Daily Herald opinion: A shift in strategy: New state report emphasizes prevention in fight against homelessness

As it marked the five-year point since Gov. JB Pritzker’s executive order creating three initiatives to fight homelessness, the Illinois Department of Human Services released a formal plan last week providing a general outline for efforts through 2029.

Home Illinois: Illinois’ Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness is an ambitious document whose defining theme is best summarized in the final paragraph of a Capitol News Illinois story we published Sunday.

“We can’t think that doing just one thing is going to adequately solve homelessness. Homelessness is a complex set of circumstances. That means the way that we respond to it needs to be complex at some level,” said Matt Burgess, CEO of Home Sweet Home Ministries, a Bloomington-Normal-based advocacy agency that operates shelters and other services for the homeless.

In that spirit, the Home Illinois plan represents a substantial departure from a strategy based on addressing immediate needs of homeless persons toward one that attempts to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.

Any program needs to address various needs of individuals and families without shelter, of course. But, as we noted in a September editorial about a consortium of suburbs working on homelessness issues, a long-term solution requires multi-faceted approaches.

The Home Illinois report identifies four specific goals: investing in housing, ensuring everyone has access to eligible benefits, ending unsheltered homelessness and building a prevention system.The task force overseeing the work expects to spend $620 million through 2029 toward achieving these goals.

Interestingly, the group identifies a lack of affordable housing alternatives as a key obstacle. That may feel somewhat like stating the obvious - people find themselves on the streets because they can’t afford to pay the rent or the mortgage. But the state of the problem is larger than that. More and more people are finding themselves on the streets because housing is not affordable for large numbers of them.

“The main reason why we have homelessness in Illinois, and the rest of our society, is the shortage of affordable housing,” said Bob Palmer, policy director for the Housing Action Illinois advocacy group.

Ironically, the Home Illinois report found that, broadly, homelessness in Illinois decreased overall by 6% over the past year, but chronic homelessness, where people have been homeless more than once in the previous year and have a disabling condition, rose by a dramatic 28%.

The steps laid out by the state agency provide a useful blueprint for addressing issues of homelessness on a large scale. They also emphasize the need for coordinated efforts among locally based advocacy groups and agencies like the newly formed Northwest Consortium on Homelessness.

They also should serve as a basis for promoting the efforts of municipal and county governments to adopt policies and approve projects that foster increased access to affordable homes, not merely to immediate care and emergency shelter.