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Just a few blocks from 419 Emancipation Ave. — the site of an upcoming service hub for homeless people in Houston — dozens of people sleep on the streets, including Jerry Wayne Griffin.
He said he hasn't had housing for about a year-and-a-half. He described his time on the streets as "hell."
"I’ve seen some of my best friends pass away," Griffin said. "I’ve seen people get robbed. I’ve seen people get raped. These streets ain’t for nobody."
He said he's looking forward to the service hub, where he hopes to "reconstruct my way of thinking" so he "can be an adult."
"I’m going to be the first one at the door," he said. "They’re going to help you with shelter. They're going to help you with a job. They’re going to help you get your life together — and that’s what I want."
He won't have to wait long. According to the city's housing department, officials expect to open the facility — which the city purchased last year for $16 million — before mid-June.
Inside the facility
Through the doors at 419 Emancipation, people will pass a security station and then enter a triage area.
"Their care will begin almost immediately because you’ll have professionals engaging them right here," said Houston public safety director Larry Satterwhite.
A large cafeteria is flanked by what will be "a busy kitchen," serving three meals to more than 220 people per day, as well as two stories of residential rooms.
Seventy-four rooms are ready for occupants. Each one has three beds, a set of lockers and a bathroom. There's space for extra beds, so the capacity could expand from 222 to 320.
The building has been used as a shelter for women and children in the past. More recently, it was used as a facility for unaccompanied migrant children.
For homeless people, the accommodations are "not what they have right now on the streets," Satterwhite said.
"Quite honestly, not what they have in a lot of other facilities," he added. "I mean, they’re getting a little bit — a lot more privacy here and a lot more access to things that they normally would not, which is, again, we hope an enticement for them to stay and stay with the program until they’re ready to graduate out of here into something better."
Among the enticements: recreation. Inside, multiple pool tables, a foosball table and televisions wait for residents. Outside, there's a volleyball net and basketball court.
‘We are people who do treatment'
There are already about 2,000 emergency shelter beds in Harris County, according to Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research. Even with an additional 570 transitional housing beds, that's not enough for the entire unhoused population, which last year consisted of at least 1,800 in shelters and at least 1,200 on the street, according to the annual point-in-time count by the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County.
But the new 222-bed facility isn't solely intended to fill that gap — according to Wayne Young, CEO of the Harris Center, the local state-designated authority for mental health and intellectual or developmental disability services. The organization is partnering with the city to run the shelter for the next three years, expected to cost up to $39 million.
"Frankly, when I talked to the city, I said, ‘If you want somebody to run a shelter, that’s probably not us, right? We are people who do treatment,'" Young said.
In many shelters, people come for the night and have to leave during the day.
"Our goal is that they don’t leave," Young said. "Our goal is that they stay here. They engage in therapeutic programming. We connect them with the housing professionals. We connect them with workforce development and that they are here receiving services all day long."
The program staff includes psychiatrists, nurses, recovery coaches and recreational therapists as well as housing and employment specialists.
The hub is also intended to be low barrier relative to other service facilities, allowing pets and couples.
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The city's housing director, Mike Nichols, said this facility will be a front door to what is already a robust homeless response network.
"Houston really has led the nation in how to deal with homelessness through housing individuals," Nichols said.
Before becoming head of Houston's housing department, Nichols served as CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless, which spearheaded the region's success in reducing the county's estimated unhoused population from more than 8,000 in 2011 to about 3,000 in recent years, primarily by moving people from the streets into permanent housing.
But, Nichols said, there are gaps in the region's housing-first framework.
"The weakness was that people had to wait on the street while they wait for housing," and many people need services to address mental health or substance abuse challenges before they can move into permanent housing, he said. "What 419 does is it begins to fill that hole."
‘Aspirational' goal to ‘end street homelessness' in Houston is a moving target
The center is a linchpin in Mayor John Whitmire's initiative to "end street homelessness" in Houston.
Nichols initially hoped to accomplish that goal — defined as moving everybody into housing within 90 days of them becoming homeless — by the end of this year.
But the initiative hasn't met its $70 million annual funding goal. And Nichols hopes the facility will move 750 people from the streets into housing per year, which is lower than previous estimates.
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The administration now says the goal to end homelessness may be attained in 2027.
"It was aspirational," Nichols said. "It was to get us moving, to get us going forward. And look what we got. I mean, it is amazing. Funding is always a difficult thing, and funding will be changing all the time. ... The fact that we got here is quite remarkable with the funding."
The long-term funding plan for the facility is murky. The first three years of operation are funded by one-time federal recovery dollars awarded after Hurricane Beryl and the derecho wind event in 2024. Going forward, officials have pointed to a mix of possible funding sources from the local, state and federal levels.
Even if Whitmire's ambitious initiative to functionally end street homelessness meets its goal in 2027 — by moving everyone from the streets into housing within 90 days of becoming homeless — the accomplishment could face a challenge in public perception.
"I would say when people think of ending homelessness, they think no one becomes homeless, and this is obviously a very different definition of that," said Andrew Sullivan, an assistant professor in the University of Central Florida's school of public administration. "There’s definitely this disconnect between what maybe it means in homelessness for a policymaker or even a service provider and just the general public."
That said, the new facility — as a low-barrier service hub with wraparound services — fills a gap that's "definitely a major problem across the country," he added.
Not everyone will go willingly
The other part of Whitmire's initiative is a ramp-up in ticketing for violations of the city's sidewalk rules — including in the East Downtown and Greater East End areas, which saw an expansion of the rules after the facility was announced.
The police department issued about 3,000 citations to people blocking sidewalks across the city last year, marking a 17% increase from the year before. About 2,000 of those tickets were issued in the second half of the year, marking a surge in enforcement, according to an analysis of municipal court records obtained through a public records request by Houston Public Media and the University of Texas at Austin’s Media Innovation Group.
This area will see more enforcement because neighboring community members are concerned about this facility attracting more homeless people to the area, according to Satterwhite, the city's public safety director. Some even launched an opposition campaign when it was announced late last year.
"To the degree that when somebody is in violation, we’re going to have to, you know, say, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t do this,'" Satterwhite said. "We want to make sure everybody feels safe. So, you’ll see a stepped-up presence in this area to ensure that that remains so."
RELATED: Where is Houston Police Department ramping up citations of homeless people?
Even with that threat, not everybody will go to the service hub willingly.
A few blocks away in the East Downtown area where dozens of people live on the street, another man — whose nameHouston Public Mediais withholding — said he would refuse to go to the shelter.
"I don’t need to be standing in a — sleeping in a facility when I own literally everything. I’m literally prince of heaven," the man said as he waited in line for a charity meal provided by a church group.
Among the most vulnerable people on the streets are those dealing with mental health challenges that make it difficult to seek shelter and move into permanent housing.
During the annual point-in-time count by the Coalition for the Homeless last year, over half of the people living on the streets reported having a mental health disorder — and about 74% of that group said their condition impaired their ability to keep a job or live independently.
The upcoming facility is designed to serve them — if they'll accept the help.
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