The Alliance to House Everyone, a coalition of government and nonprofit service providers, housed 77 families between Dec. 1 and March 1, coming in under the coalition’s stated goal to find stable housing for at least 90 families experiencing homelessness in 90 days.
That’s 50% more families than were housed during the same timeframe in previous years, according to Close to Home, a nonprofit that coordinates the housing alliance, the region’s homelessness response system and federal funding allocated to the region. An additional 76 families, made up of at least one adult and one child, were in the process of locating housing or obtaining vouchers as of Thursday.
The Alliance issued the challenge in response to an alarming increase in family homelessness.
Though the goal wasn’t met, important system changes were made during the challenge to make it easier to house families and other individuals more quickly, said Katie Vela Wilson, executive director of Close to Home.
“The community has done an incredible job of speeding up the process for families to get [housing] vouchers,” Wilson said, crediting Opportunity Home, the city’s housing authority, and the Housing Authority of Bexar County for providing voucher appointments at emergency shelters during the challenge and simplifying the application process.
Last year, the annual point-in-time count, which deployed hundreds of nonprofit staff and volunteers to survey people experiencing homelessness, found 253 families living in shelters — a 28% increase compared to 2022’s snapshot.
Over the last three months, Alliance partners worked to prioritize family placement through the city’s resident relocation program and expedite appointments for families.
“A lot of great things have come out of this collaboration” despite not reaching the 90-family goal, she said. “We’ve made some system changes that we think will help get families connected more efficiently to housing.”
One of the biggest barriers to finding stable housing with a voucher is the dearth of landlords willing to accept them, Wilson said. Close to Home will be working with the housing authorities and other organizations to develop incentives for landlords to accept housing vouchers.
“We’ve heard from affordable housing providers that our clients make amazing tenants,” she said. “We have to have an efficient homeless response system, but if we don’t have an efficient housing process, we’ll always bottleneck.”
Haven for Hope, the city’s largest homeless shelter and resource hub, is still operating a makeshift overflow shelter for families at its near West Side campus, Haven President and CEO Kim Jefferies said last week during a panel discussion at St. Mary’s University.
“We have close to 300 children staying at Haven from about 160 different families,” who are being sheltered in the standard and overflow facilities, Jefferies said, adding that most are families with single mothers, but there are two-parent families as well.
They are at Haven, she said, because “something happened, [for instance] they got sick and were working an hourly job and got behind on their bills and just couldn’t make rent because they wanted to put food on the table instead.”
Haven’s policy is never to turn away a family seeking shelter; therefore, typically more than 50 families end up sleeping on mats on the floor of its administrative buildings.
“In 2021, we had the lowest number of families we’d ever had in emergency shelters,” Wilson said. “That’s because there was a moratorium on evictions. And there was emergency housing assistance available to keep people from being evicted.”
With the moratorium lifted, assistance funds reduced and rising inflation and housing costs, “we’re seeing the most families we’ve ever seen in our emergency shelters, at least in the last 10 years,” she said.
A local initiative to house 500 people in 500 days in 2021 was successful, as was a federal initiative to house 1,500 people experiencing homelessness in San Antonio by the end of 2022.
Though not specifically aimed at families, a new, city-funded pilot at Haven for Hope has brought in 81 people from the streets into shelters in its first four weeks, Jeffries said.
A shelter coordinator maintains a real-time list of available beds at Haven and SAMMinistries shelters and more shelters will be added over the coming months, Wilson said.
That coordination lets outreach workers and other staff know where and when they can take someone they’re helping — which hasn’t always been the case, she said.
It can take years for someone experiencing homelessness to accept shelter, so offering shelter where there is none can break their trust, she added. “What’s most impactful about this [pilot] is being able to promise the bed and deliver it at the moment they’re ready.”
