Under One Roof That Isn't a Shelter's
Program Provides Homeless Families With Places to Live

By Chris L. Jenkins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008

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.

County leaders said that the program is especially important because it gets families out of the shelter system, which can strain the county budget more than getting them into housing immediately. Although no long-term studies have been done in the Washington region, an extensive study of thousands of mentally ill and indigent New Yorkers in 2001 found that the typical person required $40,449 worth of publicly funded services while homeless. When people were placed in housing with social programs, that figure fell by an average of $12,145.

In addition, local agencies have teamed up with the private sector to lessen the cost to taxpayers. Reston Interfaith received a $500,000 grant from the Freddie Mac Foundation to pay for the social service component of the outreach. Thai and his family received help with financial planning and budgeting.

Other than some unpacked trash bags that hold some of the family's possessions, the house looks as if Thai, Tran and their children, David, 10, Tiffany, 8, and Stewart, 5, have lived there for years. The furniture is donated, and family members have been able to integrate some of their belongings into the home.

Families go through a rigorous interview process to get into the program. They are screened for their potential to improve their lives and establish a solid foundation. Reston Interfaith runs eight other homes similar to the one that Thai and his family live in; some house people who are fleeing domestic violence or young adults leaving foster care.

"It's first-come, first-served, but we want to make sure that these are families that are going to work well in the program," said Margaret Melnik, the Thai family's Reston Interfaith caseworker.

The program, known as Housing OpportUnities Strengthens Everyone, is administered by grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and will help 34 homeless families in the county. In the Thai family's case, 30 percent of the household income goes to rent, while the family begins saving and planning for the future.

Families are eligible for the program if their income is less than 50 percent of the area's median income, in this case less than about $25,000 a year for a family of five. If the family's income reaches $51,500, Reston Interfaith will encourage the family to move on so another family can use the program. The Thai family could stay, however, and pay rent set at 30 percent of their gross income.

"We just wanted to work hard and do what was asked of us," Thai said. He said the most important thing about the experience was that his family stayed together. "We have been very lucky."