Anthony Humphrey slept on the pavement outside a downtown Houston drop-in center. Except when a Gulf Coast rainstorm slammed the city — then he took cover under a storefront awning or below Interstate 45.
He had no driver’s license, no Social Security card, almost no hope. That was in 2014. This month, Humphrey will celebrate a year in his apartment.
“Someone came up to me,” the 50-year-old recalled. “He said, ‘We know you’ve been sleeping here. We want to get you into coordinated access’ ” — a system referring homeless people to housing.
Humphrey is one of thousands of homeless housed in the Houston area since 2011, when leaders embarked on a new approach to help — starting with veterans.
Rather than open more shelters, they focused on getting people into housing. They told charitable organizations to sign on or lose out on funding.
They built a computer system to assess the homeless, prioritize them based on vulnerability, then connect them with programs. And they collected data, lots of data.
The results are surprising and have Seattle officials taking note: There are an estimated 1,050 homeless people without shelter in the area, according to a recent count, down about 75 percent from 4,418 in 2011.
[For more of this story, written by Daniel Beekman, go to http://www.seattletimes.com/se...sing-and-lots-of-it/]
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