Email from United States Interagency Council on Homelessness

U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness

December 11, 2024

USICH Executive Director Announces Departure

Today, Executive Director Jeff Olivet announced his resignation from the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH). Follow the link for A Message From Outgoing USICH Director Jeff Olivet: Despite Challenges, Homelessness Is Preventable and Solvable.

Olivet became the leader of USICH in January 2022. During his tenure, the federal government weathered a global pandemic, developed a new public health-driven strategy to prevent and end homelessness, increased the supply of affordable housing, and strengthened the nation’s commitment to homelessness prevention and research.

“It has been an honor to work with leaders at all levels of government and in the private sector across the country who are helping to save the lives of Americans struggling to afford the high cost of housing,” said outgoing USICH Executive Director Olivet. “I have learned the most during my time in the Biden-Harris administration from the real experts—people who have experienced homelessness—and I urge anyone who holds this position (or any position of power) to meaningfully include people with lived experience as partners in the policymaking process. In every state, city, town, and tribal nation I have visited, people experiencing homelessness reinforced a central truth: People do not want to sleep outside, but too often our systems are making it hard for them to stay housed. I urge communities to resist calls to criminalize homelessness and instead invest in housing, supportive services, and evidence-based solutions.”

Under Olivet’s leadership, USICH provided guidance to communities on how to effectively and humanely address encampments and launched the ALL INside Initiative with the White House, which is a first-of-its-kind effort to help communities address unsheltered homelessness. The guidance was issued in April, two months before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state and local governments can pass and enforce laws that cite, fine, arrest, and jail people for sleeping in public, even when shelters are unavailable.

Pandemic Response

During the pandemic, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan—the biggest single-year investment in ending homelessness in U.S. history. Congress created emergency rental assistance and emergency housing vouchers, temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit, and distributed cash directly to lower-income households. This increased investment in housing and support helped prevent millions of evictions, cut poverty nearly in half, and averted a massive rise in homelessness during the worst of the pandemic from 2020 to 2022.

To help communities use the unprecedented resources from the American Rescue Plan Act, USICH and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development launched the House America Initiative. Over the course of 2022, House America helped 105 states, municipalities, and tribes permanently house at least 100,000 people and add at least 20,000 affordable homes into development.

Later in the pandemic, the White House released a plan to address one of the biggest root cause of homelessness: the shortage of affordable housing. USICH works with communities to help implement the White House’s Housing Supply Action Plan, and in 2023, the country was on track to build more apartments than any other year in the previous 50.

All of these results showed that progress is possible—even during the most difficult times.

Public Health-Driven Strategy

The pandemic underscored the connection between health and homelessness. In addition to coordinating the federal response to homelessness during the pandemic, Olivet spent his first year on the job working across the Biden-Harris administration to develop a new strategy to address the homelessness crisis. USICH released All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness in December 2022. All In is based on feedback USICH collected from more than 600 communities and more than 500 people who have experienced homelessness. All In recommitted the federal government to moving people as quickly as possible into housing with strong wrap-around supports. The plan also represented the most significant federal effort to date to systemically prevent homelessness before it starts and to center racial equity in the nation’s response to homelessness. It serves as a roadmap for the nation to urgently address basic needs of people in crisis, expand housing and support, and build better systems to prevent homelessness—with an evidence-based and all-hands-on-deck approach.

All In, more than any other federal plan, acknowledges the connection between housing and health and uses public health strategies to prevent and end homelessness. To that end, Olivet increased USICH’s collaboration with the health-care sector, building partnerships and recruiting fellows from Kaiser Permanente to help implement All In and issuing guidance for how health systems and hospitals can help solve homelessness.

ALL INside Initiative

In 2023 and 2024, USICH and the White House embedded federal experts in local offices in Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, and the governor’s office in California to help them cut red tape and speed up the time it takes to help people move off streets and into homes. Through the ALL INside Initiative, several of the communities received federal waivers to lower barriers to housing, health care, and support for people experiencing homelessness. As a result, unsheltered or overall homelessness is dropping in several ALL INside communities, including Dallas and Phoenix.

Homelessness Prevention

In September, USICH released the first-ever federal framework for homelessness prevention to spur more action, innovation, and collaboration at all levels of government and across all sectors. Specifically, it is intended for local, tribal, and state governments; nonprofits, funders, systems, providers, and advocates of housing, health, human services, justice, education, employment, child welfare, and emergency services. As All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness states: “Ending homelessness requires working on both fronts—rehousing people who are already homeless while preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place.” For every person in America who moves off the streets or out of shelters and into homes, more than one loses a home and becomes homeless. Through this prevention work, USICH has continued to focus on driving down racial disparities in homelessness.

Homelessness Research

Olivet spearheaded the development of the first federal homelessness research agenda in more than a decade as well as a soon-to-be-announced online forum for researchers to share and discuss findings, challenges, and opportunities for collaboration and innovation. The research agenda is intended to shape federal investments in homelessness research and offer a roadmap for academic researchers, philanthropy, students, and others committed to understanding what works to prevent and end the crisis of homelessness in the United States.

Olivet’s last day as executive director will be December 16. USICH will keep the field informed as a new Executive Director is appointed to lead the agency.

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