Officials said nearly 1,200 people in the county are without homes since 2018.
With an estimated 282 adults sleeping in the streets, while others stay in emergency shelters or some other form of temporary housing, county officials are searching for ways to add more shelter beds and housing options in Fairfax.There are six county-owned emergency shelters in Fairfax operated by local nonprofits with a total of 510 beds in a mix of space set aside for individual adults or entire families. Some facilities have a waitlist of several hundred people to get inside.
She pointed out several large commercial sites around the community that would make good candidates for temporary housing. A Best Buy store recently shut down and is vacant.
“We don’t want people to be living in tents. That is absolutely not what we are advocating for,” Selvaraj D’Souza said. “But what options did they have?” “Turnover is typically quite high among the staff at the shelters,” said Thomas Barnett, deputy director of the Office to Prevent and End Homelessness. “That creates challenges, in creating stability and high quality services.”Maura Williams, vice president of housing and community services at the Cornerstones nonprofit organization, said it was particularly difficult to keep staff working under the county hotel program.
The review of the county homelessness-prevention plan is meant to discover “what is working with regularity?” he said. “What is a waste of resources? What is something another jurisdiction is doing that’s a best practice that we need to try to experiment with here?”
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