Partners working throughout Springfield and Sangamon County to address homelessness do so for a variety of reasons. The overwhelming motivation is compassion and concern for those in our community facing incredible hardships. Compassion and empathy are crucial elements of work that involves walking alongside neighbors who have endured trauma and helping them pursue stability and the lives they hope for.
Compassion drives this work, but research shows that inaction is actually more costly than proven solutions such as supportive housing. Heartland Continuum of Care data projects that providing supportive housing for every household on our Coordinated Entry list would cost about $5.2 million. This estimate, $15,000 for individuals and $20,000 for families, would cover rental assistance and intensive case management for 341 households as of Jan 1, 2025. While significant, the question remains: What is the cost when we do not help our neighbors achieve housing stability?
Heartland Continuum of Care’s Crisis response system seeks to create a system of care for community members facing housing instability through prevention/diversion, emergency shelter, street outreach and supportive housing. Efforts over the past three years to implement our community strategic plan to address homelessness have seen significant improvements to each one of these components. However, gaps remain and no component is funded at the scale necessary to reach our goal of creating a system where no household experiences homelessness for longer than a month.
When the Homeless Crisis Response System has inadequate resources and programs to meet local needs, the effects are felt throughout the community.
When prevention programs cannot meet demand, households often have to rely on emergency shelter. But shelters have fixed capacities and limited flexibility. They serve as a safeguard, offering temporary safety, but without enough supportive housing options, permanent supportive housing or rapid rehousing, shelter stays lengthen. This keeps shelters near or at capacity, creating difficult conditions that sometimes drive people to sleep outside or in vehicles. Street outreach teams then become lifelines, but their effectiveness is again limited by how quickly supportive housing opportunities become available. Each of these interventions have costs associated with them.
The failure to create an effective crisis response system has expensive costs as well. Malcolm Gladwell illustrated this nearly 20 years ago in The New Yorker article “Million Dollar Murray.” In the article, Gladwell tells the story of Murray Barr in Reno, Nevada. Murray experienced homelessness in Reno for several years and was considered a “super-utilizer” of the city’s emergency services. He cycled repeatedly through jails, emergency rooms and police encounters. Over a decade, the public spent an estimated $1 million on interventions that never helped him exit homelessness. As one officer put it, “It cost us $1 million dollars to not do something about Murray.”
Nationwide studies have done similar cost analyses demonstrating communities spend well more than $30,000 annually per person through shelter, health care and other crisis services without helping a person exit homelessness. There is a high cost to not ending homelessness.
A common critique is that homelessness grows despite increased funding. The reality is more complex. HUD reported a record high number of people experiencing homelessness in 2024 and an 18% increase over 2023 levels. In Springfield/Sangamon County, annual point in time count numbers gauging the number of people who were in shelter, transitional programs, or unsheltered on a given night dropped slightly from 2024 to 2025, while the number of people who touched our system of care increased by over 400.
More people are experiencing housing instability locally and across the country. While funding has increased in some programs and areas, it has not increased at a level to meet the growing need. The need is driven by many difficult economic and social realities. For example, local fair market rental values have increased 40% from 2020 to 2024 which puts an increased financial strain on households and increases the cost of helping households both stay in their home and exit homelessness into housing.
The goal of our community is to create the most effective system to support people in stable housing. The vision is to continually strengthen resources until prevention, keeping people housed in the first place, becomes the system’s largest component. To get there, we have to work together to reduce inflow into homelessness while increasing outflow by moving more people from shelters and streets into permanent housing.
The high cost of homelessness is measured not only in dollars but in human potential lost when people are left without stability. By investing in supportive housing and a stronger crisis response system, Springfield and Sangamon County can spend less on emergency services, reduce strain on community resources, and most importantly, give our neighbors the foundation they need to thrive.
Every Josh Sabo article ever:
“Give me a little more money and then I can finally fix homelessness!”
That’s a fair point, a big part of our work is trying to develop solutions with measurable successes despite gaps in the funding necessary to scale those solutions. We see examples of what is working elsewhere in the country and we work to create new programs that we believe will work for our community. Meanwhile increases in the cost of rent, groceries, housing, and healthcare continue to increase dramatically which pushes more people toward housing instability.