Dominic Anthony Walsh, HPM
Dave sits on a chair next to a shopping cart full of his belongings on Bagby Street in Houston’s Midtown in March 2025.
Exactly one year after its creation by the Houston City Council, Mayor John Whitmire’s “Initiative to End Street Homelessness Fund” has fallen dramatically short of its goal.
The administration hoped to raise $70 million when the fund was approved Feb. 26, 2025. Over the first year, it raised about $31 million — and it’s unclear if the funding sources from the past year are coming back.
The largest outside contributor, the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County (METRO), said a final decision hasn’t been made about renewing its funding.
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“The question of renewing METRO’s $10 million contribution is part of a broader partnership discussion, and those conversations are anticipated in the near future,” a spokesperson wrote.
A spokesperson for the Houston First Corporation, which supported the reallocation of $2.6 million to the homelessness initiative last year, wrote, “We have not had any subsequent conversations with the administration on this matter.”
A spokesperson for the Houston Downtown Management District described last year’s $1 million contribution to the fund as “one-time,” writing it “was meant to address an immediate funding gap and launch ongoing engagement with partners we are still working actively with to solve policy, funding, and housing challenges.”
Harris County last year approved $16 million for homeless services and eviction protection but refused to tie those dollars to the city’s fund. The county’s housing director, Thao Costis, told Houston Public Media at the time, “We’re trying to contribute to the bigger end street homelessness plan — we’re just not calling it the mayor’s plan.”
The $20 million sought from private philanthropy never materialized.
The shortfall in the fund — intended to support outreach, case management services and permanent housing — marked a blow to Whitmire’s ambitious plan to erase chronic homelessness by the end of 2026.
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At the news conference where the city unveiled its homelessness initiative in late 2024, housing director Mike Nichols said, “The only constraints we have to ending homelessness on the streets lies in the funding and the collaboration.”
Around the same time the fund was created last year, the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston and Harris County counted about 3,000 unhoused people in Harris County, including about 1,200 people living on the street.
In an interview with Houston Public Media in January, Nichols for the first time said the $70 million goal “probably has to be reevaluated.”
“We feel comfortable that the city’s portion is going to be maximized,” he said. “Anything we can move toward homelessness, we are trying to do that. I think that is an important number.”
Dominic Anthony Walsh/Houston Public Media
Trazawell Franklin, left, and April Jamarillo, right, sit in front of the SEARCH Homeless Services center on Nov. 11, 2025.
Over the past year, the city of Houston repurposed about $14 million in federal funding for the homeless initiative. But when it comes to purely local dollars from the $3 billion general fund, the city contributed $3.5 million to the specialized homeless fund. It also used at least $3.5 million from the homeless fund to pay expenses for the Navigation Center — a city-funded shelter and services center previously supported by the general fund. So the contribution was essentially canceled out.
“I do not see the general fund portion growing for at least two years,” Nichols said. “What I see is us using our federal funds very wisely and very focused. I’m hopeful that state funds will sometime grow in the future. And I think the federal funds will, too, because of Houston’s ability to properly utilize those funds.”
In the near term, an additional $41 million of federal disaster recovery dollars — part of $315 million awarded after the derecho wind event and Hurricane Beryl in 2024 — will support outreach, case management, social services and shelter beds.
About half of that will go toward one of Whitmire’s flagship projects to address homelessness — a 240-bed shelter and service hub at 419 Emancipation Ave. in East Downtown. It’s the lynchpin in the city’s plan to address street homelessness.
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The $16 million property is expected to operate on a budget of $10 million to $14 million per year. The federal disaster recovery funds will underwrite the majority of expenses for the first two years of operations.
Beyond 2028, the plan for the facility at 419 Emancipation is hazy. The city has identified a wide range of potential funding sources — many of which failed to materialize over the past year, including private philanthropy and funding from the state.
Still, Nichols remained optimistic.
“I’d say that we haven’t moved as fast as I’ve wanted, but we certainly have moved in the right direction,” he said.