Charlotte-Mecklenburg's Ten-Year Implementation Plan to End and Prevent Homelessness - One Person/One Family At a Time

As Charlotte-Mecklenburg's population grows each year and our relative supply of affordable housing decreases, we continue to see the numbers of homeless families and individuals swell in our community. Over 5,000 people are homeless in Mecklenburg County on any given night and tens of thousands annually. We are currently spending millions of dollars to address our growing and tragic homelessness crisis, but at best, are only able to manage the problem with little capacity to address root causes.

While many effective programs are in place to support homeless individuals and families, they, collectively, have not been sufficient in the face of the growing problem to effectively reduce or end homelessness in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. The evidence is compelling that the scope of our crisis has become too large and the causes too complex to continue working from an institutionalized, agency-driven system that relies heavily on emergency shelters and crisis management.

If we truly want to see significant reductions in our homeless population five to ten years from now, we need to begin shifting away from the traditional shelter-based model that often results in people shuffling from shelter to shelter and program to program for extended periods, to a housing-based model that focuses on getting homeless individuals and families off the streets, out of shelters and into appropriate and safe permanent housing that is linked to services.

MORE THAN SHELTER! represents a movement to the third phase of our community's body of work to address the growing homelessness crisis in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. It builds on Living in the Shadows, An Assessment of Homelessness completed in 2000 and Out of the Shadows, a broad strategic plan developed by a community task force in 2002 with input from well over 125 participants. MORE THAN SHELTER! includes ten-year implementation strategies driven by the Out of the Shadows vision and goals as well as a discreet number of specific and immediate priority actions to take in FY07-08.