Accolades and advocacy
We’re pleased to share that we’ve been accepted into the prestigious Housing Venture Lab at Terner Labs, which was announced this week! The stated goal of the program is to help scale critical housing innovations at the intersection of equity, affordability and sustainability. We’re very excited to be joining other mission oriented groups in our cohort that are also trying to tackle the housing crisis of today, who are innovating to build more homes, bringing dignity and solve problems in the short and long term. To be clear though, we’re excited to use our platform to help bring others into solving structural challenges, with us, and we’re hopeful that you’ll follow us on our journey!
Our model is focused on collaboration between stakeholders, bringing funding and leadership from Medicaid together with the utilization of HUD subsidies, and tactically useful and targeted resources across food, transportation, broadband and more. We take a local, human- and community-first approach that looks to empower unhoused individuals and the community-based nonprofits who serve them with the tools and resources they need to thrive. Coordinating, providing and addressing these Social Drivers of Health (SDoH) are necessary to ensure that people who are homeless can get and stay successfully housed, and healthy. We’ve grown and expanded our model and services from urban and rural Appalachia in West Virginia to California, where we’re an approved CalAIM Technical Assistance Provider. We’re confident that our inclusion in Terner Lab’s will help us stay true to our mission.
However, this week California Governor Gavin Newsom also implemented a new Executive Order that follows up on the Supreme Court ruling that begins to criminalize homelessness. This EO is short-sighted, inflammatory and harmful to the movement in addressing and ending homelessness. It maintains a CA Department of Transportation (CA DOT) policy directive that is able to remove encampments that “pose threats to life, health and safety.” It now directs all state and local agencies to provide as little as 48 hours notice to have people who live in encampments on the street that they will be swept up. It is a superficial attempt to “clean up” homelessness by removing it from sight.
Just one of the many homeless encampments in San Francisco, 2023.
California’s housing crisis is not new, and no singular administration is to blame for any successes made, nor the continued failures to solve it. While there are over 180,000 homeless individuals in California today, there are 6 million more Californians living in rentals spending an unaffordable share of income on housing today, compared to 1970. Imagine you live in San Francisco where you were one of these 6 million housing insecure folks. A big tech company came in, as did its middle to high-income employees, who can afford higher rent than you. Your landlord says they’re increasing rent, but your salary hasn’t gone up. You get evicted, take all of your things with you and have no other option but to live in a tent.
This isn’t an anomaly, or a siloed anecdote. We’ve heard this over and over again, across the country. Governments are more interested in wooing big business to their community to help the privileged few, than they are maintaining dignity and safety for all those already in their community.
What this Order will do is increase the strain on non-profits, like those we serve and partner with, to get people housed. The CA DOT boasts that it has cleared nearly 12,000 encampments since July 2021, but to us, this is nothing to be proud of. Human-centered and community-first programming that use collaboration and structural solutions to house people are the answer. Or more simply, creating more affordable homes that guarantee people can live and stay in them is the solution. Period.
We firmly stand against this Executive Order, and any similar efforts like it to sweep systemic and structural problems under the rug. We encourage you to join us in working towards addressing these and similar problems with other leaders like those at Terner Labs as we try to build a society that prioritizes empathy, safety and health, for all!
