Results Show Community Efforts Helping the Homeless

Community Conversation on Homelessness in Lexington – March 9, 2018

Lexington faced an escalating problem.  In 2005, 882 individuals and families were homeless.  That number had grown to 1,544 by 2014.  With the subsequent creation of the Office of Homelessness Prevention and Intervention and the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, our community made substantial investments in addressing this challenge.  You can read background on the issue of homelessness in my earlier blog posts here.  In 2018, we received heartening news: our community has reduced the number of homeless in 2014 by 55.63% to 685, a number lower than the level in 2005.

The city collected this data within the last 10 days of January, as it does annually.  The LexCount survey tallies those who are in emergency housing, transitional housing, and unsheltered.  Below are some more detailed, encouraging findings:

• Homeless veterans have decreased by 54.68% since 2014. The exact number has decreased from 203 to 92.
• The number of chronically homeless individuals decreased from 186 in 2014 to 92 in 2018.
• Chronically homeless families decreased from 33 members to 6 within this same window.

There are many pillars supporting these results, including deploying housing first best practices.  Lexington has allocated $9 million to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund since 2014.  We have realigned over $1.1 million in federal housing funds from transitional housing to permanent housing.  We have invested $2.8 million to support over 13 different homeless programs that assist in housing and related services.  In addition to allocating resources, a particularly notable and qualitative aspect of our success is how the Lexington community has come together to address this problem.  Our community has structures such as the Lexington Continuum of Care and OneDoor Lexington that allow the good work in our community to be complementary and maximize effectiveness.

The Office of Homelessness Prevention and Intervention continued to support that synergy by recently hosting the Lexington Ending Homelessness Academy and Community Summit on March 5 – 9, 2018.  This event brought supportive funders, staff, and board members to collaborate and learn about best practices in working with homeless populations throughout the week.  The Summit culminated in a public event, Community Conversation on Homelessness in Lexington, on March 9, 2018.  I was honored to give a brief introduction at the event prior to an informative and challenging presentation by Iain De Jong.  He has been a thought leader in strategically and effectively addressing homelessness.  Notably, he developed the Vulnerability Index – Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool (VI-SPDAT), which is used in Lexington and internationally.  I encourage you to view a Facebook Live video of his presentation here.  This event represents another positive step in the continued community effort to tackle this issue thoughtfully and effectively.  We still have much more work to do, but I am pleased to see Lexington continuing great work with measurable progress.