On a winter night in Connecticut, people are sleeping in cars in mall parking lots, behind office parks, and in wooded strips that most residents pass every day without noticing. It is easy to look away. The numbers make that harder.
Connecticut’s Homeless Management Information System counted 3,735 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2025, including 833 living entirely unsheltered. That unsheltered figure is up 45 percent in one year and 183 percent since 2022. This is not a stable problem. It is getting worse, and Connecticut has no single person responsible for stopping it.
The people who become homeless do not all arrive there the same way, and they do not all need the same response.
A single mother working two part-time jobs, neither offering benefits or predictable hours, can be pushed into homelessness by a sudden rent increase. She needs stable, affordable housing, and she needs it to exist somewhere she can afford it. A construction worker whose opioid use began with a legitimate prescription after a workplace injury may lose the prescription before he loses the dependency. He needs housing, too, but housing by itself may not be enough to keep him in it.
A veteran may carry trauma that makes crowded shelters, constant noise, and unfamiliar people feel less like refuge than threat. A young person aging out of foster care may have no family safety net, no savings, and no practice holding together rent, work, transportation, and daily life. A person leaving incarceration may be rejected before he even gets started. A domestic violence survivor does not just need a roof. She needs a place her abuser cannot find, protection that does not fail when he comes looking, and a real chance of disappearing long enough to stay alive.
This is why homelessness cannot be solved by one program, one slogan, or one theory. It requires a system that can assess who someone is, what they need, and route them to the right combination of housing, treatment, supervision, and support. Connecticut has dozens of agencies and overlapping funding streams, but too little unified authority, too little coordination, and too little accountability for results.
Housing is still a major part of the problem. Connecticut’s rate of housing construction dropped from roughly 14,000 units per year in the 1980s to about 4,000 in the 2010s, a steep decline. Developers build what zoning allows and what the market rewards, and neither reliably produces the small, lower-cost units many people need.
But the obstacle is not only zoning language on paper. It is also the sustained, organized resistance of communities that do not want any additional housing near them. Across Connecticut, residents have shown up at zoning hearings, lobbied local officials, and applied political pressure to block projects. A family that stretched to buy a home in a community with good schools and lower crime has understandable reasons to want to protect that investment. But the cumulative effect of thousands of such decisions is disastrous. Connecticut gives municipalities sweeping control over land use, making the shortage extremely difficult to solve town by town. The state has to take a larger role.
Texas recently moved in that direction by passing legislation to make it easier, in certain larger cities, to build housing in commercially zoned areas and to convert some office buildings to residential use. Connecticut has its own inventory of vacant office parks, closed malls, and underused commercial buildings with existing utilities, parking, and infrastructure. A similar policy here could make it easier to adapt some of those properties for transitional shelter or permanent housing without years of delay and repeated local fights. The goal is not unlimited development. It is sensible, strategic growth in places already built for human use.
It is important to note that adding affordable housing will help more than the homeless.
History does caution that building housing is not sufficient on its own.
Chicago’s high-rise 1950s public housing projects failed due to concentrated poverty, high crime rates, poor living conditions, and mismanagement. The towers were eventually demolished. Hartford’s Charter Oak Terrace, built in the 1940s and demolished by 1998, showed what happens when housing is constructed without sustained management, adequate services, and accountability. The lesson is not that public investment in housing is a mistake. It is that housing without the surrounding support fails.
Housing First has produced real results by placing people into permanent housing without first requiring sobriety or treatment completion. But for many people, housing alone is not enough. Some will also need treatment, supervision, case management, or a protected transitional setting to keep them housed. The single mother may stabilize quickly if she simply has a safe place to land. The construction worker with untreated addiction may not.
That is why the most important model is not a single program but a system. Houston’s “The Way Home” reduced homelessness 60% over roughly a decade because it built a coordinated existing interventions more coherently. Data was shared. Resources were directed more strategically. Someone was in a position to see the whole picture.
Connecticut’s governor should establish, by executive order, a single Office of Homelessness Coordination led by a named director who reports directly to the governor and is responsible for results. It should have the authority to coordinate homelessness-related efforts across public, private, and nonprofit agencies, align funding decisions, require common reporting, and build a shared operating system for the people and organizations working on the problem. Not a task force. Not a working group. A permanent office with real authority.
The Houston playbook, adapted for a smaller and different state, is as good a place to start as any. What few Connecticut residents would have predicted is that some of the clearest lessons in social services coordination would come from Texas.
Barry Dexter lives in the Unionville section of Farmington.