You Can’t End Homelessness While People Are Still Sleeping Outside

How Temporary, Relocatable Interim Housing Can Help Cities Reach Functional Zero Unsheltered Faster than Traditional Shelter Models

For decades, cities have chased the same goal: build enough permanent housing to solve homelessness.

But while that housing is being planned, funded, and constructed, people continue to sleep outside — where their health deteriorates, their trauma deepens, and the cost of helping them rises.

Some housing leaders now argue we’ve been starting in the wrong place.

While homelessness encompasses far more than people sleeping outdoors, reaching “functional zero unsheltered” is a critical first step. It simply means that no one has to sleep outside and that there are enough beds for everyone who needs one.

Right now, in many parts of California, that is far from reality. There is roughly one shelter bed for every four people experiencing homelessness.

Why Interim Housing Exists in the First Place

In an exclusive interview, DignityMoves Founder and CEO Elizabeth Funk explains how interim supportive housing offers a faster, more dignified alternative to traditional shelter models — and a practical path toward ending street homelessness while permanent housing is still being built.

Unlike permanent housing developments, these are temporary, relocatable modular structures placed on temporarily available land, designed to be moved once the land is needed for another purpose.

“Only permanent housing is a true solution to homelessness,” Funk said. But permanent housing can take years to build and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit in major cities.

That gap between what we know works and what can be built quickly enough is exactly what DignityMoves set out to address.

The organization’s playbook shows how Interim Supportive Housing can be deployed in as little as five months, at a fraction of the cost, using modular units on temporary sites.

These are not permanent buildings. They are temporary housing communities designed to meet urgent needs now.

What Interim Housing Provides that Shelters Cannot

Furthermore, it’s not just about cost and development speed; it’s also about design – more specifically, a focus on dignity, safety, and stability. “The longer someone struggles to survive on the streets, the harder and more expensive it becomes to help them return to stability,” Funk said. “The only way to solve it is to have enough beds for everyone.”

Because of this, DignityMoves focuses exclusively on Interim Supportive Housing (ISH), which addresses immediate needs while preserving the path to permanent housing.

ISH provides:

• Health and Well-Being – Reduces harm caused by displacement and exposure
• Service Connection – On-site access to case management and care
• Fixed Address Stabilization – A stable base for work, services, and housing applications
• Scalability and Flexibility – Capacity can expand or contract as needs change
• Safer Service Delivery – More effective than street outreach

“If we are going to solve homelessness overall, we must first stop allowing the problem to become more deeply entrenched,” Funk said. “If you are in a hole, first you need to stop digging. Ending street homelessness is not the final goal, but it is a necessary precondition for solving the homelessness problem for good.”

How Interim Housing Differs From Traditional Shelter Models

To understand why interim housing changes outcomes, it helps to look at the traditional shelter system. Unlike traditional shelters or permanent housing projects, interim housing consists of temporary private units installed on land that may only be available for a few years.

Many shelters are designed for short-term emergency relief rather than long-term stability. Residents sleep in congregate rooms, have little privacy, and are often limited to brief stays.

“An overnight stay in a shelter might keep someone out of the cold, but it’s hardly conducive to progress,” Funk said. “When we are in fear and not in a stable environment, our bodies and minds go into ‘fight or flight’ mode, making it biologically impossible to think clearly enough to solve what are likely some fairly difficult life circumstances.”

Many traditional shelters are “congregate” settings, as Funk describes them: “big warehouses crammed with bunk beds, where people are generally only allowed to stay a few days at most.”

Interim housing, by contrast, provides private rooms with locking doors. Residents can stay as long as needed while working toward permanent solutions.

There are other important distinctions, Funk added. Many people are far more willing to accept help when dignity is part of the package.

“When people feel stable and safe, they are far more likely to take full advantage of the intensive case management care they are offered — and those services have the highest possible chances of efficacy.”

Strategies for Implementing Interim Housing in Dense Cities

One of the most common objections to expanding shelter and housing in dense cities is a familiar one: there simply isn’t any land available.

Funk argues that this assumption overlooks opportunities hiding in plain sight.

“The secret is to take advantage of temporarily vacant land, and use relocatable housing units that can be removed when the land is needed for another purpose,” Funk said. “We need to think about what motivations a landowner would have to allow it to be used for this purpose.”

She points to several practical strategies for identifying these spaces.

“Private landowners can benefit from property tax exemptions, which could be motivating to investors holding on to land for value appreciation,” Funk explained. In other cases, developers may have projects on hold or delayed due to lengthy entitlement processes. These pauses create windows of opportunity to use land that would otherwise sit empty.

And it’s not just private landowners worth considering. Public and community institutions often have excess land as well.

“Hospitals, schools, churches, corporations — they all have excess land, and very real financial as well as moral motivations to contribute to solutions. We are even considering building on top of a parking garage at a community college,” Funk said.

Because the units are relocatable, these communities can adapt over time. As Funk notes, “municipalities have the ability to dial up or dial down their bed capacity as needs shift across the region.”

Can This Strategy End Homelessness Once and For All?

Beyond the human toll, unsheltered homelessness carries an enormous financial cost that many people rarely see.

Emergency room visits, encampment sweeps, law enforcement responses, and crisis services add up quickly when people are forced to live outside without stability. Funk argues that this reactive approach is far more expensive than providing proactive, supportive housing.

“We often think about the human cost of unsheltered homelessness, but most people may not realize the enormous cost to society of allowing this problem to perpetuate,” Funk said. “The cost totals over $80,000 per person per year in emergency room visits, encampment sweeps, police interactions — yet providing someone a dignified interim housing unit, with three meals per day and intensive supportive services, costs about $40,000 per year. The current situation costs us twice as much as it would cost to do the right thing.”

Funk believes the conversation around homelessness can resonate across political and social lines when framed this way.

For fiscal conservatives, the numbers show how expensive the status quo has become. For environmental advocates, unsheltered homelessness carries real risks to land and communities, including wildfire hazards. For residents concerned about safety, sidewalks, and public spaces, ending street homelessness improves quality of life for everyone.

“I feel fiercely optimistic that ending street homelessness is not just idealistic, it’s inevitable,” Funk concluded. “We are at a rare moment where everyone — fiscal conservatives, advocates, and frustrated taxpayers — finally agrees this is the answer. We have the resources, the proven solutions, and the political will. What happens next depends on whether we act with the urgency this crisis deserves. The time to end street homelessness has come.”

Doing the Right Thing for the Wrong Reasons Makes a Sandcastle

Ending street homelessness should not depend on whether it is cost-effective, politically convenient, or beneficial to property values. Those arguments may help move policy forward, but they are not what will sustain long-term change.

Homelessness must be addressed because it is the right thing to do, not because there’s an incentive in it for someone else. Once that incentive goes away, we no longer have the will to continue.

While any action toward ending homelessness matters, I think it’s important to recognize that capitalism created homelessness — it created the foundation that holds it up.

Ending homelessness for good, street homelessness included, requires building a new foundation altogether, one where human life is more valuable than financial gain, where “financial incentive” is not the reason, and where ending human suffering does not require convincing.