Treating homelessness like the "public health crisis that it is" will help meet President Joe Biden's goal of reducing the number of people without a permanent place to live by 25 percent by 2025. So says Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. The Biden administration's All INside initiative, which Olivet is helping to lead, is now underway. Federal employees will go to California and five cities — Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Seattle — to help accelerate local strategies. Erin caught up with Olivet to learn more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What were the selection criteria for these cities? Why Phoenix? It’s looking at a combination of political will, capacity of the system to deploy new approaches and the acuity of the problem. There were a number of factors, including the number of people living in unsheltered settings, but also very specific opportunities for advancing existing local efforts and bringing on new solutions. Phoenix and Maricopa County have seen a pretty significant increase in overall homelessness, but in particular, homelessness for people who are staying outside in tents and on the street. There’s a real crisis there of a very large encampment called “The Zone.” Is All INside modeled on previous efforts to end homelessness? There was a Bush-era initiative called the Collaborative Initiative to Help End Chronic Homelessness in the mid-2000s. That targeted 11 cities. There was an Obama-era program called Strong Cities, Strong Communities that really is the template for this program. We drew heavily on that model of embedding federal staff, providing technical assistance and support in navigating federal funding streams, peer-to-peer learning. Is there a bipartisan appetite for solving homelessness? There are precedents for how to do good bipartisan solutions to homelessness. I’ll give you one very concrete one. Over the last 12 or so years, we’ve seen Democratic and Republican leaders on the Hill get behind efforts to end veteran homelessness. As a result, we’ve reduced veteran homelessness 55 percent in the last decade. What’s your timeline for getting the federal embeds on the ground? They will be onboarded a week and a half from now and then embedded in the cities very shortly after that, by the end of June.
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