Policy & Practice | December 2021

Disrupting Housing Insecurity and Homelessness

By Tiffany Dovey Fishman, Lydia Murray, Kelly Mahoney, Jamia McDonald, Jordan Schneidman, and Courtney Brett

August 2016, Bergen County, NJ, made national headlines for doing something no county had ever done: end chronic homelessness. 1 Six months later, Bergen County reached “functional zero” for its homeless veteran population as well, bringing the number of veterans experiencing homelessness below the number that can be housed within a month, to ensure that homelessness for veterans is both rare and brief. 2 How did Bergen County do it? By dispensing with its old strategies of aggregating data and one-size-fits-all solutions in favor of an unorthodox approach. The county assembled a regional team, aligned around a shared goal of getting to zero; it collected real-time, person-specific data on its homeless population; and it used these data to redesign its response. 3

Photo Illustration by Chris Campbell

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Policy&Practice December 2021