Under One Roof That Isn't a Shelter's

Program Provides Homeless Families With Places to Live

The odyssey began with a frantic call to Fairfax County emergency services late last fall. Trung-Anh Thai could no long afford the $2,000 monthly payments on his modest home in Burke. He was starting the process of selling the house back to the bank to avoid foreclosure, but the deal meant that he and his wife and three children had to pack up their things and vacate their home. They had no place to go.

"I had no money for food, for medicine or anything else," said Thai, 53, a slightly built man who speaks in broken English with great passion.

The family ended up in a Reston homeless shelter while Thai continued to work as a school bus driver for $18 an hour. His wife, Phuong Nga Tran, 45, a manicurist at a nail shop, had been laid off several months before because of chronic pain in her hands and wrists, and the family was trying to start life anew.

Usually, Thai, a Vietnamese immigrant, and his family would have found themselves at the start of a methodical and sometimes frustrating two-year journey through the county's homeless shelter and transitional housing system before they could get into a home of their own.

But on a recent day, seven months after they entered the Embry Rucker Community Shelter run by the social services group Reston Interfaith, the family members welcomed a caseworker from the agency to their two-story single-family home off the Fairfax County Parkway.

The family's opportunity to live in the house, complete with a small back yard, front porch and three tidy bedrooms, is based on a movement to help the homeless known as Housing First. Instead of keeping families in shelters, the program works with agencies to move them into housing immediately and then offer social services and other support while they continue their middle-class lifestyle.

In this case, Thai and his family, after five months in the shelter, were able to move into a home in late May.

"The theory is that people need to be stable and in a home in order for social workers to work with them most efficiently," said Kerri Wilson, executive director of Reston Interfaith. "Once you have them stabilized and in a place they feel safe, then we can address financial planning or any other issues that a family might need to address."

The Housing First model began in New York as a way of helping the single, troubled men and women who spent years on the streets and in shelters get a fresh, stable start. The model is being used now to help homeless families. In the Washington region, a few agencies that work with homeless people have adopted the approach to move families out of homelessness by using federal subsidies to help pay their rent.

When using the models for singles, cities nationwide have reported sharp declines in homelessness after beginning Housing First. In San Francisco, the number of chronically homeless people was down 28 percent in the first two years. In Dallas, it dropped 26 percent, and in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., 15 percent in the communities' first two years of using the program.

In Fairfax, advocates say they hope the approach will play a significant role in the county's plan to abolish homelessness by the middle of next decade. A total of 1,835 residents of the county, Fairfax City and Falls Church are homeless, a fraction of the three communities' total population of about 1.1 million, according to a point-in-time survey conducted Jan. 24. The number is up slightly from 1,813 last year and 1,766 in 2006.

Particularly troubling to advocates and county leaders is the number of homeless families. According to the survey, 311 families, including 414 adults and 670 children, are homeless in Fairfax and the cities of Falls Church and Fairfax. The survey also found that two-thirds of adults in those families have jobs, which suggests that wages are often too low to pay for housing in Northern Virginia.