Housing For Health: Ending Chronic Homelessness Before It Starts

Access to safe, stable housing is a health care issue.

Last week, I was joined on a #SXSW panel by Community Solutions, Inc.'s Rosanne Haggerty, Enterprise Community Partners' Laurel Blatchford and National Healthcare for the Homeless Council’s Bobby Watts to explore innovative, data-driven solutions improving the lives of our homeless neighbors.

 With housing costs on the rise, the growing number of individuals and families couch surfing, sleeping in cars or living in dangerous conditions on the streets is not just an isolated crisis of personal poverty:

•  It’s an equity crisis, exacerbated by the wealth gap, as the number of families who cannot afford their monthly rent grows.
•  It’s a business crisis, as many companies now struggle to hire a workforce that can afford housing near their work sites.
•  And it is a health crisis, with the average life expectancy for a person without stable housing being 27.3 years less than the average housed person.

Kaiser Permanente recognizes that creating lasting change in our communities will require an all hands on deck approach. That’s why we’re proud to partner with Community Solutions’ Built For Zero initiative to help communities end chronic homelessness in 15 of the communities we serve.

By combining Community Solutions’ industry-leading data visualizations and problem-solving tools with our scale, local resources, partnerships and health expertise, we hope to provide community leaders with a better understanding of homelessness in their communities. We share Rosanne’s excitement and hope that together, we can “quickly get to a place where we don’t tolerate homelessness in our country anymore.”

To learn more about the initiative, give my interview with Modern Healthcare a read. It’s partnerships like this that make me proud to #BeKP.