On Las Vegas Boulevard just south of Charleston, a cold light streams into the lobby of Hebron housing community, illuminating shelves—some empty and some neatly stocked with canned goods, dry pasta and beans, boxes of apples, instant mac and cheese and hygiene products.

“Happy New Year!” a tenant greets Merideth Spriggs, sitting behind the front desk. “You’re open tomorrow, right?”

“Happy New Year!” replies a smiling Spriggs, founder and chief kindness officer of Hebron’s umbrella organization Caridad. “We are! Ten to three, but I’ll be here earlier.” She continues to chat about the best places to watch the fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

It’s just before 10 a.m. on an overcast Friday, and Spriggs has been at her post for a few hours sorting mail, processing rent checks, directing deliveries and guests and monitoring a grid of about 20 security cameras throughout the low-income and transitional housing complex in the city’s urban core.

“Most people don’t really cause me drama here, because they want to just come in and use the food pantry and charge their phone,” she explains.

Spriggs founded her nonprofit in San Diego in 2010 with a mission to “humanize the homeless.” When the charity moved to Vegas in 2014, they began doing street outreach Downtown and leading a federal program focusing on veteran and chronic homelessness. In 2019, Caridad launched a job training program, Caridad Gardens, for veterans and folks transitioning out of homelessness, she says.

The organization assumed operations of the 124-unit low-income housing at Hebron this year.

“We have workforce dorm housing here, where they’re in roommate situations. So our team can literally meet somebody, put them in here and, within 30 days, get them their identifying documents, working full-time and paying their own way in their own apartment here,” Spriggs says. “Everybody pays rent.”

“How much do you charge for a room?” one visitor inquires. Spriggs says it’s based on income, but the standard rate is $785. “We have a three-month waiting list,” she gently explains.

‘A Housing Problem’

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), affordable housing is defined as housing for which the tenant or household is paying no more than 30% of their income. Advocates say when a household spends more than 30% of its income on housing expenses including utilities and repairs, other basic needs can suffer, including health care, nutrition, transportation and the ability to perform at school and at work.

Nevada’s lack of affordable housing—particularly in the Las Vegas metropolitan area— is one explanation for ongoing homelessness in the region. According to a 2022 report from the nonprofit National Low Income Housing Coalition, the state had the highest percentage (81%) of extremely low-income renters with “severe cost burdens,” followed by Florida (80%), California, Oregon and Arizona (76%).

More than 97,000 or one-fifth of Nevada renters earn 0% to 30% of area median income. (That’s less than $20,000, per the latest federal data.) Of that group, 81% are severely cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than half their income on housing costs, per the report.

Households that do not make enough income to pay rent—a number that has spiked in Southern Nevada since the pandemic—are at risk of eviction and becoming homeless. A 2020 census and survey of homeless individuals found that 47% of respondents who reported experiencing homelessness for the first time said they “lost their housing because they could no longer afford it.”

“Homelessness is a housing problem,” says Clark County Social Services Manager Michele Fuller-Hallauer. “Without safe, accessible, affordable housing, we will not solve this issue.”

According to Southern Nevada Homeless Continuum of Care, a network of local organizations and government agencies in charge of coordinating funding for homeless services and transitional housing, more than 6,000 people experience homelessness in Southern Nevada on any given night.

Fuller-Hallauer says the pandemic presented opportunities to “test” new approaches and interventions. Its Operation Home initiative set an “audacious” goal to “house 2,022 high-risk unhoused community members by the end of 2022.”

“We exceeded that stretch goal,” Fuller-Hallauer says. “And that has helped us to really move the needle on some things … that, moving forward, will become part of interventions and will become standardized. That was our community. Providers really stepped up, and landlords have partnered with us.”

She adds that state and local officials made “strides” in 2022, mentioning former Gov. Steve Sisolak’s allocation of $500 million in American Rescue Plan funds for affordable housing projects.

Last year, Clark County also made hefty investments by initiating a Community Housing Fund with $160 million to help developers with gap financing, and to create incentives for more building. The county announced that the first round of awards, totaling $120 million, was expected to lead to the construction of about 3,100 affordable housing units for low-income families and seniors.

2023 Point-In-Time Count

Depending on construction, it can take several months before people can move into new affordable housing.

In the meantime, the Continuum of Care is seeking 600 volunteers for its annual Point-In-Time Count to assess the current situation. The regional census of the homeless population is scheduled for January 26, and is required by HUD to determine funding for transitional housing and homeless services.

“During the pandemic, we had to modify the methodology because of … not wanting volunteers to be out and get potential exposure,” Fuller-Hallauer explains. “[This year], we’ll be going to our traditional method—full-on canvassing that we have done previously.”

Volunteers will be trained, assigned to predetermined deployment areas and asked to look for and count the number of homeless people there. They’ll also be asked to conduct surveys, to determine demographics information and factors that contributed to lost housing.

While the Continuum of Care phases out of pandemic mode, it also awaits the distribution of $15 million in federal funds for programs to “reduce unsheltered homelessness.” The Continuum of Care submitted a final application to HUD in October, according to documents on its website.

Fuller-Hallauer says that money will be used for “various types of outreach, including medical and street outreach … some supportive and wraparound services that help people connect to services and get housing … rapid rehousing projects and permanent supportive housing projects.”

Such services help people move toward stability and can be the difference between life and death for those experiencing homelessness, Spriggs says.

In December, Hebron hosted a vigil in partnership with the outreach group Straight From the Streets, recognizing hundreds of lives lost as a result of homelessness. In one particularly moving moment, she says, a resident named Andrew “shared his story … and the fact that he knew he was going to die on the streets if he had not come into our housing.

“It’s just so full circle that Straight From the Streets got him the house, and he got to share at the homeless vigil,” Spriggs says. “He wasn’t a statistic.”

This original version of this story was updated to correct the year Caridad was founded. 

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