Nearly a decade ago, the Rockford area reduced homelessness for veterans to functional zero. A little over a year later, it hit the same milestone for chronically homeless adults.
Rockford was the first metropolitan area in the country to achieve that for both of those populations. Functional zero doesn't mean that homelessness ceases to exist, but rather that a system is in place to ensure it is "brief, rare, and non-recurring."
The northern Illinois city is of similar size to Peoria, where conversations about the unhoused have become supercharged in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's Grants Pass decision last year.
How Rockford did it
Rockford, Winnebago County, and Boone County joined Built for Zero in January 2015. By that December, the region reached functional zero homelessness for the veteran population. Chronic homelessness followed in January 2017.
Angie Walker is the homeless program manager for the city of Rockford's health and human services department. The department offers some service internally, such as a rapid rehousing program, youth housing programs, and transitional housing for people with serious mental illnesses.
But they also serve as a larger coordinator for the various homeless services offered across the Rockford area. She said processes and procedures also need to be clear across the board for all partners involved in reducing homelessness.
"One of the keys for us was really making sure we knew who the people were that we were talking about that needed the assistance."Angie Walker, homeless program manager for Rockford's health and human services department.
For instance, Walker's office serves as the single point of coordinated entry for unhoused people entering the system. Walker said the policies governing that entry process aren't just shared with those in her office, but with all partners in the Continuum of Care in the Rockford area.
"We need for them to understand how the whole process works, as well. Everybody has to be on the same page, or it's not going to work," she said.
That also means making sure all partners are working towards the same end goal. For Rockford, that means steering unhoused people towards permanent housing, rather than transitional housing, for the purposes of achieving and maintaining functional zero. People are still counted as homeless if they're in transitional housing.
"We have transitional housing here, so it's not that we don't use it, but you really want to make sure you're using those temporary placements for people that really need that extra help," Walker said. "We don't want to put somebody there that could really kind of flourish in permanent housing if they can do permanent housing, and that's what they want to do."
Walker said establishing a by-name list of each individual experiencing homelessness in the region was another vital component of connecting people with the right menu of services.
"It's not just a list of names, but it's information that can help us learn about our individual people that are homeless and to help work with them on an individual basis to get them the housing that they need," Walker said. "One of the keys for us was really making sure we knew who the people were that we were talking about that needed the assistance."
Peoria's encampment ban brings homeless conversation to forefront
Homeless encampments in Peoria and surrounding communities have long drawn scrutiny from those who see them as a blight or as vectors for drugs or crime. Until last year, municipalities didn't have many tools in their kits to quickly remove the encampments from public property, like the land adjacent to Interstate 74 that's owned by the Illinois Department of Transportation.
The Grants Pass ruling changed that. Several municipalities clustered around Peoria quickly enacted ordinances banning public camping. Last November, the Peoria City Council followed suit on a contentious 6-5 vote with its own ordinance prohibiting the encampments.

The ordinance created a hierarchy of escalating fines, or even potential jail time, that can be imposed upon violators who refuse to leave after several attempts to move them along.
Enforcement of the ordinance was set to begin after 30 days, but was delayed first due to the holidays and then an early January cold snap. The Peoria nonprofit LULA is currently housing 61 unsheltered people in motels. The city of Peoria has approved an $80,000 payment to the group to reimburse them for their costs and extend the motel stays through the end of February.
That solution has successfully depopulated the encampments, but is also widely recognized as a temporary "band-aid" fix at best.
"When we're talking about how we allocate resources and we look at future development, we have to know exactly what homelessness looks like in our community, and it is different depending upon where you are."Kate Green, executive director of the Home for All Continuum of Care
Organizations in the Peoria area are working with Re!nstitute in the background to rapidly secure permanent placements for the unhoused, and particularly for the unsheltered population. That's according to Kate Green, the executive director of the Home for All Continuum of Care, which coordinates services for the unhoused in Peoria, Tazewell, Woodford, and Fulton counties.
"We brought together street outreach, criminal justice, and law enforcement. We have our service providers who are involved in housing placements, all coming together to identify where our gaps in our system of care are, and how can we improve on those, and kind of iterate on that very rapidly," Green said.
They're aiming to get at least 40 unhoused people permanently sheltered within 100 days, and an additional 20 people connected to services that will allow them to "gear up" into housing.
"Some of the ordinances that have come into place here locally, they're really prohibiting unsheltered homelessness, and it's really forced some challenges upon our planning group and our planning team, but they are rising to the occasion," Green said.
Data is crux of long-term battle plan for resolving homelessness
But the Home for All Continuum of Care is also working on a further-reaching strategy centered around robust data.
In October 2023, the Home for All Continuum of Care teamed up with Built for Zero, the same organization that Rockford partnered with, to develop a roadmap to functional zero.
The Peoria-area CoC is a partner in what's called the Illinois Quality Data Collaborative, which seeks to catalog the circumstances of each individual experiencing homelessness down to a level far more granular and real-time than the annual Point in Time headcount.
"In order to do that, you need to have a by-name list. You need to have a list of the individuals experiencing homelessness, and then you work from that list to try and get those individuals housed," said Marnie Thomas, a system improvement advisor for large scale improvement with Built for Zero's state initiatives.
That helps not only in better understanding the inflow and outflow of individuals engaging with services like emergency shelters, but also the unique circumstances of each person. For instance, are they a veteran, a youth who's aged out of the foster care system, or part of a family in need of permanent housing? All have different needs, Green said.
"When we're talking about how we allocate resources and we look at future development, we have to know exactly what homelessness looks like in our community, and it is different depending upon where you are," said Green.

Walker, Rockford's homeless program manager, said their by-name list is a "living, breathing document" that they use every day.
"A lot of people use ID numbers, right? It's not an ID number. It's an individual person with specific needs, specific wants. They have barriers that we have to work with and different needs," Walker said. "So we really have to know the individual people that we're working with so that we can come up with a housing plan that's suitable for them."
Sandy Colts is a systems improvement advisor of large scale change at Built for Zero. He said the goal is to convert data from something that's just collected for compliance purposes into the "real engine" for the community's active response to homelessness.
"Typically imposing fines and or arresting people who are unhoused does very little, If anything at all, to improve their housing outcomes, and if anything, adds significant barriers to them being able to obtain housing."Sandy Colts, systems improvement advisor with Built for Zero
"The ultimate question that we are interested in, that we believe communities want to answer, is homelessness going down or is it going up? What is actually happening?" said Colts.
Colts said Peoria is progressing through the rubric other communities have used to build up their data systems into the kind of real-time information that cities like Rockford have harnessed in their efforts to achieve functional zero homelessness.
"They are making steady progress on that rubric and working through a lot of the very frustrating, devilish details that happen in technical data systems to make that as efficient and reliable as possible," Colts said.
Software is one such detail. Green said the Home for All Continuum of Care is an outlier in the Illinois Quality Data Collaborative because the rest of the participants all use a different data management platform.
"A lot of the tools were built out for the rest of the cohort, whereas we are kind of bootstrapping as we go to ensure that we have the data elements and we can build out our dashboards and be able to do that work," she said. "So I would hope in the next six months, it will be a very clear picture for us, but it is a little bit of a moving target."
Colts believes this work will put the community in a better position to address homelessness over the long-term.
"We have some beliefs about what we think will work best, and we have seen them work in other communities," Colts said. "Typically imposing fines and or arresting people who are unhoused does very little, If anything at all, to improve their housing outcomes, and if anything, adds significant barriers to them being able to obtain housing."
After achieving functional zero, the challenge becomes maintaining it
Angie Walker admits things have changed a lot since Rockford hit functional zero.
"We used to have a fairly easy time finding housing for people. There were a lot of units available; the prices were reasonable. Landlords had those vacant units, so they were willing to work with us. Times have changed since COVID," she said.
Walker said as the housing market tightened, landlords have become a lot more selective about who they're willing to take into their units than they used to be. A unit that used to run $500 a month now might be $900, she said.
Building more housing is one solution for that issue. Walker said they have a couple developments coming online in the next couple years. That's a longer-term fix, but Walker said her team is also building up a landlord engagement program. They're hiring a new employee to work directly with landlords.
"He's been a contractor, but we're looking to bring him on full time here in the next couple of months, but somebody to work specifically with landlords, to look at the issues they have with working with our people," Walker said. "What are the reasons they don't want to work with us?"
"It's hard work, put simply, and there needs to be some method for starting somewhere, demonstrating an impact, learning what works and expanding from there."Sandy Colts, Built for Zero
A landlord survey suggests that while the amount of time it takes to get their rent payments may be one issue, communication is a bigger one. Walker said they're often confused about who they're actually working with, whether that's the city of Rockford, Rockford Township, Winnebago County, or someone else.
Walker said they plan to launch a new landlord hotline so the property owners can call and talk directly with a case worker or someone else if they're having issues with a tenant.
Sandy Colts with Built for Zero said Rockford's mindset of continuous improvement is key to making functional zero work there. He said his organization often talks with communities about a couple of mindsets, including a bias towards action and a willingness to fail forwards.
"Continue leaning into the data. They will be able to tell the story about, is this policy working or not? And if it's not, can we go back to the drawing board? And the answer is yes, you can," Colts said. "So that is one piece is just the mindset of continuous improvement, remembering nothing is permanent. We're constantly learning and adapting."
Colts said homelessness is a complex problem, and getting multiple partners and systems working in harmony takes a lot of perseverance and energy to make solutions happen.
"It's hard work, put simply, and there needs to be some method for starting somewhere, demonstrating an impact, learning what works and expanding from there."