What does it take to end homelessness?  Just what Governor Malloy is proposing: invest in supportive housing and increase the supply of affordable housing.

I am one of the many people at the Greater New Haven Regional Alliance to End Homelessness table discussing how we can achieve the region's goals of ending homelessness among chronic individuals and veterans in the next four years, and for all people over the next ten years.  There are great efforts underway to better coordinate and utilize our existing resources.  Many providers in Greater New Haven are moving quickly to rework how they deliver services to respond to the unparalleled demands they are facing, while they recommit to meeting these tight timeframes to end homelessness.   

There is great urgency to improve the financial stability of families and individuals in our region right now. 

There's a supply-side versus demand-side battle raging in the nation's capital, which seems like old hat.  The new twist is the debate is about how to get Americans back to work, and the disagreement is about the root cause of our unemployment woes.

Professor Molly Anderson has a vision for a better life for people struggling with food insecurity and a clear, doable plan.  

1. Bring people to good food;
2. Bring good food and food-growing opportunities to people; and
3. Design affordable housing with access to good food and food growing opportunities. 

1 and 2 -- no problem.  But affordable housing?  With access to food and other opportunities?  Now it all starts to seem pie-in-the sky.

It turns out that my random decisions are not so random, rather highly predictable  and easily influenced.  And I am not alone.  Behavioral economics has unraveled a whole new world of understanding people's actions, and provided compelling evidence to break-down some of the stagnant or ineffective structures/policies/ideologies that have persisted for so long.  

I’m feeling pinched in the data divide. Or maybe adrift. I’m not sure if the malady is too much data or too little data or not the right data. Mostly, I think the challenge is not having the time and skills to make the most of the data that is available. And what is available is very impressive. Workforce Alliance, our region’s lead entity to connect people with employment, has made available the data and analysis they receive from Monster on labor market trends in South Central CT.

How does our community address homelessness in a way that meets the needs of homeless people and everyone in the community?

Springfield, Massachusetts answered this question and had astounding results: the city went from having 100 homeless people living on the streets to 5 just a few years later. Geraldine McCafferty, Springfield's housing director, told the story of the city's efforts at an IForum this morning at the Lyceum in Hartford hosted by the Partnership for Strong Communities.  

Asking the poorest people in our state to pay for prescriptions doesn't work.  We know this in CT from first-hand experience.  We know it from the research that has been done in the field.  But Governor Malloy's current budget includes Medicaid recipients paying co-pays for prescriptions and doctors' appointments. $1.50 seems like an impossibly small amount of money to ask someone to pay for a prescription, and for most of us it seems hard to believe that this is either an unreasonable policy or a barrier to care.