Bay Area Activist Enlists Tech Giants to Help End Homelessness

What do CEOs dream about? Beachfront getaways? Private jets? A hole-in-one?

Chuck Robbins, chief executive of technology giant Cisco, dreamed about homelessness. “I had people that I knew, very close to me, who were actually homeless in the dream,” Robbins recalls.

This was years before the Covid-19 pandemic, but homelessness was already on the rise in Silicon Valley. Robbins wanted to do something, so he asked Sam Liccardo, the mayor of San Jose, Cisco’s home base, for advice. “He sent Jen to my house,” Robbins says.

Jen is Jennifer Loving, the longtime executive director of a Silicon Valley nonprofit called Destination: Home. She, too, had a dream. Loving had spent decades trying to help homeless people, with mixed results. Providing them with temporary shelter, food, health care, and counseling was insufficient. “The answer to homelessness is a home,” she says. Her dream was to build homes — lots of them — expressly for homeless people.

Accompanied by her teenage daughter, Loving went to see Robbins and his wife, Page, at their home. “It was a really authentic and beautiful conversation that went on for hours,” she remembers.

“What do you really need from me?” Robbins asked, finally.

“I need you to be my partner, and I need you to help me raise a billion dollars,” Loving replied.

Not long after, Cisco pledged $50 million over five years to Destination: Home. It was the largest charitable donation ever to fight homelessness. Behind the big check was a call to action. “We encourage other tech companies ... to actually step in and help,” Robbins said when announcing the gift in 2018.

They did, and not just in Silicon Valley. Apple donated $50 million to support Destination: Home, part of a $2.5 billion commitment to ease California’s housing crisis. Microsoft pledged $500 million in loans and donations to address homelessness and develop affordable housing in and around Seattle. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sent $100 million, with no strings attached, to 24 charities across the United States to help the homeless. Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, pledged $66 million to combat homelessness in San Francisco.

Loving was hopeful. Operating with a small staff and budget, Destination: Home had already made strides toward ending homelessness in Santa Clara County. The grants from Cisco and Apple accelerated progress. Villas on the Park, a landmark 83-unit apartment project in downtown San Jose, opened in March; it provided support services as well as new homes to people who once slept in shelters or cars. Chuck Robbins and Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, stopped by to take a look.

Then came Covid-19.

“Homelessness is always heartbreaking,” Loving says. “But now it’s so much worse. We aren’t sleeping. It’s traumatic and impossible. I’m not complaining. It’s just true.”

Stubborn Problem

Photo by Harry Who

Homelessness is a really hard problem. Even when a leader like Loving gets things right — developing a strategy, raising money, finding the right partners, and building political support, all of which has happened in Santa Clara County — success is not guaranteed. In 2019, the last time the county surveyed its homeless population, it found 9,706 people on the streets or in temporary shelters. The number is surely higher now because of Covid-19.

Charities have been trying to solve homelessness for nearly 150 years. The New York City Rescue Mission, the nation’s oldest homeless shelter, opened in 1872. (It was known as the “Helping Hand for Men.”) Hobos rode freight trains during the Great Depression. The homeless population grew in the 1960s and 1970s as state psychiatric hospitals released people with mental illness into society and veterans coming home from Vietnam struggled to find work.

A pastor named Fred Hilst — he was Jennifer Loving’s uncle — was one of those who stepped up. The Biblical Tabernacle, a church he had started in Venice, Calif., opened its doors to anyone needing a place to stay. His family lived there, too, and Loving often visited as a child. “I remember serving Thanksgiving dinner or helping to pass out sandwiches,” she says. She went to a summer camp for homeless kids started by her uncle, where her grandma was a nurse.

By the time Loving had graduated from college and earned a master’s degree in psychology, programs to help the homeless had become professionalized. Charities supported by governments and philanthropy opened shelters and soup kitchens, providing a suite of services, including drug and mental-health counseling, access to telephones and computers, job-hunting advice, even classes in money management — everything, in theory, that homeless people needed to address their problems and get back on their feet. Loving joined one such charity, then called EHC Lifebuilders, in 1997.

“We had built an industrial complex around managing homelessness,” she says.

It didn’t work. Shelters were necessary but insufficient. They came with rules to maintain order — no weapons, drugs, or alcohol; no abuse of staff, residents, visitors, or property; no derogatory comments about race or ethnicity; no unacceptable levels of personal hygiene. Not surprisingly, many homeless people struggled to comply.

“I challenge anyone to live in a shelter and tell me how well you can bootstrap yourself out of the situation,” Loving says. “We spent a decade or two spinning our wheels on the shelter model.”

“There was a lot of money being invested in homelessness, and homeless numbers were not going down,” says Joel John Roberts, chief executive of People Assisting the Homeless, known as PATH, which operates shelters and builds permanent housing for the poor.

New Approach

DESTINATION: HOME

Philip Mangano, who was the homelessness czar in the George W. Bush administration, gets credit for developing a new approach, called housing first. Mangano, who had run shelters in his home state of Massachusetts, found that people needed a roof over their head and food on the table before they could attend to issues like substance abuse. It was a 180-degree shift from past practice.

“When you ask homeless people what they want, they never say a pill, a program, or a protocol,” Mangano once said. “They say they want a place to live.”

Inspired, in part, by promises of support from Washington, in the early 2000s, cities including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco produced 10-year plans to end homelessness. Santa Clara County created a plan, too, and eventually political leaders decided they needed a new organization to make it happen. That led to the creation of Destination: Home in 2008.

As executive director, Loving committed to the housing first philosophy. Her priority would be permanent homes, not shelter beds, even though she’d come from the world of shelters. She also embraced an idea known as “collective impact,” which she learned about in a 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article by consultants John Kania and Mark Kramer of FSG. They argued that large-scale social change cannot be achieved by the “isolated intervention of individual organizations”; instead, it requires coordination among government, business, and nonprofits. Critics say collective-impact models are too top-down and consultant driven, but studies have found that, when executed well, they can drive meaningful change.

Collective impact differs from a collaboration or partnership, Loving says. “There are problems for which no one is naturally responsible,” she says. “So how do you form a team? You need a backbone entity, a common data system, shared metrics and goals, and a continuous feedback loop.”

Destination: Home provided the backbone for the campaign to end homelessness, setting goals, building coalitions, and tracking progress. It started small and has stayed that way; it has fewer than a dozen employees. “On our own, Destination: Home is irrelevant,” Loving says. “The collective-impact model is the game changer.”

To begin with, Destination: Home promised to find housing for 1,000 chronically homeless people. The pledge was part of the 100,000 Homes Campaign, a national effort created by Community Solutions, a New York group, to set public goals and deadlines to reduce homelessness. For Destination: Home, the pledge was a way to get partners aligned, to rally the broader community, and to prove that housing first was workable; the groups fell short of their goal, getting 850 people into housing, but they were encouraged by their progress.

‘A Model Solution’

Next, Loving needed to show that building apartments for the chronically homeless makes fiscal sense.

A Republican county supervisor, Mike Wassermen, asked for a study, so Destination: Home commissioned a report, “Home Not Found,” which it said was “the largest and most comprehensive body of information” to analyze the costs of homelessness at that time.

The findings were eye-opening: Taxpayers were spending about $83,000 a year per person to pay for temporary housing, food, health care, and policing, among other things, for a small number of persistently homeless people. Providing permanent housing and support services was cheaper.

These efforts laid the groundwork for a breakthrough: a ballot measure, known as Measure A, that would permit Santa Clara County to sell $950 million in bonds to finance housing for extremely poor people. Supporters of Measure A, led by Destination: Home, built a broad coalition; they raised $2.3 million for the campaign from, among others, philanthropist John Sobrato, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Ben Spero, a venture capitalist who is now chair of the Destination: Home board.

Persuading voters to raise their own property taxes to help the poor is no easy task, so advocates relied on data as well as moral appeals. “Why spend the money, reactively, on emergency rooms and jails when you can keep people housed?” Spero said. The measure passed by the slimmest of margins, getting 67.7 percent of the vote, just above the two-thirds required.

Soon after, Measure A began delivering results. A few apartments were built, and hundreds more were put into a pipeline. Local opposition was inevitable, but Loving, her political allies, and the developers who built the projects got used to the nastiness. “Some meetings are worse than others. I’ve had police escorts,” Loving says. “I’m pretty thick-skinned.”

Two years after the passage of the bond issue, the San Jose Mercury News said in an editorial: “Measure A is starting to fulfill the promise advocates made to voters in 2016 that it could turn a county with one of the worst homeless problems in the nation into one providing a model solution.”

Meaningful Progress

HARRY WHO

Success bred success. By the time Loving went to see Chuck Robbins, she was able to talk about Destination: Home’s track record. Federal, state, county, and city governments were all working with housing developers to get projects built. Providers of services like health care and drug counseling would come onsite to help residents. Destination: Home was the glue that holds the pieces together.

The grants from Cisco and Apple provided flexibility. Private money can be used to acquire land, to fund a project before it secures government loans, even to help developers gain knowledge and skills they need to serve the homeless. By the end of 2019, Destination: Home and its partners reported that they had found homes for 14,132 formerly homeless people. They have built more than 200 new units of housing, and another 2,900 are in the pipeline. This is meaningful progress.

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Yet homelessness persists. The trouble is, new people become homeless all the time, especially now, and especially in places where housing costs are growing faster than wages — that is, in virtually every big city and well-to-do suburb in America. While homelessness across the United States fell slightly during the 2010s, the National Alliance to End Homelessness — an organization formed, it must be noted, in 1983 — says the Covid-19 crisis “has the potential to diminish or completely wipe out these modest gains.”

When Covid-19 struck, Destination: Home and a broad array of partners moved swiftly to keep as many people as possible in their homes. Together, they raised $37 million to provide emergency financial help to those in need. Santa Clara County, the city of San Jose, and Cisco, which made a $10 million anchor contribution, were the biggest donors. More than 20,000 people sought help; so far, 4,000 people have received cash payments, typically $1,000 a person, up to $2,000 per family.

“We want to help as many people as we can, but the demand is huge,” laments David Low, director of policy and communications at Destination: Home.

Still, Santa Clara county leaders are proud that they have been able to come together during a time when America sometimes seems to be splintering apart. “Whether you were a Republican or Democrat, we agreed that homelessness was wrong and bad,” says Cindy Chavez, president of the county board of supervisors.

At the center remains Loving, with her deep roots in the community. Chavez calls Loving “an extraordinary leader.” Chuck Robbins says, “Her passion and ability to create change are an inspiration.” Ben Spero says she has a true, mission-driven orientation: “She just wants to make a difference.” Joel John Roberts says, “She gives everybody else credit.” True to form, Loving tells me: “If you’re giving credit, it does not go to Destination: Home.”

And so the work goes on. Loving has not lost hope. She still believes in the collective-impact approach and says it is “absolutely replicable” with strong political leadership. Nor has the Covid-19 crisis rattled her belief that the solution to homelessness remains clear: build more homes that even the poorest of the poor can afford.