The District’s Interagency Council on Homelessness recently released its draft strategic plan for the next five years. This isn’t just another of those plans that officially-established entities produce, when required. It’s truly impressive — and in a number of ways.

The plan has many pieces. And the pieces have pieces. I may have more to say about some of them. For now, I’ll confine myself to a few general observations.

Ambitious Goals, Realistically Defined

The plan establishes three major goals — one for homeless veterans, one for chronically homeless individuals and families and a third for everyone else who is or will become homeless. They differ by deadline, but the basic goal itself is the same — an end to homelessness.

This doesn’t mean, as the plan makes clear, that no District resident will ever again experience “a housing crisis,” i.e., the crisis of not having housing. The plan instead envisions an end to long-term homelessness. By 2020, it says, “homelessness in the District of Columbia will be rare, brief, and non-recurring.”

Whether the District can get there in only five years is far from certain. Much hinges, as the plan also makes clear, on the availability of more housing that’s affordable for the lowest-income residents and the success of efforts to increase their income.

This, as it says, is especially important for households that have the time-limited subsidies provided by rapid re-housing, but it’s critical for all — both for their own well-being and for the funds it would free up to meet the needs of others.

Enlightened View of Homeless People

Actually, this headline runs afoul of what seems to me an important change in thinking, both within the administration and among some service providers. “There are no ‘homeless people,'” the plan says, “but rather people who have lost their homes.”

They “deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” which we know isn’t always the way they feel they’re treated now. Nor the way they’ve been viewed by past administration spokespersons, who’ve contended that families seeking shelter just want to live in a hotel room, for free.

The redefinition of homeless people has further implications. One is that they’re all ready for housing immediately, rather than only after they’ve successfully completed programs designed to fix them, e.g., by enabling them to kick drug and/or alcohol addictions.

In short, the plan unequivocally embraces the Housing First model — and quite clearly, in several places, addresses the fact that funding, through the Housing Production Trust Fund and other sources, has supported projects inconsistent with the model.

More generally, the plan stresses economic, rather than behavioral causes of homelessness. It doesn’t by any means ignore needs for services, including those that address behavioral health problems.

But key factors it identifies — and recurs to in its strategies — are the egregious shortage of affordable housing, wages that won’t cover housing costs and public benefits that are even more inadequate.

Anyone who thinks this is just common sense should look at some of the mainstream conservative explanations of poverty — this recent piece by New York Times columnist David Brooks, for example.

Another implication of the drafters’ view of homeless people is that programming must meet their needs, rather than expecting them to adapt to what currently exists. This is one of many indications that the drafters envision a system that will continue to evolve.

It’s why they call the plan a roadmap, rather than a blueprint. They set goals. They outline “pathways” from homelessness to housing. They use these, together with data on differing homeless groups to estimate “inventory” needs over time, e.g., the number of permanent supportive housing units required, the number of rapid re-housing subsidies.

But they also stress ongoing data collection and assessments “to understand what is working and where changes are needed.”

A Collaborative Venture

The District government alone can’t end homelessness, as the plan rightly says. Service providers have to make sure their programs mesh with the revamped — and evolving — system. Donors have to align their support with the system and help fill gaps. Developers, landlords and employers obviously all have roles. Churches and other community groups likewise.

To all these, I’d add advocates, of course, and those who belong the the community just by virtue of living in D.C. We who can must be willing to pay higher taxes. The envisioned end to homelessness should save money in the long run, but achieving it won’t be cheap.

And we’ve got to willingly accept homeless shelters in our own neighborhoods, since the plan includes contracting for and actually constructing smaller, scattered shelters to replace not only the DC General family shelter, but several over-large and decrepit shelters for individuals.

We see collaboration in the plan itself. To some extent, it could hardly be otherwise, since ICH members include not only government agency heads, but representatives from service provider and advocacy organizations and homeless or formerly homeless people.

This at least partly accounts for some innovations tucked into the plan, but the public “conversation” sessions the ICH conducted may have played a role too.

The style and format of the plan invite further collaboration. The pathways, inventories and the like reflect a lot of serious number-crunching. And the plan has a lot of numbers in it. But it’s a remarkably readable document — and remarkably transparent about the data sources, the assumptions, the known unknowns, the magnitude of the challenges and the tentativeness of the specifics.

So we everyday interested residents can understand what’s really a very complex system overhaul — and over time, participate. In short, a lot to like, even at this draft stage.

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