Q&A: A community-first solution for homelessness.

Byline: William Morris

A solution to homelessness, Anne Franz and Gabrielle Clowdus believe, has to go beyond just providing homes.

As the co-founders of Settled, a startup nonprofit, Clowdus and Franz are advocates for a "community-first" approach to housing for the chronically homeless. In practice, that vision takes the shape of a small village of tiny homes, built on church property and shared by both the long-term homeless and "missional" neighbors living in the community by choice. It's inspired by a similar project in Austin, Texas, and Settled hopes to create a template that can be used throughout the Twin Cities and beyond.

Key to Settled's vision are the tiny homes: high quality, built on trailers, for $20,000 apiece. Settled currently has a single demonstration unit on display at Woodland Hills Church in Maplewood, and is working on plans to create its first "sacred settlement" of a dozen or so units.

Finance & Commerce spoke with Franz and Clowdus about what makes Settled different from other homelessness-prevention programs and how to address the needs of the most difficult, expensive populations that traditional social services don't reach. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Question: The Housing First model has not been the dominant model for all that long and, in fact, was considered an improvement over some of the previous efforts to address homelessness. So talk to me about why you think Housing First is not sufficient.

Clowdus: So just a little bit of back history: For the first several decades after [the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill] there was a housing-readiness model that said let's make people graduate from one stage to the next, in order, with the end result being permanent housing but what they found with that model was that people never actually got to the permanent housing. And so about 25 years ago, a clinician said, "Hey, what would it look like if we just put people in housing first?"

At this point, there's a significant body of literature that shows that Housing First works when you're measuring housing stability and you're measuring the cost someone has on the public. But what the Housing First research hasn't done is show any increase in community engagement or social belonging or sense of purpose. So the model only goes so far. These are people that have been homeless 10 and 20 and 30 years, but often that homelessness really began when they lived in homes of extreme...

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