Like the sight of people huddled against the cold, Kansas City’s data about people living outside or without stable housing presents a bleak picture — but one that the city, in a new collaboration with local businesses, is seeking to change.

The numbers, according to the city, are dire:

More than 2,000 people are homeless in Kansas City at any one time.

In the last seven years, that population has risen 170%.

And among those who are chronically homeless in Kansas City, 95.7% are living outside without any kind of shelter, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That’s the highest percentage of any major city In the United States.

But on Tuesday, at the weekly meeting of the city’s Neighborhood Planning and Development Committee, the committee chose to send a new ordinance to be voted on by the City Council that aims to kickstart a better strategy to tackle the crisis.

The ordinance, if passed, would authorize the city manager to use $1 million that is already in the budget — but which has not been appropriated — to overhaul the city’s approach to homelessness and begin to create a “Kansas City Housing Gateway Program.”

It aims to use that initial city money to both provide immediate rent assistance to people at risk of homelessness and to help raise more money, with a goal of getting $10 million from both public and private sources to house 600 people in its first year.

“This is an ambitious undertaking to transform our homeless response system,” said Mary Owens, the deputy director of Housing and Community Development and one of three individuals who spoke before the committee.

Solidifying the details of that program is part of what the ordinance about.

“This is a first step, a first step to a larger process,” said Mayor Pro Tem and 5th District Councilwoman Ryana Parks-Shaw, who chaired the committee and also co-sponsored the bill with 6th District Councilman Johnathan Duncan.

The expectation, however, is that Kansas City’s current approach — seen as splintered — would be modeled on the successful “Housing First” and collaborative community programs in cities such as Houston, where homelessness is reported to have dropped 60% since 2012, and Milwaukee, where it has dropped more than 90% since 2015. The programs, more than offering just temporary beds or meals, also focus on wrap-around mental health services and successfully getting people into housing.

Besides Owens, others who spoke before the committee included Josh Henges, who was hired in 2022 to be Kansas City’s first homeless prevention coordinator, and Kevin Barth, the chief executive officer of Commerce Bank in Kansas City, who spoke of witnessing the “steady increase” of homeless people in Kansas City, particularly downtown.

Barth’s experience was partially responsible for the ordinance and its call for a more effective approach.

“I come from a family where it was not uncommon for me to get home from school and find that my father had picked up a hitchhiker,” Barth said. “(Or) there might be a whole family in our house that were down on their luck.

“Sure enough, those people would stay with us for a few days before my father was able to help find them assistance either through our church or other community organizations. That’s where I come from. So when I first started noticing it, I thought of it first as a humanitarian issue. And it’s still a humanitarian issue of helping the homeless.”

“But over the last few years, it’s become more of a comfort and even a safety issue, with the number of homeless people congregating downtown. . . .We’ve had several employees assaulted, or even experienced just very uncomfortable incidents in just one year. While I believe this is a very small percentage of the homeless population, it’s still an issue. And, as a result, (we) have a number of people that are reconsidering whether they want to work or live downtown.”

As part of doing business in Houston, Barth said he spoke to colleagues and leaders who told them of Houston’s success in reducing homelessness. He was introduced to and began talking to Mary Chapman Semple, an expert on homelessness who is credited with Houston’s transformation and who now consults with numerous other cities.

Barth said he also entered into conversations with city staff and other leaders, including Stephanie Boyer, the chief executive of reStart Inc., a Kansas City nonprofit that provides shelter and services to people experiencing homelessness.

“I called on about 15, 16 business and landowners downtown,” Barth said. “Every single one of them — every single one of them — said, ‘We would like to be part of the solution.’ We realize this isn’t about taking the homeless and busing them to the next city over. This is about helping them here with, not just housing, but also with other services.”

Barth held another meeting with a dozen Kansas City chief executives, which led to some of those business leaders paying to have Chapman Semple come to Kansas City to consult. They held two, two-day working sessions with stakeholders and other advocates for homeless people.

Fixing a fractured system

Owens, Kanas City’s deputy director of housing, said one problem with Kansas City is that currently, “our system is incredibly siloed.”

“We have 214 providers and 333 programs serving our homeless population,” she said. “And all of those programs are serving independently to one another.”

They are all working separately, she said.

“Our funding is not aligned around outcomes,” she added. “Our funding is aligned around programs. So instead of the goal of these programs being to end homelessness, they all have different goals — whether it is to feed as many people as they can, or to house as many people as they can. But it’s not to end homelessness.”

Owen enumerated other problems: The lack of affordable housing. Too few low-barrier shelters. Too little transitional housing.

“We’ve put an outsized focus on permanent supportive housing,” she said, “And we’ve disinvested, or haven’t been investing enough, in that temporary housing intervention for our temporarily homeless.”

Another problem, she said, is data. The city tries to maintain a database, a homeless information management system of homeless people in Kansas City, that helps to chart their names, the place they generally call home, what services they receive, where they receive them, and anything else they might need to help them find and keep stable housing.

Owens said that currently, only 63 of the 214 organizations that provide services to homeless individuals are required to report their data through the city’s system.

“So we don’t have a complete picture of our homeless population,” she said, “or who’s serving our homeless. So in order for us to really make a strong difference in homelessness, we have to get better data.”

The $1 million, Owens said, is being seen as a “catalytic investment” to spur additional public and private buy-in to bolstering the city’s efforts.

“It’s estimated that for the first year to successfully house 600 individuals,” Owens said, “we’re going to need $10 million. So we’re going to need to pull resources from the city, the county, the state, our federal resources and then, of course, our business and philanthropic partners.”

A public-private partnership

Henges said, “What we’re trying to solve here is the difference between becoming homeless and remaining homeless. If you become homeless, we don’t want you to remain homeless. And if you are currently homeless, we want to intervene on that.”

In specific, the ordinance calls for the city manager to establish the Kansas City Housing Gateway Program in partnership with the business community.

It calls for the city manager, in the initial phase, to address unsheltered and chronic homelessness by identifying funding sources, reaching out to stakeholders, engaging with landlords and implementing strategies that are geographically diverse in approach.

Per the ordinance, the $1 million is to be taken from the general fund. The money had previously been budgeted to support a 2023 ordinance which banned landlords from discriminating against tenants based on their “source of income.” It specifically required landlords to accept Section 8 housing vouchers. That ordinance, however, has been challenged in court, making the $1 million available.

The ordinance calls from funds to be used to help provide “rapid, needs-based” financial assistance to people at imminent risk of homelessness because of, but not limited to, problems with rent, deposits, utility payments, transportation, or difficulties obtaining safe and stable housing.

The city manager is also to establish an advisory board composed of representatives from the Houseless Advisory Committee, the city staff, city council, designated businesses and philanthropic leaders.

The city manager is to report back to the City Council within six months to provide a comprehensive review of the response system and recommendations for addressing unsheltered and chronic homelessness.

“As we’re looking through this,” Henges said, “One of the bigger picture goals is we need a unified system, and under that unified system, unified language and unified data. We need a public, private partnership. This is what, wherever we see cities success, that is a huge element of it.”

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