Homelessness is often the result of a single setback. Often, a brief financial shock like a missed paycheck, an unexpected expense, an injury, or a short gap in benefits pushes individuals and households over the edge.
In Connecticut, people are flooding into the homeless response system. Unsheltered homelessness rose by 45% last year alone. We can address this through proven strategies that prevent homelessness before it starts or rapidly resolve it, like flexible funding.
Flexible funding provides fast, targeted financial assistance that can be tailored to a household’s immediate needs, whether that means covering a car payment, utilities, legal services, or a short-term housing gap. It works because it intervenes in the critical windows of time before someone loses their home or immediately after—before the many traumas and day-to-day difficulties of homelessness make it even harder to regain housing.
Too often, systems are designed to respond only after a solvable situation has become a catastrophe. By waiting until after the critical periods surrounding an instance of housing instability pass, governments lock themselves into the most expensive possible interventions: shelter beds, emergency rooms, and crisis services. Flexible funding reverses that logic. It allows modest, timely investments to address a temporary setback before it becomes something far more intractable.
Canada offers proof at scale. In British Columbia, rent banks step in at the precise moment eviction is looming. When prevention is available, people remain housed, continue paying rents well below current market rates, and avoid the cascade of losses that follow displacement, including higher housing costs, moving expenses, lost possessions, and, for many, homelessness itself.
Ontario’s Bridge Funding program follows the same principle: a small rental top-up paired with case management has kept hundreds of households housed at a fraction of the cost of shelter-based responses. One person avoiding homelessness through eviction prevention costs one-sixth as much in healthcare and one-third as much for shelter. This means that each dollar spent on eviction prevention results in five dollars in savings. These programs reveal that not only is prevention cheaper, but that homelessness is often a policy choice: the predictable outcome of delayed intervention.
In Connecticut, programs like the Eviction Prevention Fund and other emergency rental assistance efforts step in when renters are on the brink of losing their homes, providing targeted financial support to cover overdue rent and stabilize housing, and budgeting guidance. But these efforts remain constrained by limited funding and inconsistent availability, leaving too many households without help until it’s too late. UniteCT’s Moving Assistance Program, which provided invaluable financial assistance for security deposits to thousands of eligible Connecticut households, ended in early 2025. The result is not just preventable homelessness, but preventable strain on shelters, hospitals, and municipal budgets.
The pressure is especially acute in Fairfield County, where rents have risen by 50 to 65 percent since before the pandemic. In Danbury, the hourly wage needed to afford a two-bedroom apartment reached $42.71 in 2025 —nearly $90,000 a year— while more than half of working families struggle to cover basic expenses. Rent increases have outpaced wages, leaving little room to save for emergencies or the costs of moving to more affordable housing.
That’s why organizations such as Catholic Charities of Fairfield County and Opening Doors Fairfield County are urging lawmakers to consider an annual $10 million Housing Crisis Response Fund. Framed not as charity but as prevention, the proposal reflects a broader fiscal reality: investing in housing stability upfront can reduce far higher public costs down the line.
In Danbury, Catholic Charities’ Diversion Specialists connect with individuals and households on the verge of homelessness to stabilize their situations quickly and keep them out of an already overburdened shelter system. Flexible funding is critical to this effort. A modest, one-time payment, averaging around $3,000 for a security deposit or first month’s rent can secure stable housing and prevent far greater personal and public costs.
Connecticut already knows what works. What’s missing is scale and commitment. As housing costs rise and financial precarity becomes more common, prevention programs remain underfunded, fragmented, or reactive. If policymakers are serious about reducing homelessness and managing public costs, flexible funding must move from the margins to the center of housing policy. That means investing earlier and funding prevention and rapid resolution at a level that matches the size of the problem.
The choice is clear: we can keep paying more for homelessness after it happens, or we can spend less, sooner, to stop it from happening at all.
Paul Lipp is Senior Director of Housing and Homeless Services, Catholic Charities of Fairfield County. Jessica Kubicki is Chief Initiative Officer of Opening Doors, Fairfield County.