AUSTIN, Texas — After a year’s worth of collaboration with the City of Austin and several sessions with stakeholders, shelters, and street outreach organization, a local nonprofit now has an action plan to end homelessness.

The Ending Community Homeless Coalition, or ECHO, said the action plan is a blueprint with strategies the City of Austin can use. The goal in their words is to make homelessness “rare, brief, and non-recurring.”  

The plan outlines five key components. They are offering outreach services and shelters, providing housing and support services, creating an effective response system, addressing disparities, and last, building public and private partnerships. ECHO’s leaders said the five elements must work together to make the future better for the 7,000 people living without a home in Austin and Travis County. 

Scaling up resources comes with costs, and ECHO wants to double the $30 million budget currently responding to homelessness. 

“The current population experiencing homelessness is having to cycle in and out of emergency rooms and hospitals, unnecessary hospitalization, getting arrested and going in and out of jail, and that cycle costs taxpayers upwards of $200,000 per top client each year,” said Ann Howard, executive director of ECHO. “That’s millions of dollars to have the ineffective system we currently have. We’d like to turn that around and create the efficiency and streamline access from street to housing.”

The action plan lists many current initiatives, challenges, proposed actions, and desired outcomes for each component. Investments would also come from different sources. One initiative ECHO is looking at is the “pay for success” model to provide supportive housing. 

“If you can create a program that will reduce utilization of expensive services like hospitalization and jail, the local government will pay back the private investors who help you scale up that housing. That’s where the name ‘pay for success’ comes in,” Howard said. 

On April 26, the Austin City Council will vote whether or not to endorse this action plan. ECHO hopes an approval will motivate departments to look at their response to homelessness, as well as make an impact on budgetary decisions.