Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city, is often held up as a success story for helping move the homeless off the street and fast tracking them to more permanent housing, with wraparound services to help keep them there.

Once considered one of the worst cities in the nation for homelessness, over the past dozen years Houston has reduced homelessness by 64 percent, dropping from about 8,500 people on the street to now around 3,200, according to Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County.

Further, the group reports that the vast majority of those placed in permanent housing do not return to homelessness within two years.

Houston has been lauded nationally for coordinating its homelessness response strategy among more than 100 different non-profit groups and private organizations — a kind of tag-team approach that is not always an easy task as squabbling and turf wars can be common, experts say.

At the core of Houston’s model is the belief that long-term housing is an important foundation from which other successes can spring.

“You can’t expect people to take care of things, to self-determine, unless they have a place to sleep every night and it’s stable,” said Kelly Young, president and CEO of Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County.

While temporary shelters are used, Kelly said, the emphasis is squarely on long-term housing.

Part of that comes from developing robust relationships with landlords and offering incentives to persuade them to lease to the homeless. Also key, Kelly said, is consistent social services and support to those who have been placed. Typically, there is a one-to-20 caseworker-to-resident ratio, she said.

In Denver, city officials said the ratio varies and points to one example where there is one-to-15 caseworker-to-resident ratio. But advocates for the homeless in Denver say that is not typical and it can be as much as one-to-50 or even more sometimes. 

Mary Frances Kenion, vice president of training and technical assistance for the Washington D.C.- based National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in an interview that the ideal ratio would be one-to-10 in cases where a person was chronically homeless and has multiple issues. A workable ratio is roughly one-to-20, she said.

As a former caseworker herself, she was unsure how higher ratios would ever be effective. “If you get to one-in-40 or one-in-50 it would be very difficult to give the kind of detail and attention to anyone,” she said.

Cathy Alderman, chief communications and public policy officer for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, said at her organization caseworker ratios range from about one-to-20 to around one-to-40 depending on staffing which is often a problem.

Alderman said Denver is moving towards the Houston model but “we’re not there yet.”

Kelly acknowledges that Houston may have an advantage over other cities including Denver in that its housing costs are lower, there are fewer zoning restrictions, and the city had an influx of federal money following Hurricane Harvey and during the pandemic to help fund its initiatives.

Still, Houston had become a mecca of sorts in recent years as other cities flock there to learn from its example.

“We tell them that every piece of what we do in Houston may not work everywhere, but our meaningful collaboration and focus on housing as the intervention is something that could move the needle,” Kelly said in an interview.

“Commitment to the work and a permanent solution is the only way that any city can ever get a handle on homelessness.”