Every night in Baltimore, about 3,000 homeless people sleep on the streets or in shelters. Four out of 5 are men. One out of 3 is a military veteran.
But if City Council President Sheila Dixon has her way, that?s all about to change.
In an ambitious proposal announced Tuesday, Dixon, along with City Health Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein, pledged to end chronic homelessness in Baltimore by 2017.
“This was a terrible picture for a city making so much progress,” Dixon said of the number of homeless in Baltimore. “It is a picture that must be changed.”
Dixon, who will become mayor in January, said Baltimore officials are working on a 10-year plan to be completed in June 2007. The plan sets out a strategy to prevent homelessness through housing and social policy, while providing housing quickly to those who are chronically homeless.
The plan will be modeled in part on successful efforts to fight homelessness in Philadelphia, said Sister Helen Amos, executive chair of the board of trustees of Mercy Health Services and one of two leaders of the planning process.
Philadelphia has decreased its homeless population by 60 percent in five years, Amos said.
“Ending chronic homelessness will not be an easy task, but it?s hard to think of a more worthy challenge,” Amos said.
The costs of the plan are unknown, but Sharfstein said they likely could be made up by money saved at the city?s hospitals treating the homeless. “It?s unhealthy to be living on the streets,” he said.
Warren Sabloff, a real estate developer and co-leader of the planning process, said the plan is the first step to ending homelessness.
“Baltimore has decided, we have decided, everyone in this room has decided the faces of homelessness are no more and everything is about to change,” he said. “We will not fail here.”
Ten-year plans to combat homelessness have been developed by more than 200 cities around the country. Some cities, including New York and San Francisco, have already seen declines in the number of people living on the streets, officials said.
