How to stop homelessness before it starts | Jen Loving

Host Elise Hu introduces Jen Loving, who leads Destination Home, a nonprofit working to end homelessness and a grantee of TED’s Audacious Project. Hu says Loving has spent her career in shelters, on the streets, in camps and housing programs, and grew up in a family that ran a shelter out of a church. Loving’s central argument is that communities have been fighting homelessness backward: they wait for people to lose their homes and reach a shelter instead of intervening when the warning signs first appear. Loving compares housing prevention with practices people already accept elsewhere. Society screens for cancer early because doing so saves lives and money, reinforces bridges before hurricanes and uses seatbelts in case of an accident. Yet with housing insecurity, policymakers often wait until the crisis has happened. Loving says missed work, a death in the family or a medical emergency can serve as predictable warning signs, meaning homelessness can be interrupted before it occurs. Her proposed approach is both more humane and less expensive than relying on shelters and emergency services after people have fallen into homelessness.

Loving begins with a story from roughly 20 years earlier, when she worked at the front desk of the largest homeless shelter in Silicon Valley. A woman named Tanya arrived exhausted and clutching a satchel that suddenly began to cry: inside was her newborn baby. Tanya explained that she had been assaulted, became pregnant, and had previously supported herself with a minimum-wage job while renting a room in San Jose. Pregnancy complications forced Tanya to stop working, which led to the loss of both her job and her home. After being discharged from the hospital, she had no savings, family or place to go—only a list of shelters and a bus token. She eventually rode Hotel 22, the area’s only 24-hour bus line and a “moving homeless shelter,” for two days with her baby. Loving stresses that Tanya’s experience is not unusual. She cites more than 771,000 people experiencing homelessness in the United States in 2024, the highest recorded level, an 18 percent increase in one year. For every person on the streets, she says, thousands more are living paycheck to paycheck and are one unexpected bill or crisis away from losing their homes.

In 2017, Destination Home and a group of partners launched a homelessness-prevention system in Silicon Valley, one of the world’s highest-cost regions. Since then, the system has helped more than 44,000 people remain housed. Loving says it does not rely on complicated programs or endless steps; instead, it provides fast, targeted and flexible support when a household is most vulnerable. The goal is to create an alternative to waiting for someone to appear at a shelter. She illustrates the process with Rose, a single mother whose unexpected layoff left her unable to pay rent and facing eviction. The program conducts a vulnerability assessment that considers not only Rose’s finances but also other conditions contributing to her housing insecurity. It determines that she faces severe homelessness risk but could remain housed with limited assistance. The program pays her back rent, works with her landlord and helps her avoid eviction. Rose also receives a caseworker who stays involved as she navigates a new job, benefits and childcare. Loving emphasizes, “We’re not just a check, we’re a partner in rebuilding,” because the support is intended to stabilize the family beyond the immediate payment.

Loving says the results are not merely anecdotal. Research by the University of Notre Dame found that Destination Home’s approach was statistically significant in keeping people housed both in the short term and over a longer period. For every dollar invested in prevention, the program saved the public $2.47. Loving calls that an important number, but says the most important number is one: one mother, child or family who did not fall through the cracks. She connects housing stability to broader outcomes. When families stay in their homes, children can remain in their schools, while public costs decline because shelter stays, emergency-room visits and arresting people simply for being poor are more expensive. Loving draws on her own experience running and working in shelters and housing programs, saying prevention had consistently been the missing piece. Her conclusion is that keeping people housed before a crisis becomes visible is not only less traumatic for families but also a more efficient use of public resources.

With support from the Audacious community, Loving says Destination Home has launched Right at Home, a national movement intended to stop homelessness before it starts. The initiative is designed to create systems that help people before they reach the worst moments of their lives, rather than making them prove their need after losing housing. The model is being replicated in 10 communities across the United States, including rural, urban and tribal communities, to test whether prevention can work in very different settings. Loving asks listeners to imagine trying to work productively while unsure where they will sleep that night or expecting to put their children to bed in the back of a car. She presents preventing homelessness as the “single most obvious answer” to the crisis: act on warning signs before eviction, displacement or street homelessness occurs. She closes with a hopeful call to collective action, saying communities can stop homelessness before it starts and keep people “right at home.”