Washoe Homeless Get A Hearing 19 Months Later
Washoe County had it’s first CHAB (Community Homeless Advisory Board) meeting since May of 2024 on December 2, 2025. Nearly 19 months. The Community sentiment chasm shows everyone how very far apart the residents are on this issue – but are they? Washoe County implemented a Zero Barrier model that exists in 164 High Tax jurisdictions across the country. That number is deceiving, as it looks much more popular than it really is. Ultimately, The Movement - Community Solutions shows 170 jurisdictions that use this model. However, those numbers are inflated. For example, Reno, Sparks and Washoe are shown as three jurisdictions, when it is really just one sharing the same funding and modeling. Almost all (if not all) of the jurisdictions using this model are high tax, liberal leaning or full left jurisdictions with a sometimes nationally recognized homeless issue, e.g. Portland and Chicago. These services take huge portions of the budget to sustain, and it’s easy to see why there are not more jurisdictions who dabble so heavily in the systemized effort – it’s incredibly expensive, diverting resources from the large majority of tax payers on things like maintenance and infrastructure, or raises taxes significantly, which hurts your working class and young and old populations. And it makes nobody happy.
There are the pro-homeless people, the folks who say that it should never be a crime to be homeless anywhere, regardless of whether it overtakes public spaces that we all use and should be able to enjoy safely. Then there are the folks who want to say that there is no place for them anywhere, lock ‘em up! Then there is the “Build it and they will come” crowd. Those stats seem to be ringing true. Nobody seemed happy with the current model.
The question on the total cost of CARES and HOPES is being investigated now. People want to know the whole cost including the buildings, maintenance, extra employees, permanent housing, permanent supportive housing, temporary rehabilitative housing, Temporary CARES housing, Warming Centers, administration costs, set up costs, HOPES team cost, Hopes Center cost – all of it. With these numbers, we can all know the actual cost benefit to having these programs. Is it less expensive to provide a center and housing vs. jailing homeless people at $150-$800/day or having them in the ER? It could be, but we can’t adequately compare because the whole cost is elusive, at best. The articles written so far don’t account for all of the costs associated with all of the programs. There seems to be a small shift toward accountability, community partnering and resourcing, and a less dictating style. We need to support that. We need a full accounting – full. We need to know what informal resources we had before the system took over, and engage them and support them again. We know who they are, they come to the meetings. We need to look at the outcomes of the jurisdictions that have had this type of program in place for years, and see if that’s really what we want for our community. An audit of Outcomes and Comparisons, not just a financial accounting. We need to have a mechanism for accountability and doing our best to serve our County constituents and residents, and control other folks coming in. As we’ve seen lately, we need to control these government program that can so easily be overtaken and manipulated with fraud. We can work together, we should work together, we should ask the people with boots on the ground who aren’t getting paid the big bucks.
These are Washoe County issues that every citizen needs to know about!
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