00:00Hi Roseanne. Hello . It's really it's such an honor to be here with you today. And I want to just in case everyone didn't read their entire whole books I'm just couple of notes from your bio. Before we get started. One is that you have founded and directed and devoted your whole career to organizations that are non-profit organizations that address the problem of homelessness. You and your teams have built over 55 100 new units for the homeless and you have housed well over 100000 people in homes along the way through the process of this you also won a MacArthur genius award. And here you are with us today. So let's welcome Roseanne but let's just if we would back up just a bit and um I'd love to know. Tell us how did this start for you. How did you get yourself here. And where were you that you decided to tip such a clear strong career path. I think I have to blame my parents . I grew up outside Hartford Connecticut and my parents would bring my brothers and sisters and me to church on Sundays in downtown Hartford. And the only other people who were consistently there were residents of the single room occupancy hotels and boarding houses that populate many cities downtown or used to. And so on really without any choice in the matter at a young age. Uh got to be familiar with the types of housing that single poor people lived in. Who uh. But for that type of housing. Uh and we see it now in so many city uh people are vulnerable to homelessness . And it was also just quite um powerful to see that my parents uh managed to provide a safety net for lots of people just by helping them fill out government forms or sort out problems when they were ill and that uh. Yeah. There was uh something to be done. There was an important type of housing to think about . So I can't say it was also linear but uh didn't seem unfamiliar to me when I got involved with this work after college. It seems like also what was important about that experience is that you didn't have the thus that them and us separation that that you could see them as people you could see who they were and um you mentioned that right after college you started right into this kind of work. You were a volunteer you were working around the Times Square area. Yeah. Uh Times Square back in the bad old days when uh no. Let's go let's pull up a picture of that battle day . Do we have that image. Yeah. It uh it seems like a million years ago. But that's what I used to walk to work. Not that long. Not that long ago and that's like in the late 80s or 90s . That was New York. I mean that was Times Square. And it was really a home to so many people who had no other place to go. I mean it was it was where you were. And so tell us about that moment you were you were working there you were working with as a volunteer working as a volunteer at a shelter for runaway and homeless young people. And I realized pretty quickly that we had a temporary and well intended response to something that was a much more long term and complicated problem. So uh it wasn't quite clear to me at that point what one needed to do other than you know everything but that housing was the place to start that without basic stability you weren't really going to be able to see these young people into any kind of pathway. So that's what I went on to do at that point learn to develop affordable housing and then started an organization um really around trying to preserve some of the existing single market fancy hotels in New York City . So in terms of that hierarchy of needs. That was something that you had a clarity about. You could see that without homes these kids were not going to be able to ever really adjust to the world or would find a foothold there. Well I think the the insight was I was about their age and I was like What am I thinking about like where am I going to live. After I finish this volunteer experience. And so uh it was fairly obvious that our needs weren't that different. So. Wow that's interesting . So you you very quickly you moved fast into finding some solutions quickly especially around the time square area and I think that the story of your your first project and the starting of your organization common ground. I'm going to show this picture which is a building that you completely transformed it had looks something like that image we saw before in Times Square and once you tell us the story. Oh this is the first of the housing developments that we undertook and it was a building that was in bankruptcy on forty Third Ave. and we had about seventeen hundred building code violations. And um but it also represented really important housing that I couldn't bear to see disappear. And so there are about 200 elderly and mentally ill people living in this building with about 700 rooms and they called it sorrows their sorrows. Yeah. And uh I think it just saw it as a design challenge interestingly and uh how would you design the units to be decent in terms of you know for efficiency units instead of these cubicles how to design the public spaces to be inviting and support uh real community life how to design the management system so it would be a safe and supported place. Um what kind of social services would be needed. So we integrated health and mental health and employment services and also just really looking at the scale of the building and you know the uh I think appropriate wariness about too much concentration of um of of any one thing and the need for diversity. Uh we basically designed a tenancy that was about half workforce housing particularly for people working in the arts and theater and the other half for existing tenants who were there and uh the homeless and so over time that that that mix really gave it a very you know kind of lovely and interesting flavor. It's interesting that you could take someone a community of people off the street and put them into this kind of housing and and I know that common ground once you had the triumph of converting this building and we're of course fast forwarding very fast here that that I know that that was an effort of great passion and love to to take a building like that find the funding go through all the loopholes and all the bureaucracy just to get something like this to happen which you did and then went on to it to do this with a number of other buildings in New York. Yeah about um about 3000 apartments in New York City. It's amazing how many buildings I actually remember that you took me to see one of them once and we walk through it. It was the uh the Prince George ballroom which was a magnificent but quite derelict old building. And one of the things I remember so vividly is that we walked through and the people there just said hello. You knew them all like you knew who these people were. They were people to you. They were people who had come into this community and and you were able to support in this way and it was really touching to me that it wasn't uh it wasn't a it's like what you were really part of their success and theirs and their story is very much a uh. And this is there's nothing magic about this. I mean people can can do this put you know strong communities together and people um I think we always found respond to you know the quality of the environment and the way they're treated. So anyway. You did . You did really think about the environment. I know through out the story of those three thousand units you brought in architects to work on it not just you know sort of in the architect you could get but really blue chip architects that would that would help you with these projects. Well I find a lot of architects really went into the profession in order to create that kind of transformational change in communities and people's lives. And so we just had wonderful support from great firms. Yeah I know you worked with Bob Stern you worked with any ad you worked with. Um Cook was Fox Alix steel trillion . Sorry. We're doing a building in Washington with them now . Some great firms. If if I mean I'm sure there are not many skeptics in the room but if if a skeptic were to approach you to say let's say why spend that money on design you need beds you know you need. You need food you need clothing why would you spend money where you know maybe that's not the priority. And I'm playing devil's advocate here but I'm sure that that's something you've encountered . Well our focus has always been on what's the real solution to the problem and what's the what's the end game. And having decent places to live it really does involve good design and it's something that matters to the community too. I mean we all are familiar with. Not in my backyard sentiment. Well we can do a lot to erase those if the buildings themselves are well designed and well managed. I think we've all seen public housing built in the 50s and 60s and wondered how we let that happen because it wasn't just bad for the people to live there . It was bad for the people who had to deal with it in their neighborhoods. And so good design works for everyone. I think that that's a lesson that you know we had to learn the hard way . Well you've also proven that it's more expensive to not deal with the problem in terms of you know hospitalizations in terms of other emergency care it's cost the taxpayer more money. Yeah . And this has been proven in just about every city that's done a cost study. And uh one of the tragedies and one of the opportunities and talk about the nexus of design and business is we spend as a society so much more to maintain people in homelessness than it costs to actually build housing or build the systems to keep people in their housing and move them quickly back into housing than it would to just continue to let the problem linger. Most of the costs are in the health care system but also in criminal justice and shelter . So I know that you've evolved through this trajectory of thinking about homelessness and that you've you've turned your attention to something that goes beyond just the bricks and mortar. And in fact you've started a new nonprofit around that idea and you sent me a picture that of I'll share with everyone here that I know was a bit of a catalyst for you see if we can pull off the next slide so tell us about this. Well this actually is uh a shot of um a woman named Sarah who lived on the streets of Times Square for many years. And it was very much a turning point when you think about you know the work we had been doing building housing and renovating housing. But we were not focused on necessarily uh what's it gonna take to solve the problem. We were you know we'd created and we're replicating um an important part of a solution. But what sort of allowed me and my colleagues to tolerate the fact they were walking by people on the street all the time was we participating in this sort of fiction that people living on the street didn't want help. And it's interesting for people who spent their lives working on homelessness that you could actually believe that. But we came to find out was that mainly what you see on the street are people who don't want to be in shelters. And uh there's a big difference between wanting help getting into a stable place to live versus wanting to be in some kind of institution. So this woman Sarah who doesn't see you on the street for many years through having gotten admitted to the hospital ended up through a social worker wanting to move into the building and this is one of these not supposed to happen things that you know that you'd opted out of wanting any help and you'd seen her using her for many years. Yeah and she never spoke you know. I always say Yeah can we offer you any help and you know no response but um I I left her my business card I guess and so and she ended up in the hospital uh social worker called me and said I understand you're her next of kin. I didn't know who she was talking about . Mm hmm. Um but it was it was just you were next of kin. Yeah well your as it ended up but the the real kind of crack in the uh the kind of the belief system was we have gotten this wrong . We've understood something completely opposite from reality. We thought people didn't want help what they wanted was help with housing not a ride to a shelter. And so out of this sense of um what else is going on in the street. We really began flipping our activity to what will it take to build a system to get people off the street instead of simply focusing on the bricks and mortar side of the equation. And over the course of about three years we sort of built a whole uh you know organization within the organization that was focused on what's the whole pattern of homelessness. Why are people becoming homeless. Why are people remit remaining on the street. What are the pathways out. And one of the kind of amazing things we discovered and this proved to be true in every other city we've worked since was that you typically weren't even considered eligible for housing for any assisted housing if you're living on the street because you weren't in the system. And then if you actually looked at what it would take to get from a situation of this woman into a stable place to live. Um you you need a P HD in housing you know that people would be required to have original documents and be able to somehow get themselves to different you know kind of lease reviews and psychosocial examinations all of the agencies and steps in these processes I suppose had some logic to the individual agency but it was completely impossible to negotiate for some vulnerable person living on the street. So we started seeing this as a design challenge in itself. How could you create a user centered design for getting people housed for helping people avoid homelessness. And so gradually that actually became the focus of a larger and larger team and we split off to become a national organization with a really different theory of change five years ago which is housing is vital but in the context of a well-designed designed housing system that keeps vulnerable people housed and helps them to get back into housing if they fall through the cracks. It's a great story and it it really does tell you about when you think about these kinds of problems and shift the lens just a bit and see them somewhat differently . You see that it's not just about breaking it into the tiniest parts but to understand the whole system and how these things are not working or working and where they're dysfunctional and I know throughout this new organization community solutions. You started a campaign that's now gone national with the hundred thousand homes and I am just going to move to the next slide. By the way we don't have a time clock here so maybe we can just keep talking. I'll say that about the 100000 Homes Campaign which has now concluded. But the idea was how do we teach other communities to understand these as design problems and that their systems exist as fragmented parts and not really elegantly designed systems to help vulnerable people and so this this notion that we needed to actually kind of spread a new way of thinking informed the launch of something called 100000 homes campaign that over the course of four years worked with 186 communities and help them to house more than one hundred and five thousand long term homeless people including more than 31000 veterans who are homeless. And this is this is why you have a lot of hope about the future of this issue. These are communities who basically had the resources they needed but didn't know how to put them together well or how to connect them to the people who needed them the most. And so by training people in all of these communities to work as teams to use person specific data to help connect people to the housing resources they needed to help organizations form more of a seamless kind of system. We're able to show that this is an issue that you can really make enormous progress on. And we're looking at a picture now of the gentleman who was the one hundred thousand person who is housed in Arlington Virginia and down but it is there you see it you know the enemy is you know the these bureaucratic processes that leave people spinning. So just teaching the Arlington community to get their processes down to some manageable steps and to really focus on the urgency of getting people like Alvin York housed as opposed to complying with rules that kind of grew up and splintered off from any logical you know kind of vision of how we problem solve has been the real essence of these changes that we've been spreading and we're now in the midst of something called the Zero 2016 campaign and we are doing something actually more ambitious with these brave communities. Seventy five of them who are involved which is getting them to a sustainable zero like what will it look like to actually end chronic homelessness and end veteran homelessness in these communities and know everyone by name and have a high performing housing system where all the parts can act. And there is a sense of urgency again. And we have about seven communities that are already at a sustainable zero on veteran homelessness and many more will be there by the end of this year. Well they've given us this time clock now a flashing light. And I I'm sure there's so much more to talk to you about. In fact I have a whole stack of questions. But during the break Roseanne we'll be there. I just would like to say that you've you've done something which is to think about this in a larger context with such empathy and to take on such difficult problems. And I just want to say thank you for what you do. ROSANNE HAGGERTY keep an eye on her. Thank you .

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Bloomberg Businessweek Design 2016: Rosanne Haggerty

Rosanne Haggerty is the president and CEO of Community Solutions, an internationally recognized leader in developing innovative strategies to end homelessness and strengthen low-income communities. Community Solutions works throughout the U.S., using data and design insights to solve the complex problems facing some of the country’s most vulnerable residents. The organization is leading large-scale change initiatives, including the Zero: 2016 campaign to end chronic and veteran homelessness in the US, as well as neighborhood-based partnerships that bring together local residents and institutions to change the conditions that produce homelessness and perpetuate poverty. Earlier in her career, Haggerty founded Common Ground Community, a pioneer in the development of supportive housing and research-based practices that end homelessness.