Homelessness is often seen as persistent, ever-present. Yet social entrepreneur Rosanne Haggerty shows how it can be solved. One hundred U.S. cities and counties work together through its organization Community solutions to achieve this goal, use new tools and habits for radically better results. Social entrepreneur Sascha Haselmayer spoke to Rosanne about what we can learn from their success.
Sascha Haselmayer: Rosanne, your story started with volunteering at a shelter and realizing that shelters weren’t solving the real problems. Tell us what you saw.
Rosanne Haggerty, founder of Community Solutions and Built for Zero
Rosanne Haggerty: We sheltered people for up to 30 days when none of them had any problems for 30 days. The good people who run the shelter explained, “Here’s the beds, here’s the coffee pot, now’s the time for the bus to pick people up.” But those who were homeless arrived and asked, “How do we find housing? Where do I apply?” I was struck by the discrepancy between what people were looking for and the answers available.
Haselmayer: At what point did you realize it was possible to do things differently, to actually end homelessness?
Haggerty: More than a decade ago, my colleagues and I changed tack and started focusing on system connectivity issues, on helping communities build the operating systems needed to prevent and end homelessness, not just people helping those who are homeless survive the next day. Our previous work had revealed a fundamental problem: it was nobody’s job in any community to see to it that all the help offered led to fewer people becoming homeless in that place. Leaders in other communities saw the same problem and volunteered to work with us and as a group to learn what it takes to actually end homelessness. This created our Built for zero network, which now includes more than 100 communities committed to achieving and maintaining functional zero.
Haselmayer: Can you explain this term “functional zero” homelessness?
Haggerty: When a community reaches functional zero, it means homelessness is rare and short-lived at the population level. Homelessness is a dynamic problem and will look different today than it did yesterday as people move in and out of housing crises. But communities at functional zero have a tightly coordinated system around the shared goal of ending homelessness. They measure progress the same way, at the population level, not by program. They focus on the question, “Will everything we do lead to fewer people becoming homeless?”
The key to this collaborative approach is having public health quality data that allows all major organizations to see the same, comprehensive picture of homelessness, person to person, across the community in real time. With that information, local teams can see which practices and policies reduce homelessness and which do not. This also enables them to see opportunities to improve everyone’s work through more collaboration, and to quickly test new ideas for preventing and solving homelessness. These teams ask better questions because they can see where their resources have the most impact in reducing homelessness to functional zero.
Haselmayer: Built for Zero now includes over 100 communities, with your team at the center. How do you support communities?
Haggerty: We start by helping a few dedicated people or groups gather the critical players: nonprofits, city and county government, the housing authority, and the local veterans’ office. These people all have some of the information and resources needed to progress toward functional zero, so we help them form one integrated team. Then we help them collect and use the data they need to get a complete and dynamic picture of homelessness in their community. We provide ongoing coaching on data analytics, quality improvement, and other practices that support collaboration for results. This includes helping communities avoid homelessness, either by partnering with “upstream” systems such as health care or using data to track and reduce the influx into homelessness. And since no community should innovate alone, Built for Zero is also a robust peer network, with communities sharing pain points and learning from everyone’s successes.
Haselmayer: It is often assumed that housing shortage is the real problem. Is that what you see?
Haggerty: Yes and no. We are so used to a community saying: we don’t have enough homes, there’s nothing we can do about it. But now we have proof in over a hundred places that you don’t even know what housing you need — or what barriers you’ve inadvertently put up with your local policies — until you put in the work to understand the dynamics of homelessness in your own country . community and obtaining better data on the nature of the problem. In addition, there are many different profiles of communities. Coastal communities that have very high costs, other communities that have lost population where housing costs and availability are not the same issue. There are other places where rents are very poorly aligned with local wages and simply exceed what is achievable with a minimum wage or regular wage job, not the availability of housing.
Getting specific in this way highlights the need for a community to view housing as a “system” that includes private landlords, government housing agencies, policies and regulations that affect housing, finances, the process of building houses. We have created a Housing Systems team to help communities more effectively align these elements to reduce and end homelessness.
Haselmayer: What about faith communities, what role do they play?
Haggerty: The faith community was the first to respond to modern homelessness in America. Today, places like Fremont, Colorado ended veteran homelessness last year and it was an effort led by their faith communities. Abilene, Texas ended chronic and veteran homelessness and it is their faith communities that have mobilized various local resources, working for justice and beyond charity. And you know, in some ways, the community of faith informs our thinking about how we can transcend ego and shift focus from “my own program, my own refuge” to achieving a shared, community-wide goal.
Haselmayer: It feels like people are starting to reject the so-so-it mentality when it comes to this issue. That’s quite a bit, because homelessness is often seen as this never-ending problem.
Haggerty: I agree, we are seeing a shift. More and more communities are recognizing homelessness as a dynamic problem. In other words, you don’t just stop. Solving homelessness means learning how to solve it every day. And as issues change over time — say there’s a fire in a large apartment building or a natural disaster like a flood — communities need to dial in what they’re doing. This reflects a mature understanding of problem solving and the realization that there is no silver bullet here. This work is about mutual obligations, shared responsibility for results, constant learning and behavior in service of a common goal.
Haselmayer: Rosanne, what you describe is somehow a new way of working. Do you see spillovers in how communities are addressing other major challenges?
Haggerty: Yes, we hear from many of our communities that the powerful thing about being part of the Built for Zero movement is that the skills their blended government and non-profit teams learn are the kind of skills they use in many of the world’s problems. 21st century that require a new way of thinking, a new way of working, even a new way of contracting – frankly a new way of understanding how to tame complex problems. We saw a hint of this during Covid. The teams that were already together and had a shared understanding of the dynamics of homelessness in their communities were able to respond quickly when new resources became available. They got people in hotels, in apartments – the input of resources allowed them to come together in a heightened emergency and be effective. That was a powerful test of this idea, albeit still within the homelessness space.
Haselmayer: And in other spheres?
Haggerty: It’s a great question that we’re very interested in. We’re looking for signals of how this is evolving in how communities address health equity issues, for example. You know, people are trained to work on technical problems, but new skills and ways of working that are tailored to complex problems are needed in the world we live in today.
Rosanne Haggerty and Sascha Haselmayer are Ashoka Fellows. Read more about Haggerty’s impact here and Haselmayer’s recent report about cities collaborating with social entrepreneurs.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.