Why Cleveland’s Leaning Hard Into the Housing-First Model to Help the Homeless

Two years ago, Robert Lucas was living in a homeless camp on a secluded grass lot close to the Conrad’s off West 144th and Lorain.

There were about 50 similar homeless camps around the city in recent years, some popping up as authorities came in and shut others down, others enjoying relative longevity and stability, which in this Whack-A-Mole reality could mean mere months.

It goes without saying that these are options of last resort, desperation, and necessity. No one wants to step around needle casings to navigate their way to the sidewalk or wake up to rats nestling in their tent. But for any number of reasons, and often a combination of them – drugs, mental illness, poor credit, pandemic-era job losses, the affordable housing crisis, racism, a criminal record, limited shelter space – this is the reality for more Northeast Ohioans than you’d think.

According to Cuyahoga County data, there were some 23,000 homeless people in the region in 2023.

“Every last one of them is on the run from something,” Lucas said. “They all got something that’s gonna keep them from being able to get a job, or be able to fucking get a home.”

For him, that was his record.

Lucas, now 34, is five-foot-seven with blond hair worn in a side part and carries the tattooed build of a construction apprentice. He talks in jumping sentences and leans toward skepticism. Lucas grew up in Parma with a single mother and lived in three houses by the time he was 18. He dropped out of high school his sophomore year to work the trades. Years later, his brother died, an episode Lucas paints as a schism for his family. “I left home, then came back home, then left again,” he said. “I was just trying to get away from the house. Trying to be on my own. Trying to figure it out.”

He fell into handiwork. Lucas spent his twenties working in tool and die shops, casting aluminum carburetors for lawnmowers and leaf blowers. He got engaged and moved into his aunt’s house. When he was 24, he took a job with a friend working maintenance at a senior living complex. Lucas was up for promotion when, in early 2017, he was accused of selling two residents’ stolen jewelry to a nearby pawn shop. (Lucas told me he was set up.) Like many staring down a trial with possible prison time at the other end, he took a plea deal – a level two felony burglary charge and two counts of theft. He agreed to serve two years of probation.

It was the beginning of his journey through the system; one he likens to being subsumed by a pool of quicksand.

While on probation, Lucas got high in Medina, which led to a two-year prison sentence. Out on parole, he caught a violation—visiting an ex—living at his sister’s house in Akron and did six more months. He got out. In 2022, Lucas plead guilty to stealing a $1,237 casino voucher out a machine at the MGM, which segued to another felony obstruction charge the following year. He fell out with his sister. His search for a new place to live and a job were futile. “Countless” landlords told him no. As did three dozen employers. And that’s how Lucas ended up at the homeless camp on the west side.

“I can’t get a lease, I can’t get a car, I can’t build my credit to get a car,” Lucas said. “And I can’t build my credit to get a car because I don’t have a lease to pay or have a means to pay it. It’s a Catch-22. It’s never-ending.”

Last year, the Bibb administration decided to circumvent the barriers that were keeping Lucas and other homeless people like him from getting a lease by kickstarting the Home for Every Neighbor initiative. Mayor Bibb propositioned the program as a way to “eradicate homelessness by the end of the decade.”

Like similar rapid housing programs in Chicago and San Antonio, over $2 million of city money would be spent on a year’s worth of rent and utilities for roughly 180 people. Unlike federal voucher programs or the typical shelter-to-house model, the city would ask barely any questions or run any checks. In other words, surmount all your typical barriers. “There are only two qualifications,” Liam Haggerty, the program’s director, told Scene. “You’re homeless and you’re breathing.”

Which automatically qualified Lucas, when his case manager, Mario Thompson, helped find him a place off East 93rd and Union last August. Lucas had spent eight years living with others: siblings, cellmates, junkies. He was now lined up to get a place of his own in 11 days.

“We continue to see a rise in housing insecurity in our city,” Bibb said at a press conference at a furniture warehouse in Independence in April, flanked by Haggerty, a trio of case managers and Lucas in a camouflage hoodie and a Cavs T-shirt. “A rise in mental health issues and challenges. Drug abuse and alcohol abuse. Historically, sometimes government has gotten in the way.” Bibb nodded. “Sometimes red tape and bureaucracy has gotten in the way.”

Let’s talk about red tape for a second.

People are routinely denied housing for a spattering of reasons. Our governments are designed to step up when those denials are unjustified, with Fair Housing laws to guarantee a signed lease for anyone in the so-called protected classes (in cases where there is proper legal representation). In Cleveland, that means you can’t legally refuse to rent to anyone because of their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, ethnicity, veteran status, family status, marital status or ancestry.

So, what’s left?

Of course, there are the standard denials for a bad credit score or failing to meet the monthly income mark. Maybe landlords don’t entertain freelancers or take Section 8 or any other housing subsidies. Or maybe you’ve been evicted once or twice in the past. Maybe you have debt or have declared bankruptcy. In Cleveland, all of these are completely justifiable and legal reasons to refuse to hand over keys to a would-be renter. (Just as having pets or being a smoker might be.)

But what if City Hall is vouching on your behalf and picking up your bills? The whole premise of Home for Every Neighbor, many participants, case managers and supervisors told me, is that it’s a housing-first program: people without homes are given keys to apartments without any credit check, any great concern for past evictions, or whether or not they have drug problems. Haggerty likens HFEN to the emergency sheltering response after a hurricane. “We’re not, like, keeping track of… ‘We know folks have this and this,’” Haggerty told me. “It’s more about, we just want to get everyone housed.”

“I think the broader goal is that ultimately,” he added, “we’re trying to end homelessness by saying, ‘Hey, there’s a reason why these folks didn’t have access to housing, and, well, how can we change that?’”

Kait McNeeley, deputy director of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, works directly with HFEN, mostly through assigning her outreach workers to specific campsites. “This program directly attacks all of the barriers,” she said. “The core of this work is the belief that housing is a human right, despite whatever circumstances led a person to become homeless. We just look past that.”

If we set aside mental health issues and substance abuse—which, if you’ve got a good attorney, can be framed as disability discrimination—then one of the central blockages to finding housing, whether it be for two years or 20, is having a felony or even a misdemeanor on your record. And it doesn’t mean you have to be found guilty either. In several apartment leases I reviewed for this article, and in conversations with about a dozen felons, landlords can deny you even if you’ve just been charged with a crime. Even if 25 or 35 years have passed. “You could make tens of thousands a week,” one supervisor of an apartment complex in Downtown Cleveland told me. “As soon as I see felony, that’s it. ‘Sorry, you can’t live here.’”

Maybe you made a plea deal for something you didn’t do, as many in the criminal justice system do. Maybe you’ve long served your time and paid your debt to society. Maybe it was decades ago.

What may linger with you the rest of your life are what are commonly referred to as collateral sanctions, or the tiny or large indirect consequences of having an F on your record, as one in 11 Ohioans do. And it’s not just landlords that throw you that rejection email. No longer can you own a gun, serve on a jury, vote in every election, donate blood, sign up for most health insurers, get access to college scholarships, travel easily to 38 countries, or get hired at one in four Ohio jobs. (Along with roughly a thousand other sanctions.) Even if you’ve served your prison time, passed parole or cleared probation. “Sure, you’ve paid your dues,” one criminal justice nonprofit worker put it, “but you’ve still got to pay the bill.”

HFEN, by its design, takes care of the bill.

“None of that mattered. They didn’t care. They just want to get you up out of here, you know?” said Jonathan Atkins, 36, who, after living in a tent near the Ohio City Rapid Station, moved into an apartment this year. It was his first time living alone since a robbery conviction in 2010. “I just took advantage of the situation: ‘If y’all gonna help me, I’ll appreciate it. All I need is a year. And I’ll never need your help again.”

There’s probably no greater an expert on collateral sanctions in Cleveland than Fred Ward. Ward, at 57, wears black jackets and Egyptian-jewel necklaces that give him the aura of a violence interrupter. Which he very well has the credentials to be. After multiple felonious assault and aggravated robbery charges in his early twenties, Ward served seven years of a ten-year sentence at Lorain Correctional. He got out in 1997. Sixteen years later, he helped found Building Freedom Ohio, a nonprofit with the sole goal—legislatively and culturally—of removing as many collateral sanctions statewide as humanly possible.

Recently, in May, Ward brought his developing Felony Impacted Liberation Movement, or F.I.L.M., to a brick-walled meeting space at MidTown’s Tech Hive, which attracted about 45 or so in a talk that quickly morphed into group therapy. 


“A lot of us directly-impacted don’t even want to identify, because felon is a scarlet letter,” Ward said, in a raspy voice that boomed around the room. “A lot of times, you see people lock their doors, wondering, ‘Hey cuz, what you done did?”

Ward looked around the space. “Anybody in the room that has a felony conviction, raise your hand,” he said. A few people turned their heads. “It’s okay,” Ward said. “This is a safe space.”

About half of the room raised a hand.

“Anybody in the room that has a family member that has a felony conviction, raise your hand,” Ward said.

Ten more raised.

I raised mine.

“Anybody in the room that has a friend that has a felony conviction, raise your hand,” Ward said.

Seven more raised.

“And anybody that has faith in a higher power, restorative justice and redemption, raise your hand.”

The remainder of the room raised.

Ward allowed some silence, like a pastor. He rested his chin philosophically on an open hand.

“You’ve paid your debt, done your time, paid your fines, paid your fees—at some point in your life, you should be able to move on,” he said.

“Amen,” one woman said.

“Just because you might have done that,” Ward said, “that don’t mean you are that.”

It was near the start of July last year when 39-year-old Terrie Williams had to be rushed to the hospital. She and her husband Jason had been sleeping on benches at the West Park Rapid Station, and it was storming. They had been staying on the Red Line until breakfast hours, but were being kicked off by transit cops. So, like everyone else, they pitched a tent.

Terrie woke up in the middle of the night drenched. She has asthma and bronchitis, so early-morning rain led to Jason calling for an ambulance, which took Terrie to MetroHealth, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia and a listeria infection. “I also found out I’m diabetic,” she said. She stayed there for a month. By the time Terrie was ready to be discharged, Jason arrived with even better news: a guy named Mario Thompson was hooking them up with a free place to stay, for a year. Jason could take a tour tomorrow.

“I told him, ‘Just take it. Don’t even bother looking at it,’” Terrie recalled. “And that’s exactly what we did.”

Jason and Terrie don’t have criminal records. They don’t have drug or alcohol issues. They don’t have evictions on their rap sheet. And before they left Terrie’s sibling’s house, they held regular jobs, in maintenance and management, at a west side Rally’s.

“I would say that their biggest barrier was that they owed utility balances,” Thompson told me, sitting at a chair at Jason and Terrie’s kitchen table. “It was only a couple hundred bucks. But you know, landlords won’t let you move in until that’s paid.” He smiled. “And we took care of that.”

Another barrier broken.

Case managers like Thompson, and the seven others contracted by the city, work their caseload more like a sponsor than a decisive parole officer.

“I’ll just come over here, we’ll just sit and talk,” Thompson, who was homeless himself for a year as a teenager, said. “Just figuring out their story. I mean, people like Terrie and Jason, they learn how to be resourceful on their own.”

That, of course, isn’t the case for everyone. In an interview with one of the property management companies working with HFEN, a sour taste pervaded most of the discussion. Since August, it’s been a roller coaster for half of their HFEN tenants: people kicking in doors, stealing hot water heaters, destroying bathroom ceilings, filling the living room with bikes, shooting up heroin in the basement, flushing “everything known to man” down the toilet, throwing kitchen grease out the window. “Domestic violence, screamin’ and hollerin’, hitting the walls, trash everywhere,” the manager told me.

“But what does Liam say? ‘As long as they’re homeless and breathing, they qualify,’” they said. “Hell, we’re all breathing. Does that mean I could live anywhere I want on the city’s dime without any repercussions?”

I brought up the list of complaints to Thompson during a recent visit to Terrie and Jason’s, a reasonably quaint apartment on the southern edge of Slavic Village. There, the kitchen cabinets are topped with single roses and plastic swords and the memories of relatives. There’s a stocked pantry, a working bath, a small TV, Terrie’s medicine tray next to Jason’s chair. As rain started to tap against the roof, I thought of the storm that sent Terrie to the hospital, where she almost died a year ago.

“I mean, I have a nice, comfy bed to sleep in,” Terrie said. “One of the biggest things is having a shower. Or just a normal place to go to the bathroom—the Porta Potties are cool, don’t get me wrong. But you don’t want to go at night.”

Jason’s mind seemed to shift to those that haven’t used the opportunity afforded them by the program. “So, second chances are extremely hard to come by,” Jason said.

“That’s true,” Terrie said.

“People ought to take advantage of them when they get one.”

“Especially now that homelessness is illegal.” Terrie said. She looked around the space. “I would rather have this house than sit in a jail cell.”

In early June, nearly a year after the city began visiting and cleaning up homeless camps throughout Cleveland, I get a text from Robert Lucas. There had been some radio silence since we’d met in April, so I had figured that Lucas disappeared back into the private life. Or, I had just become one of the latest people he decided to knock from his life.

“I apologize for not being in contact with you,” Lucas texted. “Truth is it’s been a little overwhelming to say the least, but I am however moved into my new place, and as you know, packing and setting up furniture. And things of that nature are pretty tedious to say the least.”

The next week, Lucas invited me over to what I would find out is his second apartment through HFEN, one just two blocks north of the Cleveland Zoo. Lucas had been living in a complex off Union and East 93rd, but there was some sort of confrontation. A man wanted by the DEA showed up to Lucas’ place and wouldn’t leave. Management found out. Lucas, through Thompson’s advocacy, was reassigned to an apartment in Brooklyn Centre, in late May.

Regardless, this is Lucas’ first time living alone in nearly a decade. Around the apartment there are traces of normalcy—the canvas prints, the Browns Dawg Pound signs, the toaster oven. (All donated.) “Sorry, I have to use these Glade Plug-ins,” Lucas, dressed in a white tank top and jeans, said, sorting through a pile of them on his kitchen table. He swiped them to the side, it seemed, as if I was the first guest worth the tidying up. “I’m really sensitive to smell, so I have to use them. I get headaches. Same thing would happen in prison. Headaches all the time.” Lucas relocated his toaster oven to the counter. “So, can I get you something to drink?” he said.

Earlier this year, Haggerty sat down with Cleveland City Council to convince them that HFEN must be renewed and funded for a second year. In late April, Council agreed. (Not without debate. “I understand the concept of getting the homeless off the streets. I think it’s a great practice,” Ward 16 Councilmember Brian Kazy noted at the meeting. “But I don’t think it’s the city’s job to be doing this.”)

But it passed, and when the first year’s spending expires in August, the city will mark off $1.9 million more in the same effort to house roughly 80 additional homeless people. Even when I brought up reports from landlords that have experienced issues with tenants, Haggerty doubled down in his philosophy. House first, he said, problems later. “You don’t ask a person who is drowning to learn how to swim,” he said.

And, as homeless advocates will quickly tell you, it’s not just about helping the individuals. Society bears a high cost from strains on emergency rooms, on police calls, on court cases. One 2017 study found that one chronically homeless person costs a city’s taxpayers about $35,000 per year. Home For Every Neighbor, in theory, halves that cost.

Since last August, Lucas has entered Suboxone treatment for meth addiction. He has, Thompson speculated, a job lined up for him at the city. (Meeting Bibb in April helped.) “When he found out I was someone he could trust, Robert opened up to me,” Thompson told me. “I’ve seen him choke up many times.” And most direly, he has an apartment. I asked Thompson what Lucas’ life might be if he’d never trekked to that campsite to help him. “Realistically? He’d either be dead or in jail.”

I brought this up to Lucas at his kitchen table. After all, Lucas will be covered by a long-term voucher from the Emerald Development and Economic Network, which means the county will pay his rent after his lease renews—or doesn’t—come September.

“The last 10 years, it’s been stressful. I’ve been around people, and people just suck. Seriously.” Lucas fidgets with a Glade Plug-in, then looks up at me. “But I can’t allow myself to get complacent. Because every time I get to that point, something comes in and fucking takes it away.”

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This article appears in Cleveland SCENE 7/16/25.