PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island – Homelessness is a complex problem, and often includes a constellation of issues, including substance abuse, mental illness and unemployment.

But a new strategy has emerged in Providence: Ignore the other problems and provide housing first.

Longtime advocates for the homeless were way of the approach. When Don Boucher got involved with the Housing First project, which puts homeless people in affordable housing without preconditions, he was skeptical that it would succeed.

Nor did he ever expect that it could save thousands of dollars per person on the emergency services that are provided to the homeless.

“I complained that they were taking away my teeth," said the program director of Housing First RI/Riverwood Mental Health Services.

Prior to the launch of the program in 2006, being sober and drug-free were preconditions for getting into housing, and Boucher was able to take punitive action against those who disobeyed the rules. But there was a very low success rate under the old system, with the overwhelming majority of tenants ending up back on the street.

“It is typically very difficult to get people to sort out the problems that accompany homelessness before they got into housing,” said Karen Jeffreys, spokeswoman for the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless.

Under the Housing First program, as long as tenants obey the rules that apply to tenants in normal housing, they can do what they want.

“With the old system if they broke the rules we could throw them out into the street in January, which didn’t solve anything,” Boucher said. “Now if I turn up and they’re drinking alcohol, they can say ‘go away, it’s my place and I can do what I want.”

Boucher was surprised by the results of the program. It has had a 90 percent success rate among the 130 c

hronically homeless people who have been given affordable housing as part of Housing First. As well as staying in their apartments and paying rent, around 20 percent have jobs.

Up to 60 percent of those given accommodation under the Housing First program are incapable of work due to mental and physical disabilities, but everyone pays rent, equivalent to a third of their income or benefits. And Boucher said they are all doing better.

“Their health is better, their hope is higher and their substance abuse is down,” he said. “It’s a great model and has been a great success wherever it’s been implemented.”

According to a study by Eric Hirsch of Providence College and Irene Glasser of Roger Williams University, the Housing First program in Rhode Island has led to a reduction in hospital emergency room visits, detoxification services, prison services and homeless shelter use. They said the average savings per person for the first year after they entered the program was nearly $8,000.

April Metts, 39 (above), who has been living in an apartment provided by Housing First for two and a half years said that it had transformed her life.

“I am so lucky to have had this opportunity,” she said. “I’ll do everything it takes to stay in this apartment.”

Across the city, Amos House, which runs a soup kitchen and provides temporary housing for the homeless, has a cooking course and carpentry program that provides the homeless with skills to help them find employment. Of the eight students who graduated from the last three-month carpentry class in September, four have so far found work.

Jim Webster has a group of students working on a house across the road from the Amos House, which will be used to house mothers and children who have been victims of domestic abuse.

“When they finish this course they could easily be hired as carpentry assistants,” he said. “Or they may be able to make a living out on their own fitting windows and doing other work.”

Phal Phann, 30, is scraping the kitchen walls ready for painting and says the course has been very useful for him.

“This is definitely going to help me a whole lot,” he said. “Once I’m done here this will help me look for a job.”

Photos by Brian Snyder

Click here for more Route to Recovery

Reuters Photographer Lucy Nicholson captured these images and stories along the Route to Recovery.

DALLAS, Texas – Frankie Walton is as smart as I am stupid.

Frankie called me on Saturday night while Lucy and I were driving around northwest Arkansas on our way to an interview.

“Is that Mr. Nicholas Carey?” Frankie asked. “Have you lost your passport, Mr Carey?”

Excuse me?

He repeated the question and after a moment of blank incomprehension I realized: Yes, I had.

Frankie, an American Airlines employee, told me that my passport was at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, where we had made our connecting flight from Austin. He wanted to know how to get my passport to me and when I said that I was coming back through Dallas two days later, he told me where it would be because he would not be there when I landed before 8am.

I asked how on earth it was that he had tracked me down. Frankie responded that using my passport he had located my reservation, which included my cell phone number. He could have just taken the passport to the lost and found office, but he went above and beyond the call of duty to track me down.

I had to use my international driver’s license to get back to Dallas, which involved a few tense moments trying to get through security (Note to self: time to get a U.S. license).

The kind American Airlines lady at the gate informed me of where I was going to land at Dallas, where I could pick up my passport and where I was expected to fly out of. If we landed on time I could just about make it.

Not only did we land on time, but I made it to the gate where my passport was kept. I was introduced to Frankie’s supervisor, who eyed me rather warily when she was told I was a customer who wanted to talk to her.

Her face brightened immediately as I launched into a grateful babble about how great it was that Frankie had found me.

Through all of this I was far more lucky than I deserve. Thank you, Frankie.

After decades of growth, Austin’s future success may come down to one thing: the University of Texas.

“The future of the U.S. economy lies in becoming a knowledge-based economy,” said Michael Rollins, head of the Austin Chamber of Commerce. “UT will be the key to our future.”

“Much of America’s basic manufacturing has gone overseas and we can’t compete on cost with other countries for that manufacturing,” he explained. “But we can still design the products that get manufactured.”

Austin – also the state capital and thus home to the state government – has grown dramatically in recent decades, driven in large part by UT. The city has gone from being a middling city of a few hundred thousand dominated by state government in the 1970s to one with a population of 1.5 million. The Austin metropolitan area led the country in job creation from 2003 to 2008.

Former mayor Lee Cooke says that this has been a deliberate strategy over the decades to make Austin a destination for hi-tech and other cutting-edge industries – companies like Apple, IBM and Samsung have facilities here – plus encouraging an eclectic and lively musical culture.

“For a long time what we have been all about is kowtowing to the creative classes,” Cooke said.

The cornerstone of that strategy has been the University of Texas with its 50,000 students and its research facilities, which Michael Rollins said has been a great draw for prospective employers.

From 2004 to 2008, 144 companies relocated to Austin, including 17 software companies and 13 life science firms.

The University of Texas has just reached an affiliation agreement with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas that will bring medical students and research that Rollins said should attract more medical and life science companies here.

Gary Farmer, president of title insurance firm Heritage Title Company of Austin Inc, said that keeping educated students in Austin using a top university and research center will be vital to the city’s growth as retaining young people in the state.

“We can ill afford to send our best and brightest to research centers in other states,” Farmer said.

Texas State Senator Kirk Watson (a Democrat) talks about the University of Texas in industrial terms, referring to this institute as the “mind factory.”

“Now the asset is the mind,” he said. “What is going to happen with ever greater frequency is that if you’re trying to lure cutting-edge companies to your community, you won’t even be in the game unless you can show them that asset.”

For much of the latter part of the 20th century, there was an easy path into the middle class in America via blue-collar manufacturing jobs where workers could make a decent wage with relatively low skills.

But as American manufacturing jobs have dwindled, it has become increasingly difficult to live that particular American dream. Dave Porter, head of economic development at the Austin Chamber of Commerce, said this latest recession has all but ended that way of life,

“That easy shot into the middle class is gone,” he said. “Now the way into the middle class is going to be through a good education.”

“For those communities in America without a top university with a research center, life is going to get pretty tough down the line,” he added.

Photos by Jessica Rinaldi and Lucy Nicholson

Click here for more Route to Recovery

MARLIN, Texas – Our journey to Kosse, Texas, to see the food bank in operation took us through Falls County, which is one of the poorest counties in America.

And it showed, with rural decay all too evident as we drove through the area.

We passed through the town of Marlin, just 30 miles from Waco, where the siege at the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel in 1993 ended in a fire that killed 76 people. Four agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and six Davidians were also killed in a firefight.

Marlin’s main street looks like it has been struck by a disaster and it has, though the disaster here is purely economic.  Most of the shop fronts are closed and faded, a sad echo of an era gone by when this was clearly a bustling little town.

Apart from agriculture, the town thrived in the late 19th century with the discovery of mineral water said to have curative qualities. For a time the town took the moniker of the “Mineral Water City of Texas.”

Those days are gone, as is clear from the nearly deserted main street.

Even worse of is the small village of Chilton, some 10 miles away, where the only business open on the main street is a branch of the U.S. Post Office. All of the other buildings along the road are in an advanced state of decay.

Figures from the U.S. Census Bureau tell a tale of decline in Falls County.

The median household income in Falls County in 2007 was $30,265, some 40 percent lower than the national median income of $50,740. The poverty rate in Falls County is nearly 28 percent, more than double the national rate of 13 percent.

Even more important, and an ominous sign for the future of this area, the population of Falls County fell 9 percent between 2000 and 2008, while the population of America grew 8 percent during the same period.

Traveling through this area was a saddening experience, all the more so because the ruins of Marlin’s main street are a depressing reminder of how prosperous this community once was.

Picture of a farmer preparing to work on his fields in Marlin by Lucy Nicholson

Click here for more stories from the Route to Recovery

AUSTIN, Texas – Chris Perry says that virtually everything that is wrong with Austin’s office property market is global.

“The problems we’re facing are not local in the making,” said Perry, a realtor at AQUILA Commercial, LLC.

The freezing up of the credit markets following the implosion of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 plus the virtual collapse of the global financial sector have left this market in suspended animation. That's occurred even though Austin has lower unemployment than the national average and none of the structural problems of northern industrial cities like Detroit.

Austin’s housing market has also got off lightly. While some parts of America have seen steep drops in property prices, the median home price in Austin was down just 0.1 percent in the second quarter.

But nothing is happening in the office property market here.

“We haven’t seen a single major transaction in this area this year because no one really knows what properties are really worth,” said Michael Kennedy, president of commercial real estate company Commercial Texas.

Gary Farmer, president of title insurance firm Heritage Title Company of Austin Inc, described the office property market as “constipated.”

“The capital markets are in disarray, debt is hard to come by so everyone is waiting for the market to settle and find out what is the new normal,” he said. “Things are pretty much frozen right now.”

Nationally, some analysts believe that the office property market, and commercial real estate as a whole, has yet to truly suffer following the crisis in U.S. residential real estate.

According to Perry, part of the problem in the office market is that sellers and prospective buyers have vastly different expectations.

“There is a major disconnect between what sellers think they can get for a property and what the vultures out there think they can pay for a property,” he said. “The real value lies somewhere in between, but no one has got there yet.”

Perry said there are doubtless financially distressed office property owners out there who are holding on for now, but cannot do so forever if the market doesn’t pick up.

“There has yet to be some kind of reckoning in the market,” he said. “The majority of people in this business still think that the worst is yet to come.”

Photo by Lucy Nicholson

Click here for more from the Route to Recovery

KOSSE, Texas – By the time the mobile food pantry rolls to a halt in this struggling rural community of 479 people, the parking lot of the local social hall is already full and a line of people snakes out of the door.

Half a dozen ladies in their 50s and 60s swarms the truck and within minutes they have set up tables and are bagging up food with an efficiency and single-mindedness that is impressive to watch.

The Capital Area Food Bank of Texas, which covers 21 counties and an area twice the size of the state of Massachusetts, makes monthly visits to Kosse. Every month this year it has set new records for the amount of food it hands out -- currently about 2.2 million tons. CEO David Davenport said he expects that number to rise as unemployment forces ever more people to become “food insecure.”

“The makeup of the hunger line has changed a great deal over the past two years,” he said. “We’re seeing more educated people and those who have been laid of in well-paying industries like the tech sector.”

“These are people we would never have expected to see lining up for food two years ago,” Davenport added.

The food bank has seen a 60 percent increase in demand for free food and in some places, including parts of the state capitol Austin, demand is up 300 percent.

Jason Steelman, 32, who is here with his girlfriend Amber Nash, 22, was a computer software analyst – a trade he picked up in the armed forces – but hasn’t worked in his chosen field for more than three years. He managed to make ends meet working as a truck driver, but the recession put paid to that job.

“All the work that’s left in this area is either seasonal jobs on the farms or working at gas stations,” he said. “We have three kids between us to feed and it’s tough to put enough food on the table.”

As Texas does not support the government food stamp program, the food bank is reliant on the U.S. Department of Agriculture and local donors like supermarket chain HEB.

“Without HEB we’d have problems finding enough food to hand out,” Davenport said. “On the state government level there is an unbending political belief in Texas that when you’re in trouble you have to pull yourself up by your boot straps.”

“That’s assuming that you’re not too hungry to pull them up,” he added. “Or that you even have boots.”

The first time the food bank came here six months ago, 60 families showed up for food. That number has now reached nearly 170.

According to the most recent statistics from the USDA, more than one in 10 Americans had low or very low “food security” in 2007, even before a the recession that began in December of that year. The recession may have ended in the third quarter of this year, according to recent U.S. government statistics, but one in five Texans are now hungry, as are one in four children in the Lone Star state.

“It comes down to economic hardship,” said Kosse mayor Ben Daniel. “There aren’t many jobs in this area right now. It’s hard times for folks around here.”

Danee Binion, 21, here with her seven-month-old daughter Madison, looks after her disabled mother and mentally disabled sister. Her husband works on a ranch, but the full household has stretched their means.

“We need some help to get by,” she said.

Janice Procter, 49, said that he husband, 66, is retired and just had knee surgery, and they have two children at home under the age of 18.

“We’re finding it tough to make ends meet and every little helps,” she said.

Democratic Senator Kirk Watson said that “Texas could do better in providing for its people," and that the state government must take action as the level of hunger in parts of the state has reached crisis proportions.

“Our political leadership should be ashamed of itself,” he said. “Here we are in a state that produces enough food to supply the entire country. Yet we can’t even feed our own people.”

Photos by Lucy Nicholson

AUSTIN, Texas– Even before we got to Austin, we were presented with a bold claim by residents – that Austin is home to the best Tex-Mex in the world.

We decided to put this claim to the test and, after consulting with Mike Rollins and Dave Porter of the Austin Chamber of Commerce, we chose Chuy’s.

Apart from the fact that this chain with restaurants in Texas and Tennessee comes highly recommended for the food, we were reminded that the Chuy’s restaurant nearest to us was where Jenna Bush, daughter of former President George W. Bush, ended up in trouble for underage drinking in 2001. If it was good enough for Jenna, we thought, then it was good enough for us.

A popular place – it was a long wait for a table – this Chuy’s also turned out to be a massive memorial to Elvis. Evlis posters on the walls, a guitar decorated with images of The King and a couple of full-on shrines.

One of them was located just inside the front door, complete with a blue bust of Presley with an inscription on it that read “Elvis lives.”

Our unflappable waitress Michelle told us that the Elvis shrine had built up over the years with donations from regulars customers who no longer have room for their collections at home.

“Now those customers can come here and see their Elvis memorabilia while they eat,” she said.

There is also the Elvis Presley Memorial Combo on the menu, an artery-congealing medley with enchiladas and queso wings – essentially deep-fried tortillas with melted cheese on them – which The King would doubtless have been proud to eat. Tasty, but deadly.

On the whole the food was good. The fish tacos were great, the fresh salsa with jalapenos was fiery and fantastic and the tortilla chips freshly made. Like the queso wings, the creamy jalapeno sauce was just a little odd and rather dangerous.

Definitely worth a repeat visit for the Elvis memorabilia alone. As for the claim that Austin has the world’s best Tex-Mex, our test was inconclusive, We’ll just have to come back for more.

Photos by Lucy Nicholoson

AUSTIN, Texas -- To an outside observer, it seems Austin has taken a light hit from the recession.

Unemployment here was only 7.2 percent in September, compared with a national average of 9.8 percent and 8.2 percent in the state of Texas.

“As bad as our unemployment numbers are by our standards, we have been quite lucky compared to much of the rest of the country,” said Dave Porter, senior vice president for economic development at the Austin Chamber of Commerce.

And while the housing crisis saw median house prices in the United States down 15.6 percent in the second quarter the median price in Austin was down just 0.1 percent on the year at $194,000 (after sliding to $182,300 in the first quarter), according to the National Association of Realtors.

But when it comes to economic pain, it’s all a matter of perspective.

“Our unemployment numbers are at record levels and what is worrying is that the jobless rate has been above 7 percent for much of the year,” said Angelos Angelou of Austin-based AngelouEconomics, which provides economic development consulting services. “This is the hardest recession we’ve experienced so far.”

Retail sales are down 11 percent on the year, which Angelou said indicates that “people are either saving their money or are concerned about losing their jobs.”

“We haven’t seen a single major transaction in this area this year because no one really knows what properties are really worth," said Michael Kennedy, president of real estate company Commercial Texas. "What’s affecting us is the same thing that is affecting the whole world right now.”

Austin has grown rapidly in recent years – the population grew 7.6 percent to 709,893 between 2000 and 2006 – thanks to a combination of government jobs (it’s the capital of Texas), education jobs related to the University of Texas and hi-tech companies.

Computer maker Dell Inc was founded here by Michael Dell while he was still at the University of Texas in 1984. IBM, Samsung and Apple all have large operations here. The city consistently ranks as one of the most attractive locations for companies and entrepreneurs to set up shop in the United States.

According to Angelou, Austin’s growth has in large part been based on an inflow of people from elsewhere.

This year he estimates the population will grow by 45,000, down from growth of 66,000 in 2007.

“For meaningful growth we need more people to come here,” he said.

Mark Dotzour, chief economist at the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University, said that what may have dissuaded more people from moving here is that their homes have lost so much value they are reluctant to sell.

“For people whose homes have lost 20 percent to 30 percent in value, moving in this market is tough,” he said. “But once Austin starts adding jobs again, I think we’ll see some people in badly affected markets decide to walk away from their homes and move here anyway.”

Photos by Lucy Nicholson