Eight Communities Get $12 Million Each to Pair Street Outreach With Housing. Everyone Else Gets the Press Release.

On Monday morning Huntington Mayor Patrick Farrell stood up and said the city had won a piece of something new. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had announced it the Friday before: a SAMHSA program called STREETS, short for Safety Through Recovery, Engagement, and Evidence-based Treatment and Support. It puts $96 million over four years into eight places, $3 million a year each, to build coordinated street-level care for people who are homeless and living with addiction or serious mental illness.

A four-year pilot in eight places is a promise to those eight places and a press release for everyone else.

That is not an insult to the eight. Huntington, Montgomery County in Ohio, the Cherokee Nation, Detroit, Houston, Miami-Dade County, Robeson County in North Carolina and Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana are all places where people are sleeping outside tonight, and $12 million over four years is real money. Farrell’s version, called HARBOR, aims to replace a fragmented system so nobody has to navigate five offices alone: outreach workers who go to people instead of waiting for them, and law enforcement, health care and housing partners at one table. Farrell described the goal as “meeting them where they are” and said, “We know that that cycle, we have to break it.” Farrell also said the city should keep reaching out to people who refuse help, without letting them live in ways that harm the rest of the city. That last line is where these programs usually get hard, because the rest of the city has a vote.

Nothing has been spent yet. The city council must approve the agreement. The city also needs signed agreements, which the paperwork calls memorandums of understanding, with partners including Marshall Health Network, Valley Health and Harmony House. Farrell hopes to make the first draw of money by the end of October, and was plain about what the federal government is doing: learning whether this works. The program grows beyond the eight communities only if the lessons are good.

Which is why the details matter more than the headline. A coordinated system is a set of signed promises about who answers the phone, who holds the bed, and who follows up with the person who said yes on Tuesday. Outreach is cheap to start and expensive to finish. The part that decides whether HARBOR is a program or a slogan is the one the announcement does not describe: how many housing units exist on the day an outreach worker hears “yes.”

If you work in a city that did not make the list, you still have a move this week. Phoenix and the rest of Arizona are not among the eight, and federal officials say they are watching to learn what works. A place that can show its own numbers is better placed. Start counting: how many people your street team contacts, how many it gets into treatment, how many into housing, and how many are still there at 90 days. A case manager who can say that sentence with numbers is worth more to a grant application than a map of need.

A person who says yes to an outreach worker needs a bed that same day. The grant will be judged by whether Huntington has one.