After helping more than 225 people living mostly in encampments, a Cleveland housing program is widening its focus to reach people who move from place to place and are harder to find.
A Home for Every Neighbor helps people secure apartment leases in less than two weeks, subsidizes rent for a year and connects the new tenants to services. Most people served since its 2024 launch had been living in 77 encampments across the city, program director Liam Haggerty said. The City of Cleveland covers the program’s $1.9 million annual budget.
With fewer people living in tents, the program is now working to find more people who are unsheltered but who move around, sleeping in cars, doorways and bus shelters and sometimes finding a place to stay briefly before returning to the streets.
Many living like this are young adults, Haggerty said. To reach them, A Home for Every Neighbor is working with A Place For Me, which focuses on young people experiencing or at risk of homelessness, and the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland. More than 20 people, some identified through the partnerships, are on track to be in apartments in the next two weeks.
Haggerty said his team is also starting to work with Cleveland’s Department of Building and Housing to identify more people living in abandoned and condemned properties.
They qualify for help, Haggerty said, “It’s just a matter of finding them.”
The goal is ‘equilibrium’ in unsheltered population, but that’s about to get harder
The program also is working to respond faster to reports of encampments, Haggerty told City Council’s Health, Human Services and the Arts Committee Monday.
The program team recently visited two camps, one at East 79th Street and Cedar Avenue and the other in a park at West 116th and Belmont, less than a month after learning about them, Haggerty said.
In the early stages of the program, the work was driven by specific number goals, Haggerty told Signal Cleveland. Now the goal is “equilibrium” — trying to keep the number of people from living unsheltered from rising.
That could be a challenge next year.
Local homelessness service providers are bracing for the effects of new funding restrictions from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD is shifting its funding priorities away from the “housing first” model — long-term housing programs with optional services — to transitional housing with two-year maximums and service or work requirements. The change is expected to cost Cuyahoga County about 400 beds in permanent supportive housing, which is for people who have experienced long-term or repeated homelessness, typically due to mental health or addiction struggles.
A Home for Every Neighbor recently applied for $1.5 million from HUD to serve the rest of Cuyahoga County. Its services are considered transitional housing.
Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless will stop providing case management services when its contract with A Home for Every Neighbor expires in November, Haggerty said. NEOCH may continue to help with outreach and to manage a fund for new tenants’ incidental expenses.
A Home for Every Neighbor is developing new partnerships with behavioral health providers to work with “some of our most challenging participants who … need to be connected to some intensive services,” Haggerty said.
