Housing-Focused Responses to Unsheltered Homelessness: Spotlight on Atlanta, GA

About this Series

Communities across the country are grappling with how to respond to unsheltered homelessness. This spotlight on the Atlanta Continuum of Care is one in a series that aims to uplift housing-focused approaches. Each of the four communities featured in this series are implementing successful strategies to reduce unsheltered homelessness by providing and expediting permanent housing access to people living outside.  

To complete each spotlight, the Homelessness Research Institute at the National Alliance to End Homelessness spoke with 5–7 local Continuum of Care staff and homeless services providers, reviewed documentation outlining homelessness response policies and procedures, and analyzed Point-in-Time Count and other local data. This limited approach is not intended to be a full evaluation of each community’s homelessness response, but simply a way to highlight components of their work that other communities and Continuums of Care may learn from.  

Researchers should continue to explore best practices in other communities and barriers—like the criminalization of homelessness—that make it harder for unsheltered people to access permanent housing.   

This report focuses on Atlanta’s successful approaches to unsheltered homelessness, as well as system-wide efforts to improve its affordable housing stock to get people off the streets.  

About the Atlanta Continuum of Care

The Atlanta Continuum of Care (CoC) is a partnership of 170 nonprofit, government, and other community organizations dedicated to ending homelessness, led by Partners for HOME. Over the past several years, the number of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Atlanta fluctuated on an upward trajectory, climbing to over 1000 people counted at a single point in time in January 2024 (figure 1).  

In 2023, the Atlanta CoC’s Community Plan to Reduce and End Homelessness named “Reduce Unsheltered Homelessness in the City of Atlanta” as its top strategic goal through 2028. Progress toward this goal is underway, with work proceeding along two coordinated tracks: 

1. Initiatives to close encampments by providing housing and services to their residents, and 
2. Broader efforts to build housing capacity and increase access to housing for all people experiencing homelessness, especially for the most vulnerable.  

Since 2022, the CoC has already housed 1,850 households through its unsheltered homelessness response initiatives alone. Strong commitments from city leadership and close coordination with the CoC are bringing significant private and public investments in permanent housing to bear. This political will enables the CoC to resolve unsheltered homelessness with housing more frequently and creates more opportunities to scale their efforts. 

Comprehensive and Coordinated Street Outreach in the CoC

Comprehensive housing-focused street outreach forms the backbone to the CoC’s response to unsheltered homelessness across its jurisdiction. The CoC set program model standards each provider should follow, with flexibility to adapt their approach to suit their strengths. Street outreach staff work diligently to build relationships with unhoused people and pursue warm handoffs to ensure they’re receiving the services they need and want. 

Aniz Inc., one of the organizations funded for street outreach, sets up teams so that a case manager works with the same 20 or so people throughout the process from unsheltered homelessness through RRH. This helps build and sustain trust throughout a person’s housing journey. When this arrangement is not possible, warm handoffs and open communication across outreach and housing agencies are key to facilitate smooth transitions to housing.  

Aniz has a close to 100% housing retention rate. Staff attribute their success to employing people with lived expertise, bringing a creative and giving mindset to the work, and fostering relationships with property managers to properly support tenants in housing. 

An organization called Mini City is also a key partner. They facilitate documentation access like photo identification and Social Security cards for people experiencing homelessness in Atlanta. Their partnership significantly reduces the burden on case managers to assist with these tasks.  

Productive Local Partnerships Including Law Enforcement 

Partnerships with the City of Atlanta, including the Atlanta Police Department, have helped to reduce punitive responses to unsheltered homelessness. This partnership meant that no people were arrested during the CoC’s encampment closure efforts.  

The City of Atlanta, however, does have a ban on camping or sleeping outside. The Atlanta Police Department has a specific team that goes out to encampments. Police will notify the CoC if someone moves into an encampment site that has been closed so that the CoC can send street outreach to engage with them. City policy directs police to seek alternatives to arresting people, like sending them to a diversion center.  

Partnerships across systems have helped mitigate the harms that people experiencing unsheltered homelessness often feel from law enforcement responses. Still, the CoC does not have the capacity to house everyone sleeping outside, and punitive policies like the camping ban are still in place. Even if people are not arrested, they may still endure unnecessary hardship, like intimidation and forced relocation—which can strain their relationships with street outreach workers.  

Real-Time Data on Unsheltered Homelessness

Data is central to the Atlanta CoC’s unsheltered homelessness response. It informs the day-to-day work of individual case managers as well as ongoing program improvement and broader system planning. To improve their data, the Atlanta CoC focuses on the following areas: 

• Coverage: All street outreach teams report data into the local Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), including participant engagement and detailed case notes. This improves the CoC’s understanding of the unsheltered population’s size, scope, and specific needs – an understanding that communities often lack. The impact is clear: more people are “active” in street outreach projects in the Atlanta CoC than in shelters. 
• Quality: Regular case conferencing, By-Name List maintenance, and a culture of cross-agency collaboration make the availability and accuracy of real-time data a reality. Agencies and HMIS leads regularly run data quality reports, including timeliness of data entry, to ensure there are no gaps or inaccuracies. 
• Equity: Data improves equity in the community’s unsheltered homelessness response, both for the people who are being served, as well as the areas of the city that are covered. For example, geographic information system (GIS) software helps to map public reports of homelessness. This data is used to inform where resources like street outreach should be prioritized, in a manner that serves the community equitably based on identified needs and other factors. 
• Regular use of HMIS: Case workers routinely use HMIS to identify the needs and challenges of the people they’re working with and to stay on track towards housing goals. Data points like housing referrals are all tracked in HMIS and monitored by Partners for HOME to inform system improvements. Regular use of data encourages improved data quality, creating a virtuous cycle that improves participant success. For example, a street outreach organization working with an encampment can easily find out in HMIS which residents are veterans. This allows them to connect the residents with Veterans Affairs programs they may be eligible for.
• Performance improvement: Quantitative indicators — like housing move-ins and retention — are regularly publicized. CoC and street outreach staff report using these metrics alongside qualitative feedback to continually improve their work. 

System-wide Efforts to Improve Housing Access for All Unhoused Atlantans

Data is central to the Atlanta CoC’s unsheltered homelessness response. It informs the day-to-day work of individual case managers as well as ongoing program improvement and Encampment Response initiatives are one facet of the CoC’s work. Over the past few years, Partners for HOME has focused on building out the CoC’s capacity to serve unhoused Atlantans equitably, engage CoC members in designing and implementing policies, and scale up housing resources. 

Effective Coordinated Entry

An efficient Coordinated Entry (CE) system helps people access resources through the homelessness response system. Now, 180 staff across the CoC — from front desk staff at emergency shelters and other community organizations to street outreach workers and hotline administrators — are trained CE assessors. The CoC’s goal is for people to be connected with a CE access point or case management team within 48 hours of being identified as experiencing homelessness.  

Population-specific Efforts 

People who are highly vulnerable due to medical or mental health needs or age, as well as special populations like veterans, young people, and families, are prioritized for housing. CoC staff maintain By-Name Lists for these populations to ensure staff have real-time information about who they are and their progress toward housing. The CoC’s goal is to uphold standards around housing vacancies, referrals, and matches to ensure providers complete each step in the housing process in a timely and equitable manner; for example, the 2023 Community Plan to Reduce and End Homelessness set a goal to rehouse families within 30 days of entering shelter. 

Listening to People with Lived Experience

Smart policies ensure that rules do not get in the way of serving people. These policies are possible because people with lived experience of homelessness are involved in many CoC committees, a Community Advisory Board, and a Youth Action Board. The Community Advisory Board weighs in on policy changes before the CoC governing council reviews them. Policy changes are also vetted by the CoC’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Committee. The CoC hosts focus groups with people with lived experience to elicit specific programmatic feedback.

Engagement in the CoC

One staff person attributed the vocal culture of the CoC to its ability to shift in real-time in response to people’s needs, and a sign that people trust their feedback will be acted upon:

“When you’re getting feedback, that’s a great sign that people feel empowered and feel like they have a way to communicate about what’s happening. We have community advocates who are strong and passionate — and we need them to help us do our work.”

Significant Investments in Housing Capacity

None of this work would be possible without the significant housing investments made by the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta CoC. Some comes from strategic efforts to marshal federal funding, like the Emergency Solutions Grant, HOME Investment Partnerships Program, Community Development Block Grant, and COVID-19 relief funds through the American Rescue Plan Act. But a lot comes from local funding efforts as well. For example: 

• The Mayor’s Rapid Housing Initiative allocated a $50 million Homeless Opportunity Bond and $17.5 million in Housing Trust Fund dollars to build 500 housing units by the end of 2025. The Initiative’s first completed housing project was built with repurposed shipping containers donated by the Georgia Emergency Management Agency on city-owned land. Other projects have been completed or are underway.
• The CoC’s HomeFirst Capital Campaign, a partnership with the City of Atlanta and the United Way Regional Commission on Homelessness, closed deals for 590 new PSH units, all located near public transit. This partnership leverages public and private funding and has exceeded its original goal of creating 550 units of PSH. 

Looking Ahead

Since 2017, the Atlanta CoC helped over 15,000 people move into housing (the chart below shows yearly move-in numbers). The biggest challenge moving forward is securing long-term, dedicated funding to sustain the progress made by strategic encampment response initiatives.  

For every one person housed in Atlanta, about 2.5 new people enter homelessness. The public may perceive increasing homelessness as a problem with the response system itself, but housing capacity does not exist to meet the need. Vacancies are rare in the CoC’s portfolio of more than 2,000 PSH and RRH units. Typically, only 15–20 new program spots open up each month. 

The CoC also lacks ongoing funding to bolster key components of the rehousing process. For example, during LIFT 2.0, the CoC contracted agencies to help unhoused people obtain vital documents and to form and maintain partnerships with landlords. These partnerships helped decrease the length of time someone experienced homelessness before moving into housing. Insufficient funding significantly hinders the CoC’s ability to continue to rehouse homeless Atlantans, and these resource challenges are compounded by the looming fiscal cliff of expiring pandemic-era aid. 

The CoC is working to establish a sustainable revenue source with state and local partners. Atlanta Rising, a $212 million campaign, will significantly expand housing and services resources by the end of 2025 and on an ongoing basis. This project will include 1800 more RRH openings and 500 new units of PSH to be paired with voluntary supportive services. Because Atlanta is hosting the FIFA 2026 World Cup, stakeholders know all eyes will be on downtown. The homelessness response system wants to offer real housing solutions to people to avoid the involuntary displacement that too often occurs in preparation for major events, so the CoC commits to rapidly rehouse all unsheltered individuals downtown by the end of 2025.  

Key Takeaways

• Close coordination between local leadership and a Continuum of Care can help to cement significant public and private investments in permanent housing.  
• Housing-oriented and well-coordinated street outreach across a Continuum of Care can accelerate move-in timelines from the point of initial encampment assessment.  
• Creating and maintaining accurate, real-time data allows a community to be strategic in their outreach and responsive to those most in need.  
• Transparency and flexibility of the CoC allow staff to trust their feedback will be incorporated, leading to stronger cooperation.  
• A combination of robust federal and local funding streams are essential to making progress in unsheltered homelessness and in creating new affordable housing.  

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the service providers and community leaders we spoke with in the Atlanta CoC for their time and partnership.