There is much to be thankful for.
There is much to do.
There are many who still wait.

The nation's attention on resolving homelessness has never been more focused. Elected officials, Mayors, County Executives, Governors, Congress, and the President and Cabinet have all been active this year. More resources from Washington than ever before. And more from local government and the private sector.

An unprecedented partnership of political will, resources, innovation, planning, and results has replaced the demoralizing past. The first national documented decrease in chronic homelessness in anyone's memory is remoralizing us that the mission can be accomplished. More than 100,000 years of homelessness ended on our streets.

The Congress is contemplating new homelessness legislation with special attention on homeless veterans. Action that is focused on realistically achieving results, unfettered by partisan concerns. While a champion has passed from our midst, Julia Carson's dream of ending homelessness is alive in our nation.

To all those serving as point persons, coordinators, "choreographers" for state and local 10- Year Plans, I salute your ingenuity, persistence, and outcomes.

To our partners who are elected, who have taken on the accountability for results, I offer you continued support, assistance, and presence.

To our fellow federal agencies, I offer commendation for working much beyond what has been to support what will be.

To our collaborators and Charter Signatories on America's Road Home, I express my unbounded gratitude for affirming new directions, investment, and policies, that will sustain and enhance our common work in the coming years.

To those 152 - and counting - communities across our country which have adopted Project Homeless Connect, I commend your hospitality to pursue a "consumer-first" approach.

To those who are doubters, cynics, critics, and friends, I extend a hand of partnership to remedy the privation of our poorest neighbors.

Most importantly, to homeless people, our neighbors across the expanse of this country, I pledge a relentless pursuit of the remedy to your homelessness. The common friendship we now have with research, cost studies, innovations, resources, and results will expand in the coming years. All to one goal, one objective, one mission - abolishing homelessness in this country.

Recently I read a book about a doctor who was equally resolute to bring healing to the disabled and ill wherever he visited. The author wondered how a person entrusted with such gifts, knowing that wherever he went, healing would follow - how that person could sleep.

Many of us entrusted with public policy wonder how we can sleep. There is much to be done. And our efforts are now beginning to "heal" homelessness.

We may not bring serums to villages or inoculations to babies, but in our policies and innovations we are initiating cures for homelessness that are equally impactful - housing, jobs, supports.

And just as important, we are offering hospitality and welcome to our neighbors.

While we do sleep, we are restless. Impatient for that day that our moral insomnia will no longer be a way of life. The day when there is a Home for every American.

IN THIS ISSUE OF THE e-news, we look at several recent studies that have emerged at the state, county, and city level to identify economic issues of homelessness.

WAKE COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA. Moving from homelessness to permanent supportive housing in the Lennox Chase development in North Carolina's Wake County produced cost reductions and increased personal stability as recently documented by the Jordan Institute for Families of the University of North Carolina -Chapel Hill School of Social Work. The research was supported by the North Carolina Interagency Council for Coordinating Homeless Programs (ICCHP), according to the State's policy point person, Martha Are.

"The Cost Effectiveness of Supportive Housing - A Service Cost Analysis of Lennox Chase Residents," released in December, found that key costs for more than 20 individuals living in Lennox Chase for two years dropped. Preliminary data show that overall costs fell and costs for inpatient substance abuse treatment also fell. Outpatient mental health services and incarceration costs also dropped.

The focus of the report was to describe in detail the demographic and personal characteristics of the residents who participated, to explain how the cost data were acquired and how costs were measured, and to present service costs incurred by these individuals two years before and two years after entry into permanent supportive housing.

A final version of the report is available on the Council' s web site.

RENO, NEVADA. Reno, Sparks, and Washoe County were the 200th jurisdictional partners to commit to a 10-Year Plan. Reno was also where cost benefit research by local police officers identified "Million Dollar Murray," a homeless individual whose use of multiple systems before his death on the streets was documented in Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article of the same name.

In December the Center for Regional Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno and the Bureau of Business and Economic Research, Nevada Small Business Development Center released new data related to homelessness, the costs of homelessness, and the cost-effectiveness of permanent supportive housing. According to the report, the UNR research team's goal was to develop insights related to the homeless population and the network of service providers that could be used to better understand resource needs, measure the efficiency and effectiveness of various programs, understand the interaction of the "components" of the system and to suggest ways to improve those interactions.

The report identified $15.5 million in annual costs related to homelessness after researchers examined costs in the county detention facility, regional judicial system, mental health services, local medical centers, VA homeless programs, local health department, local social services department, Reno and Sparks Police Departments, shelters and other community emergency services, and the local school district. Among the other observations in the report:

The number of persistently homeless being intercepted at a "street-level" has increased substantially over the past several years. The steady and significant increase in the number of "homeless- related" calls for Reno Police Department service in the City of Reno has become a growing portion of the City of Reno Police Department's overall "customer base".

Homeless inmates at the WCSO Detention Facility consume a relatively small portion of total person days, or the amount of actual time incarcerated at the Detention Facility when compared to non-indigent, non-homeless prisoners. However, WCSO Detention Facility is the largest provider of mental health services to homeless individuals across the Reno-Sparks-Washoe County area and even beyond. "Mental Health Housing Unit No. 3" at the WCSO Detention Facility has seen a substantial increase in the number of identified "indigent" and/or homeless inmates over the past few years. The report further notes that the implications of the Detention Facility being at its operational 'maximum capacity' affect the entire local criminal justice system, as heavy utilization of a limited resource limits availability.

The jurisdictions in the Reno-Sparks-Washoe County area have created new judicial services - such as the Drug Court, the Homeless Court and the Mental Health Court - as a means of diverting various "indigent" and/or "persistently" homeless defendants away from the more "mainstream" courts and incarceration, and into treatment programs.

COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA. Columbia, South Carolina officials, led by Mayor Bob Coble, who has put in place a new 10-Year Plan and adopted the innovation of Project Homeless Connect, are now moving forward with a Housing First initiative for 25 of their chronically homeless neighbors. Columbia officials announced recently a new contract with the USC School of Medicine and the Columbia Housing Authority to rent apartments throughout the city where USC will provide the medical and social services for the new tenants. The three-year program will cost $270,000 in the first year.

If Columbia's experience follows that of other communities, those individuals will start saving the public purse with their move to housing, and according to data recently released in a report by the Midlands Area Consortium for the Homeless, South Carolina Council on Homelessness, and the SC Budget and Control Board Office of Research and Statistics, the current local costs of homelessness, including in the criminal justice system, hospital utilization, and mental health services, are substantial, even considering that researchers used a broad definition of homelessness. The research estimated that inpatient hospitalization and emergency department utilization alone totaled $23 million.

For example, inpatient hospital utilization and emergency department visits represented significant charges by Midlands clients. For 2006, 1,561 Midlands clients incurred 4,739 visits to emergency departments (ED) totaling $6,024,804 in charges. Inpatient hospitalizations for the same period totaled $17,249,078 for 547 Midlands clients over 897 visits.

To conduct the analysis, South Carolina's Office of Research and Statistics (ORS), a branch of the S.C. Budget and Control Board, which maintains one of the most comprehensive data warehousing and analysis systems in the country looked at HMIS data, Point in Time data, and other resources.

email: ichnews@setechnology.com

web: http://www.usich.gov