Fresh start: Charlotte program providing housing for the homeless saves lives and dollars.

• Author: Duckwall, Dane
• Position: NC TREND: Grateful giving

When Charlotte's Urban Ministry Center opened Moore Place in February 2012, Tabby Burns was one of the first residents. Partially paralyzed and addicted to crack, she'd been homeless for years and spent one Christmas holed up in a port-a-potty. Now 55, she's been sober since late 2009, when various health issues led to a nearly three-month hospital stay. After her release, she lived at a recuperative shelter before moving into the Moore Place apartment complex.

"I'm very grateful for what God gave me," she says, "which is the right people at the right time in my life so that I could be where I am, which is clean and sober."

Moore Place is filled with similar stories of second chances. Each of its 120 single-tenant apartments is occupied by someone who had been homeless for at least a year and has a mental or physical disability or an addiction. There's still more to be done. Of the 1,476 people experiencing homelessness in Charlotte during January's annual count, 147 were identified as chronically homeless. The city hopes to reduce that number to zero this year. UMC has several programs to help the homeless, including a soup kitchen, temporary housing during the winter at Charlotte churches, and permanent housing at Moore Place and scattered apartments around the city.

Moore Place uses the "housing first" model, which identifies the chronically homeless, provides them with housing and then surrounds them with the support services needed to turn their lives around. Federal subsidies play a key role. At Moore Place, tenants pay 30% of any income they receive in rent, with the rest covered by housing subsidies. The average income of residents is [dollar]733 a month, while a few tenants have no income and pay nothing.

"We have a saying that housing is a basic human right," says UMC Executive Director Dale Mullennix. "It's not a reward for clinical success, because almost nobody has clinical success living on the street." Tenants receive services to help keep them out of taxpayer-funded jails, detox centers, emergency rooms and hospitals.

A study found that Moore Place residents reduced their emergency-room visits by 81% and their hospital stays by 62% during their first two years as residents, saving [dollar]2.4 million in costs to the community. Three-fourths of tenants are at least...