Testimony to Connecticut General Assembly Appropriations Subcommittee on Health

Co-Chair Dillon, Co-Chair Marx, and members of the Health Subcommittee,

My name is David Rich. I am the President & CEO of The Housing Collective, a non-profit organization based in Bridgeport. We provide backbone support for the homelessness emergency response system in western Connecticut, and respond to the affordable housing crisis in Fairfield County, Litchfield County and Eastern Connecticut. I am also a resident of Salsbury, CT.

I am testifying today in support of two bills: 

• HB 6893 An Act Appropriating Funds to Assist Homeless Persons 
• HB 6894 An Act Establishing an Interagency Council on Homelessness 

In 2014, my organization and several partners helped establish Connecticut’s eight Coordinated Access Networks, or CANs, which together make up the state’s emergency homelessness response system. Through this process, the state provided additional resources to solve homelessness and created a single point of entry into the system for individuals experiencing homelessness: Dial 211. Afterwards, I watched as we drove down homelessness for six years in a row, and even ended veteran homelessness. The new, coordinated approach was working.

In 2020, things changed. The pandemic caused an unprecedented disruption in the real estate market. Rental costs and home prices soared, rising 30%, 40%, even 50% or more depending on the community. Predictably, homelessness has increased every year since, rising 13% last year alone. Meanwhile, not only have budget allocations for the homelessness response system not seen a material increase, they have not kept up with inflation. As a result, today, 1 in 4 people is being turned away from services because the system does not have enough capacity. 

To summarize: 

From 2014 to 2020, the state created a more coordinated approach to homelessness and invested significant resources in it. 

From 2020 until today, the number of people experiencing homelessness increased dramatically, but state budget allocations did not. 

I share this to illustrate that our coordinated system works when it receives resources that meet the scale of the challenge. HB 6893 will provide those resources. 

Further, one of the key words in that last sentence is “coordinated.” Homelessness is driven by a lack of housing but it touches every aspect of someone’s life, including their health and their ability to access education, transportation, and economic opportunity. As such, state agencies responsible for transportation, economic opportunity, etc. have a key role to play in ending homelessness. 

H.B. 6894 will pave the way for this collaboration by creating a coordinated Interagency Council on Homelessness.  

However, I encourage you to amend the bill to ensure that people who have direct contact with homelessness can participate in the decision making process, including service providers and people who are currently formerly homeless. .

Before I conclude, I would also like to acknowledge and thank Representatives Kadeem Roberts of Norwalk and Laurie Sweet of Hamden. Last week, they launched the first-ever End Homelessness Caucus in the General Assembly. This is the type of leadership that homelessness demands, and I encourage members of this committee to consider coordinating with the caucus.  

Thank you for the opportunity to present this testimony.