Finding homes for the homeless in Fairfax County

Sunrise is still hours away when the first volunteers begin trickling into the Mott Community Center in Fairfax. Armed with coffee and rain gear, they gather the supplies they’ll need for the day: maps, hygiene kits and six-page surveys with questions such as “How long have you been homeless this time?” and “How many times in the past three months have you been to the emergency room?”

Hunched over a corner table and wearing jeans and hiking shoes, the chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, Sharon Bulova, who asked to come along today, is sketching a rough map to a homeless camp she has seen in the woods near her home. “We didn’t know about this one,” says a volunteer. “It’ll be our first stop.”

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It’s 4 a.m. on Wednesday, the third and last day of what organizers dubbed “registry week.” In 2008, Fairfax County, the second wealthiest jurisdiction in the nation, adopted a 10-year plan to try to end homelessness among its residents. It has since made steady progress getting families into permanent housing, but success among single, chronically homeless adults has been far harder. That population, estimated to be at least several hundred people, is slowly rising, according to the county.

So Fairfax is trying something new. This summer, along with a handful of local nonprofit organizations, the county signed on to a national campaign called 100,000 Homes, run by the New York-based group Community Solutions. The campaign targets the chronically homeless, with a national goal of housing 100,000 of them by July 2014. So far, according to Community Solutions, the movement has housed more than 35,000 people in the 185 jurisdictions that have joined since 2010.

What sets 100,000 Homes apart, its advocates say, is an approach that offers permanent housing first, not last, bolstered by supportive services. Rather than imposing conditions on housing such as sobriety or employment, the campaign’s model quickly provides a stable place to live, not just a shelter bed. Then it encourages recipients to make their own choices to get jobs or treatment.

The first step is always registry week, during which trained volunteers led by county and nonprofit organization employees build a detailed database that includes photographs and personal information on as many chronically homeless people as they can find. In Fairfax last week, that meant more than 200 volunteers fanning out to winter shelters and hiking into wooded areas behind multimillion-dollar homes to take the pictures and conduct in-depth interviews — an undertaking vastly different than a traditional point-in-time homeless census that only counts bodies.

Once the information is organized, agencies will prioritize the people they met based on medical vulnerability. Then they will try to get each person housed.

Meeting their neighbors

After breaking into teams of five and six, the volunteers set out. The people who will go to the campsite near Bulova’s house pile into a white van. They’re led by Amanda Andere and Lisa Thompson, both of whom work for Facets, a Fairfax nonprofit organization that provides food and shelter. Other members of the team include a retiree, a college student and an Army veteran who used to be homeless.