HOUSING 1000
In 2011, Destination: Home helped launch Housing 1000 – a collaborative, community-wide campaign to house 1,000 of our community’s most vulnerable chronically homeless men, women and families. A first-of-its kind effort, the campaign not only connected several hundred homeless individuals to housing, it served as the springboard for many of the successful strategies that have since been implemented in Santa Clara County over the past decade.
Note: The Housing 1000 campaign ended in 2014 and is no longer active.
Proof that Housing Ends Homelessness
Housing 1000 was established by Destination: Home in 2011, in conjunction with the national “100,000 Homes” campaign, to provide supportive housing to chronically homeless individuals throughout our community. Unlike many efforts that came before it, this initiative was focused on assisting the hardest-to-serve members of our community and dispelling the myth that chronically homeless individuals could not be successfully housed.
The campaign was led through a partnership with the County of Santa Clara, the City of San Jose and the Santa Clara County Continuum of Care, representing one of the first major initiatives of our local collective impact model for ending homelessness in our community. As the backbone of the effort, Destination: Home helped bring homelessness service providers, public funders and strategic partners together into a coordinated effort and a common set of metrics to measure our impact. By the end of the three-year campaign, the partners had connected 850 chronically homeless members of our community to housing – with 83% of them maintaining stable housing.
In addition, our 2015 Home Not Found: The Cost of Homelessness study included an extensive analysis of Housing 1000 data and found that, for persistently homeless individuals, it is possible to obtain savings that greatly exceed the cost of housing. In particular, the 10% of Housing 1000 participants with the highest associated cost of public services saw their annual pre-housing “cost” drop from $62,473 while homeless to $19,767 once housed.
Laying the Foundation for Future Successes
The Housing 1000 campaign served as validation of both the Housing First approach and the collective impact model embodied by Destination: Home. And it laid the groundwork for several other important initiatives. Following the success of the campaign, the Santa Clara County Continuum of Care formally adopted the Housing First approach and developed a 2015-2020 Community Plan to End Homelessness centered on permanent housing strategies.
The results of Housing 1000 also served as a catalyst for more than $1 billion in new funding commitments, including the 2016 Measure A Affordable Housing Bond, a commitment of rapid re-housing funds from the City of San Jose, “Housing Choice” vouchers from the Santa Clara County Housing Authority, and creation of a County of Santa Clara permanent supportive housing fund.