Less than a decade ago, more than 700 people were homeless in the small, 150,000-person city of Rockford, Illinois, about 90 miles northwest of Chicago. By the end of the year, the city expects that number will have shrunk to essentially zero—making it the first community in the U.S. to end homelessness.

“I think for so long we believed in most communities that homelessness is just something we are going to have to live with,” says Beth Sandor, who co-directs a program called Built to Zero at the nonprofit Community Solutions, which works with cities like Rockford on eliminating homelessness. “Rockford is in the process of transforming that idea and really demonstrating what it looks like to live in a community where homelessness is not normal.”

In 2018, the city became the first in the country to reach a goal of “functional zero” for veteran homelessness, meaning that at any given time, while a veteran may become homeless, it’s rare, and they quickly find housing. It became the second city to reach the same goal for people who are chronically homeless—those who have been homeless for long periods of time and have a diagnosed disability. A handful of other cities have achieved the same thing. Now, Rockford will be the first to end homelessness for all remaining populations—youth, single people who have only been homeless for a short time, and families.

The work started in 2014, when the Obama administration launched a challenge to mayors to end veteran homelessness. Rockford signed on, and started working with Community Solutions to use a new approach to get people housed. Every veteran, a list that exceeded 100 people, was tracked individually with details about their situation, and then the city’s homeless coordinators met repeatedly with other groups that had the same clients, such as veteran agencies and mental health organizations. Together, they went through the list, name by name, figuring out how each person could be helped, and how quickly it could happen.

“We were doing something we’ve never done before, which was literally talking about veterans one at a time with the people working with them, with an entire focus on getting them housed permanently as quickly as possible,” says Jennifer Jaeger, Rockford’s community services director. “At the same time, we were taking that data and publishing it monthly, leading to more community accountability. That community accountability led to more community involvement and buy-in.”

The city already had the resources it needed, including housing vouchers for homeless veterans that are provided by the federal government (after a veteran pays 30% of their income toward the rental, the voucher covers the rest of the cost). But the new push to end homelessness provided coordination. “It was really about focusing and crystallizing our efforts on the population—pulling everybody to the table and holding everybody accountable,” Jaeger says.

The agency used the same approach of coordinating with others to work through a list of each individual case when it began working to end homelessness in each segment of the population. For each group, it comes up with new strategies to test and watches the data to see what’s working. The solutions are different—to work with youth, for example, who are often hard to locate after an initial meeting, the team realized that it needed to find new ways to reach each individual when it found someone an apartment. It turned to texting and Facebook Messenger. With people who are chronically homeless, the work is even more focused on building trust and personal connections; a coordinator convinced one man to move into a residency hotel by telling him that it had a TV and he’d be able to watch the Cubs play baseball.