There is no reason families should be sleeping outside at night. This is why today, we joined with the County of Santa Clara, City of San Jose, Santa Clara County Housing Authority, Cisco and several other Continuum of Care partners to launch HEADING HOME, a community-wide campaign to end family homelessness by 2025.
No More Families Living On Our Streets
Currently, there are approximately 600 families in Santa Clara County experiencing homelessness, and another 600 new families enter homelessness for the first time every year. 75% of these families have a female head of household and 62% self-reported having children enrolled in school in Santa Clara County.
The goal of the HEADING HOME campaign is to achieve “functional zero” by 2025 – meaning the number of housing placements for families is greater than the number of families entering homelessness. In order to achieve this ambitious goal, the campaign partners will be working together to house 1,200 homeless families in the next year and then 600 per year annually going forward.
The HEADING HOME campaign will leverage four key strategies:
- Emergency Housing Vouchers – The Santa Clara County Housing Authority has been awarded approximately 1,000 emergency housing vouchers, which will provide rental support to homeless households for up to ten years. The vast majority of these vouchers will be targeted towards homeless families.
- Rapid Rehousing – The coalition will expand its Rapid Rehousing programs, which provide a time-limited rental subsidy along with case management and supportive services, with a goal to serve another 200 homeless families annually.
- Homelessness Prevention Strategies – The coalition will work to expand homelessness prevention services so that fewer families fall into homelessness. This includes plans to expand the Homelessness Prevention System to serve 2,500 households by 2025 as well as new investments in Housing Problem-Solving programs, which quickly house families who recently became homeless and are sleeping on the street or in a place not fit for human habitation.
Affordable and Supportive Housing Development – New affordable housing developments in the Measure A pipeline include approximately 1,000 new family apartments in five years. There is also the potential to expand further by leveraging $1 billion in Project Homekey funding that is dedicated to families.
The HEADING HOME campaign also represents a key element of the 2020-2025 Community Plan to End Homelessness and plays an important role in achieving our community-wide goal of permanently housing 20,000 homeless individuals by 2025.
Join the HEADING HOME Campaign!
Ending family homelessness is within our reach – but we’ll need your help to house every homeless family in our community. As we roll out elements of this campaign in the weeks and months ahead, we’ll need the support of elected officials, landlords, private businesses, non-profit partners and other community members.