In 2011, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) identified Houston as one of ten priority communities for addressing homelessness. This designation qualified our community for technical assistance and other resources that allowed us to adopt an inclusive, regional approach that would shift our city from one that was managing homelessness, to one that was solving it.

In August 2012, the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County invited the public to a four-day Community Charrette on Homelessness. The goal of the meetings was to develop a plan to prevent and end homelessness in Houston, Harris County, and Fort Bend County. With the support of the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH), more than 450 community stakeholders participated in these sessions including business leaders, homeless services providers, faith-based organizations, and people with lived experience.

Following the charrette, CSH presented a detailed report with actions steps to the Continuum of Care (CoC) steering committee. This in turn brought to life the collaborative that we know today!

In 2014, The Way Home was officially adopted as the name for the homeless response system, and it publicly unveiled an approved action plan to end homelessness in our region. Although this collaborative was already producing significant decreases in overall homelessness, the plan - modeled after the then federal “Opening Doors” plan to address homelessness - set new, ambitious goals to end veteran, family, youth, and chronic homelessness by combining the model for safe, permanent housing with wraparound supportive services – a strategy that proved successful in the years to come.

Our experience with Hurricane Harvey also prepared us to handle the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In July 2020, the City of Houston announced a joint $65 million plan called the Community COVID Housing Program (CCHP), which had the goal of serving 5,000 people experiencing homelessness over the course of two years in response to the pandemic. This program accelerated the work of The Way Home and our partners. As of July 2023, more than 14,000 people experiencing homelessness or at imminent risk have been served since October 2020. Around 9,000 of those people were served under phase one of the program, exceeding our two-year goal.

Today, our partners have placed more than 28,000 people in permanent housing since 2012, and there has been more than a 60% decrease in overall homelessness since 2011!

Looking to the Future

Houston has continued to be recognized as a national model, and it’s all thanks to the work of partners of The Way Home. These public-private partnerships have only fueled our goal to become the first major city to end chronic homelessness.

The Way Home brought to life a collaborative strategy for our community. Today, over 100 partners make up this collaborative, and they work together every day to make homelessness rare, brief and non-recurring throughout the greater Houston area.

We invite all our partners and allies to mark the occasion by sharing their own stories on social media using the hashtag #TheWayHomeHOU!