to afford one- and two-bedroom rental units,” she said. “There is … a lack of housing, at all levels, that needs to be solved.”
The new name itself does not include direct clues as to what the agency does — similar to the local public housing authority, Opportunity Home San Antonio, which rebranded last year.
Close to Home’s rebrand isn’t dissimilar from other efforts across the nation, Wilson said, adding that separating the alliance from the nonprofit’s name helps clarify the role it plays as a coordinator and facilitator for service providers, government and funders.
But some confusion is seemingly unavoidable.
The previous acronym SARAH was often confused with SARA, the San Antonio River Authority, noted Melody Woosley, director of the city’s Department of Human Services who sits on the Close to Home board.
“I like the new name,” Woosley said. “It’s about homes, not homeless.”
