A year after Rosanne Haggerty won a 2001 MacArthur “genius grant,” Amherst magazine wrote about her nonprofit Common Ground, which had transformed the Times Square Hotel in New York City from a rat-infested “dumping ground for the homeless” into a model of subsidized “permanent supportive housing,” with health care and job training services on-site—as well as roof gardens and exercise rooms. This year, the organization will open its 2,935th unit of permanent or transitional housing.
Now, Haggerty has launched a new, national organization, Community Solutions, which, through its 100,000 Homes Campaign, aims to find housing for that many people by July 2013. To date, government or nonprofit partners in more than 100 communities around the country have housed roughly 11,000 people.
