“We’ve been flying blind when it comes to housing and homelessness, but it doesn’t have to be this way,” Rosanne Haggerty, President of Community Solutions, told a crowd in May during The Rockefeller Foundation’s first-ever TED Salon.
At the core of Haggerty’s vision is a simple but essential idea — homelessness is a systems problem, not a personal failure. In cities and counties across the U.S., the same issues keep repeating themselves — individuals falling through the cracks of disjointed services, agencies working in silos, and communities being left without the tools to understand homelessness in real time.
Changing the system, one community at a time
“But now you find in places like Houston and Miami and Minneapolis and Detroit and dozens of other communities, that they are finding solutions because they’re thinking differently about this problem,” added Haggerty.
It all starts with challenging conventional milestones and changing the way they work.
“They are rigorously coordinating the work of all of the actors in their system to see that homelessness is prevented as part of what they’re completely accountable for as a team,” shared Haggerty. “They aren’t spending more money on homelessness. They aren’t arresting people because they’re homeless. They’re not forcing people out of sight or out of state.”
Redefining success
Ending homelessness doesn’t mean that no one will ever experience a housing crisis again. Instead, Haggerty redefines success as creating systems that can respond to homelessness quickly and effectively, ensuring that when it happens, it’s brief and rare.
Haggerty concludes her talk with a challenge to all of us — stop accepting homelessness as a reality of modern society and take action.
“This is not a time for half measures, but for big bets and to move toward the kinds of housing systems we need, modeled on what we need.”
