Asheville and Buncombe County are getting a significant boost in their efforts to prevent homelessness.
The region has been selected as one of 10 pilot communities for a national initiative called Right at Home.
The Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care, a community planning body that works to build a collaborative response to homelessness, will receive a minimum of $5 million to manage the program.
The initiative will last three years and serve at least 1,000 local households at risk of homelessness, according to Ben Williamson, the chair of the Continuum of Care’s Homelessness Prevention Work Group.
He said the program will provide flexible financial assistance.
“So, it’s not just rent payments,” Williamson said Thursday night at the Continuum of Care’s monthly membership meeting. “This can be back payments. This can be childcare. It can be car repair. It can be other situations that can help with basic needs. These things all overlap, and they’re all critical. And they all contribute to someone staying in their home or not.”
Emily Ball, manager of the City of Asheville’s Homeless Strategy Division, said that decreasing the inflow of people entering homelessness is a “critical strategy.”
“This is certainly exciting,” Ball said Thursday night. “This is absolutely what we want to be doing. The fewer people who become homeless, the more we’re able to decrease the overall number of people that are homeless. And then we can spread resources to people who are currently homeless and help them exit into housing.”
The theory behind the Right at Home program is that it’s cheaper to provide rental assistance to at-risk households than it is to assist them once they’ve become unhoused.
The initiative is led by a nonprofit called Destination: Home, which is based in Silicon Valley. The program builds on an idea the organization launched in 2017 in Santa Clara County, Calif.
Researchers at the University of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) are working with Destination: Home to evaluate the effectiveness of the national pilot program over the coming years.
In 2023, the Notre Dame researchers found that those who received temporary financial assistance through the Santa Clara County program were 81% less likely to become homeless within six months and 73% less likely within a year. They also estimated that the community received $2.47 in net benefits for every dollar spent through the program.
“The single most obvious solution to homelessness is stopping it before it starts, yet our country continues to respond only after people fall into crisis,” Destination: Home CEO Jennifer Loving said in a statement that announced this week’s launch of the national initiative. “We have proven that targeted homelessness prevention works locally and now it’s time to prove that this can work all across the country.”
Other participants in the pilot program so far include the state of Alaska (Alaska Coalition on Housing and Homelessness); Atlanta, Ga. (Partners for HOME); Austin-Travis County, Texas (Ending Community Homelessness Coalition); San Mateo County, Calif.; Denver-Adams County, Colo. (Metro Denver Continuum of Care); Miami-Dade County, Fla. (Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust); and the state of Minnesota (Minnesota Tribal Collaborative Pathways to Housing). Two additional locations will be announced at a later date.
The national organization will review the Asheville-Buncombe plan in June, and the program is expected to begin in September.
Thursday night’s meeting also happened to coincide with the two-year anniversary of the founding of the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care. City. County leaders announced in late 2023 they would form the community-wide planning body in response to recommendations made by the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Previously, efforts to combat homelessness had been coordinated by the Asheville-Buncombe Homeless Initiative Advisory Committee (HIAC).
The Continuum of Care’s membership increased from 228 to 608 over the past two years, Ball said.
She added that Right at Home representatives were “really impressed with leadership buy-in into the CoC,” and that one of the program’s selection criteria was “strong local infrastructure, including a lead organization capable of coordinating service providers and managing funds” – something that Asheville and Buncombe County didn’t have until the Continuum of Care was established two years ago.
“I hope you leave here understanding that the only way that this happens is because of the Continuum of Care,” Ball said. “This is not a single-entity action that made this possible.”
