The Federal Criteria and Benchmarks for Achieving the Goal of Ending Veteran Homelessness and the functional zero standard represent different approaches to measurement, but they are not exclusive.
- We believe that achieving the Federal Criteria and Benchmarks and/or Mayor’s Challenge criteria for ending veteran homelessness is an important milestone on the path to reaching functional zero, and a major accomplishment for a community.
- The Federal Criteria and Benchmarks are complex and affirm whether a community has met valuable outcomes and system behaviors at the time that it was certified. Learn more
Built for Zero’s definition of success, known as functional zero, lays out a standard that allows a community to measure cleanly, objectively, and in real time, whether it has ended veteran homelessness and also whether it is sustaining this outcome over time.
- To achieve functional zero, a community must have fewer veterans experiencing homelessness than it can routinely house in permanent housing in a single month.
- This measures whether communities have built systems that can achieve and sustain functional zero, even if new veterans experience housing crises over time.
- Fewer communities have been able to reach functional zero than have satisfied the Federal Criteria and Benchmarks.
