Authored by Luis Ulerio, Director, Mayor’s Office of Homeless Services, City of Newark
During the pandemic, cities across the United States learned that with collective will and dedication, we could cut through barriers to deliver services to our most vulnerable, even under unprecedentedly difficult circumstances.
In Newark, under the leadership of Mayor Ras J. Baraka, we rose to the challenges presented to serve those in need. We carried out successful interventions for residents experiencing homelessness, such as widespread testing and new transitional housing.
As the pandemic subsided, Newark knew we could not go back to entrenched systems of service. There was valuable innovation born out of this period, and strong momentum was created through the work that could be leveraged to deepen our impact and exact system change.
In response, Mayor Baraka created the Office of Homeless Services in early 2022. He immediately charged the office with developing a strategic plan to address chronic homelessness in Newark. The planning process included more than 100 contributors, including those with lived experience, business leaders, philanthropic organizations and institution leaders from our medical and educational community. All were involved in developing recommendations that shaped the plan.
In December 2022, Mayor Baraka, along with public and private partners, launched the plan titled “Path Home: Collaborating Across Our Community.” The first-of-its-kind blueprint dedicated to ending chronic homelessness in our city focused on three overarching strategies: to Better Address Street Homelessness, Improve Access and Services Throughout the Shelter System and Expand Prevention and Housing Services. The plan helped develop a vision: Newark will strive to end chronic homelessness for all individuals over the next three years through collaboration, prevention and housing.
Since the launch of the plan, we have introduced several innovative and comprehensive strategies that have helped reduce the unsheltered population by 57.6% in its first year and have sustained a two-year reduction since the plan’s launch in 2022.
Private and Public Partnerships
No city alone can prevent and end homelessness. It takes dedication from entities across sectors to achieve a common goal. Mayor Baraka’s plan was a call to action for the community to join the city’s efforts and use the power of collaboration to push forward the strategies outlined. Many partners from various sectors joined the work and aligned their efforts to support the plan.
Two of our most impactful partnerships have been with the Newark Alliance, a nonprofit founded in 1999 working toward economic development through the combined collaboration of leaders from business, real estate, healthcare institutions and other sectors, and the State of New Jersey’s Department of Community Affairs and its Office of Homelessness Prevention, which coordinates efforts to prevent homelessness among cities and municipalities. These entities have played a critical role in supporting our efforts from leveraging partnerships and private and public resources to supporting various initiatives that serve our most vulnerable Newark residents. We have received deep data analytics and operational support and funding that supported services and initiatives that directly impacted the plans’ strategies. These partners, like many others from across our community answered the call and stepped up to support.
Enhanced Street Outreach Efforts
One of Newark’s most critical goals was to reduce the number of people living on the streets of our city. In our first year, we accomplished significant progress through new approaches to engagement, better coordination among stakeholders and community partners and alignment on outcomes. As we pushed forward in these efforts, we knew that more needed to be done. That is why we continued introducing new services and tools to address this need.
Earlier this year, we launched a new texting hotline for the public to use to help any unsheltered person on the streets of Newark. Through the text hotline, the community can complete a brief survey, and their information is sent to street outreach providers offering services to those in need. In 2024, we partnered with the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School to deploy an outreach team of medical and clinical practitioners to engage unsheltered residents and provide cost-free, direct access to behavioral health treatment and resources. This initiative has been so successful that it is now being expanded to several teams that will canvass hotspots throughout the city.
We significantly expanded the number of outreach teams that will serve our city by contracting with additional organizations, such as Bridges Outreach and Collaborative Support Programs of New Jersey, to increase our reach and coverage. Newark refuses to be a city that accepts that some residents will inevitably experience prolonged homelessness. We have committed to tackling this head on by bringing services directly to those that need them most.
Low-Barrier Transitional Housing
Following the success of a pilot program in 2021, Mayor Baraka charged the Office of Homeless Services to create communities that followed a low-barrier housing model that serves unsheltered Newark residents.
In early 2024, we opened Newark’s newest community called “Come As You Are: Bridge Housing Community,” which would focus on helping residents move off the streets and begin their journey toward a permanent home.
We engaged the surrounding community to inform the design and assembled a creative team of professionals to bring this innovative project to life. Such meaningful resident input and professional talent combined to create an advanced housing model intended to encourage a “come as you are” transition into a new supportive community.
The project consists of 12 shipping containers, which were converted into four clusters of residential units with dorm-style rooms, private shower facilities and communal spaces for 20 chronically homeless Newark residents. The community has an administrative office for support staff and a multipurpose space for resident engagement and interaction. The grounds include a park space for gatherings and relaxation, as well as community gardens and greenhouses where food and nutrition education and aeroponics workshops take place.
We are continuing our mission to create more communities that serve our most vulnerable. In seeking an even better design, we partnered with the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Hillier College of Architecture to develop a third model. Students and instructors led the design of this community and outlined four guiding principles to drive the design: privacy, security, storage and dignity.
The final design is called Resilient Hope, a village of 12 dwelling units housing 25 individuals, two support structures and one public-facing community building, intended to house some of Newark’s most vulnerable residents without addresses.
We have since partnered with development professionals to bring this design to life. To date, we have secured city land and funding and have begun to engage the community with the goal of beginning this project in 2025.
Newark Forward
“Newark Forward” is one of the city’s proud sayings that remind us to keep pushing and working on Newark’s most pressing issues. We are moving boldly forward in 2025. We are planning to significantly increase the number of transitional beds for chronically homeless residents through new partnerships and projects and begin construction of a new state-of-the-art 8,000 sq. ft. drop-in and resource center in downtown Newark. We have an ambitious goal to end chronic homelessness in our city, but we passionately believe that it can be done by continuing to collaborate across our community. Together, we will move forward and achieve this goal.
Explore Housing Resources from NLC
National League of Cities’ Ending Homelessness: A Guide for Local Governments provides an overview of the homelessness crisis facing U.S. communities, why it’s happening and how cities can work with partners to shape solutions.
Using Disaggregated Data to Improve Delivery of Homelessness Services and Housing
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Explore New NLC University Courses
NLCU: Supporting Small-Scale Development
Ending Homelessness: A Guide for Local Governments
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