Rapid Results in Rapid Re-Housing 100-Day Challenge Highlighted During Montgomery County Regional Cabinet Meeting

On September 25, Secretary Ken Holt and Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development staff were in Montgomery County for the day for a regional cabinet meeting with Governor Larry Hogan. After the cabinet meeting, Secretary Holt toured Montgomery County to recognize, celebrate, and break ground on affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization projects and initiatives.

Secretary Holt was able to meet with and congratulate homelessness services providers from across the state as they convened in Rockville to celebrate the conclusion of the Rapid Re-Housing 100 Day Challenge. Through collaboration with the University of Maryland School of Social Work and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development sponsored a year-long Learning Collaborative, working with 28 service providers from every corner of the state. Through this learning collaborative, the providers learned best practices, strategies to increase landlord participation, and how to utilize data more effectively, with the ultimate goal of dramatically increasing the number of placements of households experiencing homelessness back into permanent housing.

At the conclusion of the challenge, the providers collectively housed 380 households, compared to 144 families housed during the first 100 days of 2018. With the skills and experience gained through this collaborative, these same providers have almost tripled the number of households that they have been able to place.

In addition to celebrating the great work being done statewide, Secretary Holt joined Governor Larry Hogan and Lt. Governor Boyd Rutherford to recognize the strides being made in Montgomery County. Governor Hogan presented Uma Ahluwalia, Director of the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services and Amanda Harris, Chief of Services to End and Prevent Homelessness for Montgomery County, with a Governor’s Citation for the Montgomery County Inside/Not Outside Initiative. Since January 2016, Montgomery County has placed more than 386 chronically homeless individuals into permanent housing, becoming about a dozen people shy of being one of the largest communities in the country to effectively end chronic homelessness. More than 150 of those placements have occurred since January 2018. This follows on the heels of Montgomery County effectively ending veteran homelessness at the end of 2015.

Additional stops during the day included a groundbreaking in Silver Spring for affordable housing space for artists, a park plaza tour in Gaithersburg and a meeting with the Maryland Department of Disabilities and a team working on affordable housing for adults with disabilities in Rockville. For more information and to see photos from the day, visit our Facebook Album.