A look into how Bergen County, New Jersey, became a Kansas role model for ending homelessness, and the nuance of its accomplishments.
By Stefania Lugli / KLC Journal
One phrase is increasingly frequenting the lips of Wichita and Kansas officials when talking about ending homelessness: functional zero.
“Functional zero” is a milestone achieved when homelessness becomes rare and brief for a certain population, such as when more people are staying housed than falling into homelessness. It’s a term (and measure) coined by Community Solutions, a national nonprofit that helps communities evaluate whether they have “measurably solved” homelessness for a specific population.
Bergen County, New Jersey, Wichita’s “community of inspiration” for reducing homelessness, is recognized nationally for being among the first communities in the nation to reach functional zero. Since its initial achievements, Bergen has been lauded nationally, consistently promoted as a success story in the efforts to end homelessness. It took functional zero from jargon to reality.
But then came a shock.
On the eve of the pandemic, Bergen County’s priorities had to change, officials there say. Systemic forces, such as the rising costs of living and housing, made it more difficult to house people quickly. COVID-19 shocked the system even further, and the county’s focus switched to meeting the basic needs for their homeless clientele: meals, vaccines, shelter – isolated shelter. Personnel changes also disrupted the status quo.
As a result, The Journal learned that from October 2019 through December 2023, Bergen County suspended its formal pursuit of functional zero, neither handing over the data necessary to measure it nor seeking advice related to it from Community Solutions. Public records and interviews with officials at Bergen County and Community Solutions show that Wichita’s oft-cited role model for reducing homelessness hasn’t been able to consistently sustain functional zero for any population since that four-year break through January of this year, the most recent time period for which The Journal has been able to obtain data.
In response to an open records request asking for documents detailing the last time Bergen County achieved functional zero, officials there provided letters from the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness congratulating the county on “ending veteran homelessness” in 2016 and “ending chronic homelessness” in 2017. The county presently doesn’t reach functional zero for any population, which hasn’t been reported previously.
Officials in Bergen County offered broad explanations for the shift.
“COVID changed the game,” said Christina Baluja, the acting director of Bergen County’s Housing, Health and Human Services Center, an equivalent to Wichita’s emerging Multi-Agency Center. “There was the moratorium (on evictions), and at the end of that landlords were struggling. There was a lot of funding that came out during the time to help, but then the cost of living, rents, have come up.
“What that means is not that there’s necessarily more homelessness. It just takes longer to house people. And in our opinion, if the person’s doing what they’re doing and working within the system, no one should be penalized for that. The system’s changed. The availability has changed. The markets changed.”
Officials at Bergen County and Community Solutions also say that Bergen County remained an active and valued member of what it calls the Built for Zero network during the period. It has now resumed sharing its data with Community Solutions and counts functional zero again among its goals.
Baluja said the worsening national homeless crisis “changes the way functional zero looks.”
“Bergen is definitely active, up and running, focused on the issues, working with individuals,” Baluja said. “It’s just the time frame has changed, and we are rolling with it and trying to make that work and connect people to permanent housing.”
What The Journal learned matters to Wichita and Kansas because Wichita formally became a Built for Zero community this past summer, meaning that it too is coordinating with Community Solutions to reach the lofty ambition of functional zero. Topeka, Lawrence, Johnson County and Douglas County are Built for Zero locations, too. The state of Kansas also hired a former Bergen County official on a $250,000 contract for consultation on homelessness policy.
Bergen County’s journey on the road to ending homelessness doesn’t mean that functional zero isn’t a useful aspiration and measure for accountability. Locales such as Rockford, Illinois; the Gulf Coast of Mississippi; and Abilene, Texas, have reached and sustained functional zero for multiple populations.
But what happened after Bergen County’s first successes show just how quickly the game can change when it comes to sustaining measurable progress. The struggle to end homelessness in a community can be two steps forward, one step – if not more – back, before going forward again.
Community Solution’s functional zero initiative, spurred by quality data, was proposed over a decade ago using an equation that tracked the number of homeless people and their wait times to get into housing. The process involved creating metrics to break a messy situation into bite-sized steps and benchmarks to track interventions.
Rosanne Haggerty, president of Community Solutions, said that functional zero is so high of a bar, that not meeting it should not be seen as a setback for a community, even after they’ve achieved it for a particular population.
“It’s never the case that functional zero is held as a standard you get to and stay at. It’s extraordinary to get there,” she said. “Communities are aspiring to it as one measure, as a system, working to get back to it if they are overwhelmed for various reasons.”
The view from Bergen County
When Bergen reached functional zero for the chronic and veterans, it relied on at least three key things: building a unified regional team or “command center” under one roof; using real-time, person-specific data of homeless individuals to target efforts and resources; and using data to redesign the county’s homeless responses to strategically apply resources, according to Community Solutions.
The Wichita Journalism Collaborative, a local coalition of community and media organizations that has elevated coverage of housing issues in Wichita, supported this reporter’s travel to Bergen County in search of a solutions story about ending homelessness.
Along the way, this reporter found people like Paul Nickels.
As sunlight cracks over the horizon of Hackensack, New Jersey, Nickels finishes up his daily rounds. He rides his bike to the usual spots: the river, the empty warehouses, under certain bridges.
He looks for proof of life.
Formerly homeless himself, Nickels rides every morning to check on the known unsheltered homeless people he’s built relationships with. He was there, once, too, before he walked into Bergen County’s Housing, Health and Human Services Center – the Triple H, as the staff calls it. He credits the institution and those who ran it for saving his life – but circumstances have changed.
“Actually getting into the shelter was very simple back then. If I was homeless now, I wouldn’t be able to get into the shelter,” he said.
That’s because that homeless shelter currently has a waitlist, so it can’t accept walk-ins. It’s also a resource center and is one of the models Wichita has used for its one-stop shop for homeless resources. The Multi-Agency Center (MAC) is currently at its first stage of buildout: an emergency winter shelter.
Bergen’s 77-bed center isn’t the only thread connected to Wichita’s homeless efforts. Kansas officials, especially Wichita’s, frequently cite Bergen County as a role model for eliminating homelessness. Julia Orlando, one of the organizers credited with the county’s success, has a three-year contract with the state of Kansas to share her expertise in homelessness policy. She and Bergen County frequently have been referenced in local government meetings, invited to policy sessions and even had a spotlight in Wichita’s recent documentary on homelessness.
In an interview last fall, Orlando said the idea of the Triple H came when Bergen County was tracking a rise in chronic homelessness. At the time, a system of churches and nonprofits were working together to help the homeless, but relief was far outpaced by the cost of housing.
The situation prompted the county to convene a task force to get a group together working on homelessness. They hired a consultant to come in and research efforts around the country.
Bergen modeled much of their policy off of San Francisco, who had a similar operation of having housing and resources co-located. Their version of the multi-agency center was built in 2015 with investment from bonds.
From there, milestones started to pile up. Bergen, crossed the difficult threshold of functional zero in 2016 for people who were chronically homeless and in 2017 for homeless veterans.
What does reaching zero mean?
Functional zero does not mean there are no homeless people in a community.
It involves using real-time, comprehensive data, including annual point-in-time counts, while being led by a continuum of care’s homeless management information data system.
According to Beth Sandor, the chief program officer for Community Solutions, communities in the program are evaluated at least once a year on whether they’ve sustained functional zero. The nonprofit provides ongoing coaching and builds custom data dashboards off of records they’ve received, like this public one from Anchorage, Alaska.
One of the pillars of a Built for Zero effort is building the capacity to sustain the achievement of functional zero, even as local conditions change, but everyday developments, such as personnel changes, can also make it difficult to stay engaged in the pursuit of functional zero.
Baluja said she was one of the few staff members who remained at the county shelter throughout the pandemic, weathering changes that included the departures of Orlando, who left last year for a medical center vice president position, and other managers, before Baluja ascended to acting director.
Other changes had an impact as well: “One of the main agencies that was doing the data had a transition where it was being passed over to a different entity to do the data, and it’s not that the data wasn’t being recorded in the system, but it wasn’t being provided to Community Solutions,” Baluja said.
Bonnie O’Brien, the president of Transitional Professionals, a member of Bergen County’s continuum of care for homelessness, said that the county’s functional zero metrics were not maintained because the chief statistician in charge of tracking had left.
Mary Sunden was that person. She worked with Orlando at the Triple HHH before retiring. She still goes to housing prioritization meetings with the continuum of care, to “cheerlead as hard” as she can from the sidelines and still makes recommendations.
She said it’s been a challenge for the county to work through an old data model in which one person made sure that everything came in centrally and organized, to the current one in which several agencies are empowered to input their own data.
“Coming out of the pandemic was a big challenge,” she said. “It’s taking them a much longer time to house people than it did before, or during the pandemic, and that’s just because of what’s happening all across the country in terms of housing. It’s too expensive, and there’s not enough of it. So people are sitting in the shelter or transitional housing for way too long, and that sort of messes up your numbers. But you recognize it, and you just kind of go forward with it.”
Baluja and Michele Dilorgi, head of the Bergen County Housing Authority, maintain that, amid the difficulties of the pandemic, functional zero remained a priority; but it couldn’t be the highest priority. The pandemic forced officials to focus on keeping their homeless safe and healthy.
“Those things were the priority …” Dilorgi said. “We were tasked with these mandates. We took all that seriously in ensuring that all residents were receiving proper care and dispersing emergency funds to individuals who could no longer work. It was a behemoth.”
It isn’t unusual for Built for Zero communities to have changes in their levels of engagement with Community Solutions as their circumstances change, according to Haggerty, the president of the nonprofit. She said communities are assigned labels based on where they are in a given cycle, usually divided into six months.
“We will come in at a community’s request to do some kind of reinforcing help, but if they are disengaged from coaching, it just means we’ve moved our limited coaching resources to a community that’s asked for more coaching that month or that cycle,” she said.
Another aspect of Built for Zero that is important to understand is that a community’s commitment to the effort is voluntary, said Adam Ruege, the director for strategy and evaluation for the Built for Zero team at Community Solutions.
“When they enter this data, we don’t have any authority over them. We encourage communities to do it,” he said. “I want to say about 80% of our communities report data every month. Which is awesome for voluntary. That’s over 90 communities reporting data.”
Some communities – but not Bergen County – offer a public database of housing and homelessness, something that Community Solutions doesn’t require, but, as mentioned before, it offers to all of its Built for Zero communities. Illinois has one, publicly showing its housing placements, days from identification to housing, and inflow and outflow of homeless individuals.
Gaps in data or increases in homelessness beyond the functional zero threshold can be fixed, he said. “However what we do is we work with communities pretty closely to try to bring that number back down. I think this speaks to the kind of complexities and how difficult it can be sometimes for even a community that’s achieved Functional Zero to be able to sustain it for a long-term period.”
When it comes to who has the prerogative of declaring functional zero, Ruege prefers to think of the responsibility as a partnership between the nonprofit and the community. It’s up to a Built for Zero city to publicize their functional zero milestone or not.
It can take months to verify a community’s data, according to Ruege. But the process is important, because it gives an outside institution the freedom to comb through a city’s inflow and outflow of homelessness and housing, which provides outside accountability.
In an emailed statement, Orlando, the once-head of the Triple H and consultant for Kansas homelessness policy, indicated that she sees data as only part of the story when it comes to assessing the efforts in Bergen County to address homelessness.
It’s a story she’ll continue to be a part of. She’s not only the vice president of integrative services at Bergen New Bridge Medical Center, where she collaborates with Community Solutions to address homelessness for individuals with complex medical needs. She was also recently appointed to the Bergen County Continuum of Care Executive Board.
“While monthly reports can provide some data points, they fail to capture the complexity of systemic change,” she wrote. “Real progress in this field depends on building relationships, addressing obstacles, and guiding communities through multifaceted challenges.”
Bergen County’s successes, in her view, transcend where the county stands on the metric of functional zero at a given moment: “The transformative impact I bring stems from years of experience driving community-wide systemic change – work that requires time, persistence, and collaboration.”
Haggerty, the Community Solutions president, said that Built for Zero should be looked at as a process for building capacity to solve homelessness “over and over again.”
“(Bergen’s) experience of working to absorb shocks mirrors just about every other community in the country,” she said.
The challenges after a success story
Not everyone in Bergen County, however, is at ease with the current state of its efforts, or the consequences of its notoriety as one of just three communities to “solve chronic and veteran homelessness.”
Nickels, the advocate who was formerly homeless and sits on the county continuum of care’s advisory board, said his biggest concern is that Bergen County’s national reputation for years-old achievements make it harder for some to deal with the current reality of homelessness.
“Functional zero, dysfunctional zero,” he said. “We did the veterans and chronic homelessness. But it’s not only ending it, meaning getting the people that we can get off the streets, but it’s maintaining that.”
O’Brien, the nonprofit director, said the county’s trajectory after its initial achievements deserved a deeper look. While a system of prioritization – meaning help for those with the most immediate needs – exists, there are a “myriad of issues and hurdles that must be overcome.”
“We work hard to try and get shelter and then stable housing for clients, but the ‘system’ does not always work in sync with a person who needs immediate assistance and does not align with the way it should be.”
Still, Nickels and O’Brien agree that veteran homelessness has stayed admirably low, thanks to a wealth of resources available for that group.
For everyone else, though, housing is getting increasingly difficult to attain. Dollars don’t stretch as far as they used to. Stigma surrounding vouchers persists.
Bergen County is hardly starting from scratch. But the goalposts of what it will have to do to end homelessness have moved farther back.
The long road of functional zero
What does this mean for other communities trying to follow Bergen County’s path to success without mirroring its complications? Is functional zero still attainable? If so, is it maintainable?
Community Solutions remains optimistic.
Rockford, Illinois; the Gulf Coast of Mississippi; and Abilene, Texas, have reached and sustained functional zero for multiple populations, Sandor, the chief program officer, said. Other cities, like Denver and Minneapolis, are showing progress in reducing homelessness despite problems of housing affordability.
“We would want Wichita to know they have a national network of allies standing behind them, cheering them on as they join the growing number of communities who are demonstrating, every day, that homelessness is solvable,” Sandor said. “While the work is hard, they are not alone.”
For the more successful communities, it appears there’s a balance between reliance on national expertise and examples, and local creativity.
Rockford, was one of the original communities to sign up with Community Solutions alongside Bergen County. It was the first community in the country to reach functional zero for both chronic and veteran homelessness and has largely maintained it since.
Angie Walker, the homeless program coordinator for Rockford’s Health & Human Services Department, said that Community Solutions’ coaching changed the city’s system for the better.
“Everything was very siloed amongst the agencies. Our system was very reactive and not proactive at all. So if there was a situation with homeless folks, people would say ‘Oh, go down to this location,’ to see if they could get services. If not, they just kind of disappeared.”
Rockford began building their by-name list (what Community Solutions advises for quality homeless management data) and working with landlords to house veterans. They hit functional zero with veterans in 2015, then functional zero for chronic homeless in 2017.
Walker credited her city’s success to staying creative with its policy. She said she’s never been afraid to push back on Community Solutions’ suggestions if she thought they didn’t feel right for Rockford.
“Chronically homeless folks, they’ve been on the streets a long time,” she said. “They’ve tried to get help. They’ve tried to go through programs and oftentimes it didn’t work out. Sometimes it was because the programs were so restrictive they didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to go to a place where they had to be in at a certain time or weren’t allowed company or had a whole bunch of rules. Because, as adults, we don’t want that where we live. We want to go home and do what we want to do, and they’re no different. We found that a lot of them were really distrustful, and because they thought we were going to try to force them to do something.”
One example Walker shared involved a chronically homeless man who struggled with alcoholism. He had lived unsheltered for years, refusing housing. Then Walker and her team came up with a strategy they called ‘Taste of Housing’ to ease certain individuals into hotel rooms to adjust to inside living.
“This one particular gentleman really liked baseball. My whole thing was ‘Hey, if you go to this hotel room, guess what? You’ll have a TV. You can watch the ballgame.’ He was a huge Cubs fan (and his team was in the World Series at the time) so we got him to go into the hotel because he wanted to watch baseball. It worked,” she said. “After that, he was like, ‘Oh, I kind of like it here. I get to take showers when I want.’ We asked if he wanted an apartment so he could do that all the time, and he asked if he could get a TV. We said, ‘Yeah, sure.’”
Still, the path to success can be cluttered with obstacles. The man Walker referred to got arrested and was in jail the day he was to sign his lease. Walker pulled off a miracle and was able to get him released and he’s stayed “pretty much” housed since then.
It’s creativity and commitment that’s steered Rockford’s pursuit of functional zero, even through COVID, which turned millions of lives upside down.
Sunden, the previous data guru for Bergen County and Community Solutions, still believes in the concept of functional zero and its milestones.
“I think it’s really extremely helpful to have a metric to work towards, and I think it’s critical that it be a flexible metric and one that adjusts as things happen,” she said. “I don’t know how you would do this without some kind of goal, and I think it’s very difficult to set the goal yourself.”
Resilience, data and creativity
While Bergen County currently falls short of functional zero homelessness, that doesn’t mean the goal can’t be met in Kansas. Homelessness is complicated. Metrics, like the ones formulated by Community Solutions, are an effort to whittle an overwhelming crisis into bite-sized hurdles to cross. Benchmarks help keep track of progress and evaluate what interventions are working and not.
“In so many things, there’s this search for a silver bullet,” Haggerty said. “Frankly, one of the things that I think we inadvertently kind of center is, like, functional zero is amazing. It’s like being the first to run a four-minute mile. But it’s just as amazing when large cities can get to 40-50% reductions (in homelessness). Functional zero is not the only measure.”
Homelessness continually evolves. What can Wichita learn from the dozens of Built for Zero communities dotting the nation?
“Collaboration. Really focusing on putting in more and more of the wraparound services so you’re not repeating the same cycle,” Baluja said.
“You have to be really forthcoming,” Walker said about a community’s relationship with Community Solutions. “I found that they’ve always been very much willing to talk things through. So my best advice is to just really be forthright and tell them if you don’t think something’s going to work for your community.”
Ruege, with Community Solutions, emphasized the value of why data and drumming up thresholds is valuable.
“Fundamentally, you can’t solve a problem that you can’t see. It starts with understanding the data. That is the power of this,” he said. “It may not mean that they’re going to see reductions immediately, but actually understanding the scope and scale of the problem as a starting point is a good path to be on.”
Cities like Wichita, Lawrence, Topeka and Salina are not alone in their journeys to end homelessness. There is value in seeking peers in other communities, to learn from others’ successes – but there is just as much worth in asking about failures and missteps. Kansas officials may be enamored with the idea of 2016 Bergen County – but, a decade later, it may not be attainable like it used to be.
However, the Built for Zero life cycle can show how progress can endure with the right combination of will, collaboration, creativity and sustainable infrastructure in shelter and services. The gains are fragile, and the losses can cut deep, but ultimate success is shaped not just by the efforts of advocates, but by reforming the systemic forces impacting the community.
This is the promise and peril of ending homelessness: chasing optimism and bracing for impact.
The Wichita Journalism Collaborative provided funding for travel and photography related to this story. The collaborative’s 10 members are working together on an 18-month project to investigate and report on housing challenges through “Priced Out: The Future of Wichita Housing,” which includes coverage of homelessness. It receives financial support from the Wichita Foundation’s Press Forward Wichita Fund.
About the reporter: Stefania Lugli is a reporter for The Journal, published by the Kansas Leadership Center. She focuses on covering issues related to homelessness in Wichita and across Kansas. Her stories are shared widely through the Wichita Journalism Collaborative.
About the photographer: Thomas E. Franklin is an award-winning photographer, multimedia journalist, and documentary filmmaker, and serves as an Associate Professor of Multimedia Journalism at Montclair State University in New Jersey.
This article was republished here with the permission of: KLC Journal