City of Tucson announces leader of Housing First effort

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To combat homelessness in Tucson, the city created a new position to get people with homelessness into apartments before they attend to their other needs.

The city recently hired Brandi Champion as its Housing First program director. Champion said the goal of a housing-first model is to provide shelter and food to people affected by homelessness, and then deal with the reasons they are in a housing crisis, such as a problem with mental health or drug use.

“Let’s get a roof over this person’s head. Let’s get them into their unit with furniture and food on a regular basis, and then we’ll start fixing the other things that made them homeless in the first place,” said Champion.

In earlier models, these reasons for the housing crisis were the prerequisite or the obstacle to the search for housing.

“Oh, now you have to be sober tomorrow. You have to be in a place where you don’t have any interactions with the criminal justice system tomorrow,” she said. “And that’s just something people can’t do. They can’t achieve it, so it’s a hopeless cycle.”

Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said in a press release that homelessness and the provision of housing for people in a housing crisis were “major problems” for the city.

Champion said, according to a statistical estimate by the Tucson Pima Collaboration to End Homelessness and the University of Arizona, homelessness has increased nearly 47% since a 2020 unhoused census in Tucson, resulting in about 854 people having none Apartment have protection every night.

“How do we get the person on the street and hold them down long enough to get them into their apartment and then offer these all-round services? So accommodation was a big barrier, ”she said.

The city is buying hotels to serve as temporary accommodation, and Champion hopes these will be operational early next year.

Hotels, as places where unhodged people could isolate themselves during the pandemic, gave housing advocates “the roadmap” to tackle homelessness with housing first, she said.

Champion hails from the city’s Continuum of Care project, which aims to prevent and end homelessness in Pima County.

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