On any night in this country, almost 550,00 people are homeless. Those numbers might seem incredibly high, but they have gone down in the last decade.
In 2010, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness created a plan called Opening Doors with a lofty goal: to end homelessness by the end of 2020.
Now, the Urban Institute has taken a closer look at that goal seven years later.
In 2014, Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton announced that Phoenix had ended chronic homelessness among veterans in the city.
That announcement was met with some skepticism, and, so, I wanted to know more about this idea that ending homelessness is something we can actually do.
Mary Cunningham is a researcher at the Urban Institute. And she says this is a solvable problem. It doesn’t mean that no one will ever be homeless again, but that homelessness will be rare, and short-lived.
Since 2010, she says there has been some major progress toward this goal and some setbacks, but most importantly, there have been some significant leaps in terms of how we think about homelessness.
