Yesterday, the Harris County Homeless Task Force presented its final report and recommendations to the Harris County Commissioners Court, and the Court voted unanimously to accept it.

As lead agency to The Way Home Continuum of Care (CoC) — the collaborative model to prevent and end homelessness in Harris, Fort Bend, and Montgomery counties — the Coalition has been working with the Task Force since it convened in October 2019.

Led by Jim Nutter, director of projects at the Harris County Budget Management Department, the Task Force made a series of 11 recommendations in the report. The Court made a commitment to proceed with three of the recommendations immediately including by allocating $5 million for a facility to serve the respite, rehab, and re-entry needs of those with serious behavioral health needs who are also experiencing homelessness.

We proudly support the Task Force’s recommendations, in particular recommendation #1: that the County make an annual investment of $13.9 million to advance The Way Home's work to implement permanent housing programs and make further reductions in overall homelessness. This investment will help to sustain key operations within the homeless response system that otherwise are not or cannot be fulfilled by federal funding.

The Court is expected to consider the annual commitment during its budgetary process this fall.

“We are grateful to Commissioner Adrian Garcia, who called for the creation of this Task Force; to the entire Commissioners Court, who voted unanimously to accept its final report; and to Jim Nutter, who led its work,” said Michael Nichols, president and CEO of the Coalition. “We are glad to have been included in this planning process. We stand behind these recommendations and look forward to the Court voting to enact them at the appropriate time.

“We are also heartened by the recent collaboration we have seen between Harris County and the City of Houston to address the issue of homelessness in our community, and we look forward to that collaboration yielding further results.”

The $13.9 million investment is necessary in addition to the $18 million the County has committed for the Community-wide COVID-19 Housing Program (CCHP) because the CCHP is a limited-time (two years) program intended as a direct response to COVID.

Moreover, the funding that has been allocated for the CCHP does not include any funding for new permanent housing units in Houston or Harris County. Before COVID, we estimated that the system would need approximately 1,900 additional permanent supportive housing (PSH) units and approximately 1,165 additional rapid re-housing (RRH) units to meet the needs in the CoC geographic region (i.e., Harris, Montgomery, and Fort Bend counties). Because the CCHP will not add to the inventory of PSH and RRH in our region, these needs remain and may only be exacerbated by COVID.

Used as a supplement to federal funding, an annual investment from the County of $13.9 million would support rental subsidy and case management for 878 additional units of housing. The recommendation is based on the system needs identified in The Way Home’s Five-Year Plan, which will be finalized and released in early 2021.