Coalition Launches CT Can End Homelessness Legislative Agenda

by Jamil Ragland CTNewsJunkie

HARTFORD, CT – A broad coalition of legislators, housing advocates, and frontline workers called on Gov. Ned Lamont and the General Assembly on Friday to increase funding to tackle the growing number of Connecticut residents experiencing homelessness.

State Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, D-Avon and Sarah Fox, CEO of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness (CCEH), introduced their legislative agenda for 2025 titled “Connecticut Can End Homelessness.” Kavros DeGraw said that the realities of homelessness exist in her district, even though people have to travel into the cities to receive services.

“This is not something that should only be on our cities,” she said. “This is all of us. This is our entire state. We should all care about each and every last of the nearly 5,000 people who are currently without a home. And we are very purposely using the word home, because think about what is conjured up in your own mind when you hear the word home. It is a human right to have at home, to feel safe.”

Fox shared her own experience with homelessness to underscore the need to help keep residents from going through the same struggles. 

“When we talk about people experiencing homelessness, we’re just not talking about someone else. We’re talking about our people. We’re talking about me,” she said. “I’ve experienced homelessness. I’ve seen the impact that homelessness has on education. So together this year we’re leaning into preventing homelessness before it begins, ensuring a crisis response with strong providers who can get the job done and staff who are paid what they need so that they can have affordable housing and wages to thrive, and housing so that we can ensure every single person in our community can thrive.”

Sarah Fox, CEO of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, speaks to reporters about her own experience with homelessness on Friday, Jan. 10, 2025, at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford. Credit: Jamil Ragland / CTNewsJunkie

Their legislative agenda calls for a $33.5 million investment for fiscal year 2026 in three critical areas. Prevention services would receive $7.8 million, annualized to support eviction prevention partnerships and flexible funding to provide short-term financial assistance to individuals on the brink of homelessness.

Crisis response services would receive $19.5 million, $10.5 million of which would be annualized to support cold weather emergency services and support for Coordinated Access Network (CAN) hubs, which provide direct services to prevent homelessness. The other $9 million would support the state’s Homeless Response System.

Finally, an annualized $6.2 million would support case management for permanent supportive housing.

The agenda also includes policy priorities, including codifying the Connecticut Interagency Council on Homelessness, implementing alternatives to ticketing, fining, and arresting people experiencing homelessness, and creating tax incentives for landlords to offer rental units to individuals experiencing homelessness.

Christina Lewin, the shelter manager at the St. Vincent de Paul Mission of Bristol, spoke as both a frontline worker in the homeless response system and as someone who has experienced homelessness firsthand to ask the legislature to support annualized flexible funding.

“The stigma surrounding homelessness needs to change,” she said. “The narratives must shift from blaming and stigmatizing to understanding and supporting. When we view homelessness through a lens of compassion and recognize the root causes we can then begin to approach the issue with more empathy and more effective solutions.”

Lewin explained that in 2002 she found herself without a home with her then 6-month-old son. 

“The homelessness response system provided us with the support we desperately needed,” she said. “The services we received helped us find stability and that stability allowed us to rebuild our lives. Today I am proud to say that my son is the first generation who graduated from UConn in August 2014.”

She said that the reality of homelessness today is far broader and more complex due to unaffordable monthly rents, inflation and earned wages not being enough to cover the rise in housing costs. She said the annualized flexible funding would allow for investment in programs and services that can help prevent people from losing their homes in the first place. 

“My own experience with homelessness has taught me with the right support there is hope,” she said. 

Carmen Colon, CEO of Pacific House in Stamford, spoke passionately about her long struggle to secure annual cold weather emergency funding.

“33 years asking for cold-weather funding. We are in New England. We have winter every year. We have an unfunded mandate for all of us to have to bring everybody in. It is not a problem to bring those individuals in. It is a sin that the next morning we have to say to those individuals who are in our shelters and our warming centers, you have to leave.”

CCEH is also partnering with the Partnership for Strong Communities (PSC) in its push to confront rising homelessness in Connecticut. Chelsea Ross, executive director of the partnership, said in an interview that there are other policy levers to push to help keep residents in their home.

“There’s two areas of our agenda, the expansion of funding for the state rental assistance program and the expansion of just cause eviction protections, that are two really powerful tools to prevent and end homelessness in our state,” she said. “We know rental assistance works because it’s been working for a really long time nationally and in Connecticut because rental assistance directly addresses housing affordability immediately by bridging the gap between what a household can afford and what we’ve seen is the rising cost of rent.”

She said the state-funded rental assistance program, also known as RAP, prioritizes individuals and families who are at imminent risk of homelessness and others who have particularly challenging or particularly significant challenges to housing stability. She noted that Connecticut is one of the very few states that has a state-funded rental assistance program, but that PSC would be looking to the federal level to see what kinds of cuts might be coming to federal rent assistance programs under the incoming administration.

“We’re lucky to have a pretty supportive delegation as well, but that doesn’t mean we take our eyes off at the national level,” she said.