Mayor Davis Leads Missoula’s Efforts to House Homeless Veterans

Missoula, MT (KGVO-AM News) - Recently, the City of Missoula and other community partners took on the challenge of finding housing for homeless veterans called the ‘Built for Zero Housing Dash’.

Mayor Andrea Davis held an informal press conference in her office on Tuesday to talk about the success of the program, along with Montana James, (Deputy Director CPDI) Emily Armstrong, (Houseless Program Manager), and Dylan Barbash (Built for Zero Specialist).

Davis began with a brief description of the Built for Zero Housing Dash.

“Built for Zero is a consortium of more than 100 cities and counties around the United States who are committed to measurably ending homelessness by making it a rare and brief experience for individuals and families by fine-tuning local homeless response systems,” began Mayor Davis. “It's a project of the nonprofit Community Solutions that the city of Missoula joined in 2022.”

Davis called the effort ‘a housing sprint’.

“We want to talk specifically today about this initiative that we undertook over the course of the holidays,” she said. “It was called ‘House for the Holidays’, and it was a housing sprint. It was an opportunity for us to work alongside other communities in a fun and competitive way to see how many folks we could get into homes over the course of 60 days, and we housed 12 military veterans in those 60 days.”

Davis said the effort was indeed a challenge; a race against time and a race to help homeless veterans.

“It was labor intensive, and it really requires rolling up our sleeves, too, but we have shown what we can do, and we talk about this quite a bit, that we are constantly in an iterative (repeating something again and again) state when it comes to addressing houselessness and homelessness,” she said. “The issues are multi-faceted. The solutions also need to be multi-faceted. We need to take a look at what we have been doing. Are those practices effective? If they are great, let's continue them if we can; if they're not, then how do we pivot to be innovative in this space?”

Mayor Davis thanked the members of the Built for Zero team for their efforts to accomplish the goal.

“More than anything, I want to congratulate the staff and our team for this effort,” she said. “Dylan Barbash will tell you that he doesn't even have sleeves anymore because he rolled them up so far in order to get all this work done. Emily Armstrong and her team for just the vision for bringing in this greater capacity to our community in terms of technical assistance, in terms of planning, and then really being able to get these initiatives deployed to see what works, and all of this under Montana (James’) leadership, this and a number of different strategies that we have here at the city to try to continue to make homelessness rare, brief and one time only.”

According to the website ‘Built for Zero”, over 100 cities (including Missoula) have committed to measurably ending homelessness.

Missoula came out on top for the Housing Dash title by defeating Placer Valley, California; Marin County, California; Washoe County, Nevada; and Nevada County, California.