The January 2022 report on homelessness in Cambridge

2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In May 2021, the City of Cambridge engaged jo consulting to facilitate a series of community conversations to develop recommendations for how the city can better work to prevent and end homelessness. Jeff Olivet and Donald Whitehead facilitated the conversations, and Jeff Olivet served as lead author of this report. Donald and Jeff were supported by an exceptional expert team: Matthew Aronson, Alice Colegrove, Lauren Leornardis, and Ayala Livny.

The team would like to thank all members of the City of Cambridge Ad Hoc Working Group on Homelessness, who contributed significant hours, wisdom, and thoughtful guidance to shape the process and recommendations. The working group was appointed by Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui, who designated Councillor McGovern to spearhead the initiative.

This work would not have been possible without Mayor Siddiqui’s and Councillor McGovern’s deep commitment to ensuring that all Cambridge residents have a safe, stable, affordable place to call home. Our deepest gratitude goes to those unhoused individuals who offered their time and expertise through interviews, focus groups, and participation on the Ad Hoc Working Group.

We will never end homelessness until those who are closest to the problem— those with lived experience of homelessness—are fully included in creating the solutions.

3 BACKGROUND Homelessness is a life and death crisis. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, as in communities across the United States, homelessness has remained a persistent public health crisis for decades. Despite great success in ending homelessness one individual, one family, one youth and young adult at a time, we have yet to scale effective solutions to the extent necessary to end homelessness once and for all. Further, we have done little to stem the tide of people newly becoming homeless.

The net result is that while we have created effective housing and service solutions that have immeasurable benefit to those who receive them, we fail to solve the homelessness crisis systemically. On any given night, more than 500 of our friends and neighbors in Cambridge have no home, and this number increases many-fold through the course of a year.

A disproportionately high percentage of those experiencing homelessness in Cambridge are people of color:1 40% of people experiencing homelessness in Cambridge are Black/African American, compared to 11% of the general population, a disproportionality of more than three and a half times the general population numbers 62% of families experiencing homelessness in

Cambridge are Black/African American

Hispanic/Latino residents make up 19% of the city’s homeless population overall—and 33% of homeless families—compared to just 9% of the general population Even when controlling for poverty, rates of homelessness for Black and Latino households in Cambridge are dramatically high. Further, the crisis of homelessness has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has further destabilized health, well-being, and economic opportunity for many in our community. Over the past several years, the city has undertaken efforts to address the city’s homelessness crisis. In 2015-16, for example, the city partnered with the Corporation for

1 Data Sources: Cambridge Continuum of Care Point-in-Time Count; U.S.

Census Bureau American Community Survey

2 The August 2016 Charrette Recommendations are available at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fb554c6bcf4c950ed250c4f/t/5 fb6d944771cab1816f1d5b8/1605818693410/Cambridge_Charrette_ Recs_2016.pdf Supportive Housing to lead a “charrette”—a community planning process to identify strategies to prevent and end homelessness. The process resulted in recommendations related to housing, supportive services, zoning, and other strategies.2 Additionally, in June 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the City of Cambridge launched the City

Manager’s Public Safety Task Force, which developed a set

of recommendations3 that included guidance on how law enforcement can play a constructive role in addressing the needs of unhoused individuals. Building on these efforts, the city launched an Ad Hoc Working Group on Homelessness in June 2021, with the purpose of holding a series of community conversations that would result in a set of recommendations to guide future homelessness policy.4 From July-September 2021, these facilitated conversations addressed: 1.

Current services being offered by non-profit service providers and city-funded programs 2. Best practices and policy directions from across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts 3. National trends in homelessness response Concurrent with the community conversations, the team from jo consulting engaged unhoused individuals through a series of focus groups and interviews.

In all, we interviewed 15 individuals and held three focus groups—one in person and two via Zoom—that included a total of 18 individuals with lived experience of homelessness. Finally, we conducted individual interviews with Ad Hoc Working Group members to solicit their input on recommendations. Thirteen workgroup members participated in one-on-one interviews. After completing these activities, we held two strategy sessions with the Ad Hoc Working Group to discuss potential strategies and directions.

This report presents what we learned from the process and recommendations for future funding, policy, and programming to address Cambridge’s homelessness crisis. 3 Public Safety Task Force Recommendations are available at: https://www.cambridgema.gov/- /media/Files/citymanagersoffice/citymanager’staskforcetoexaminefuture ofpublicsafetyincambridge/finalreportoftaskforce2021.pdf 4 See Appendix A for list of Ad Hoc Workgroup members and Appendix B for meeting agendas, including expert presenters.

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WHAT WE LEARNED

The community conversations process was designed to build upon previous efforts and to move quickly from assessment to recommendations. The groups that engaged in the community conversations, focus groups, and interviews brought a wealth of perspectives to the problem. These perspectives shed light on multiple dimensions of the homelessness response in Cambridge—both things that are working well and things in need of improvement. This section highlights key findings and provides background and justification for the recommendations that follow.

PERSPECTIVE OF UNHOUSED RESIDENTS

Focus groups members and interview participants described past experiences that left them with difficulty trusting programs and service providers: “I just don’t trust openly…[don’t] even want to ask you for help.” “I have a hard time humbling myself.