10/03/2025
Where in Walla Walla is our "Rosanne Haggerty"? We need someone with her passion and drive to lead us in this direction with the solution to some of our homeless issues. It is a problem that has a solution.
Rosanne (often spelled “Roseanne” in some sources, but more frequently “Rosanne” Haggerty) is a prominent figure in the field of housing, homelessness, and community development. Below are several of her key projects and initiatives, and how they have shaped her approach:
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Key Projects & Initiatives
1. Common Ground (later “Breaking Ground”)
In 1990, Haggerty founded Common Ground (now called Breaking Ground) in New York City.
One of her flagship projects was converting the Times Square Hotel (a once‐deteriorated building) into one of the nation’s largest supportive housing communities.
Over time, under her leadership, Common Ground built or rehabilitated nearly 3,000 units of affordable/supportive housing in NYC, serving thousands of formerly homeless or low-income people.
The model was notable not only for providing housing but integrating supportive services (mental health, social services) on-site to help residents stabilize.
2. “Street to Home” (West Midtown / Times Square neighborhood)
Haggerty recognized that just building housing was not enough if homelessness in surrounding neighborhoods continued. So she launched “Street to Home” in the West Midtown / Times Square area, to reduce street homelessness in a defined geographic area through coordinated efforts.
This effort set goals like “knowing each person experiencing homelessness by name,” prioritizing those with the most serious health conditions, and testing interventions to improve housing placement rates.
In that area, they achieved an 87% drop in homelessness within the 20-block area, and 43% in surrounding blocks.
3. 100,000 Homes Campaign
In 2010 (or around that time), Haggerty’s team launched the 100,000 Homes Campaign, a national initiative to help U.S. communities house 100,000 of their most vulnerable homeless individuals by mid-2014.
The campaign ended up surpassing its goal: more than 105,000 people were housed.
That said, while many individuals were housed, none of the participating communities fully ended homelessness during the campaign period.
4. Community Solutions / Built for Zero
In 2011, she left (or spun off) Common Ground to found a new nonprofit called Community Solutions. The goal was to shift from purely building housing toward helping whole communities re-engineer their systems, data, and processes to end homelessness.
One of the centerpiece initiatives of Community Solutions is Built for Zero. This is a movement of communities that commit to using data, coordinated systems, and improvement practices to reduce homelessness to a “functional zero” (meaning homelessness becomes rare, brief, and non‐recurring).
Through Built for Zero, as of recent reports, dozens of U.S. cities have made measurable reductions in homelessness; some have achieved functional zero for veteran or chronic homelessness segments.
In one major endorsement, Community Solutions (under Haggerty’s leadership) was awarded a $100 million grant through the MacArthur Foundation’s “100 & Change” competition to accelerate ending homelessness in 75 communities.
More recently, Community Solutions has also been active in acquiring or preserving housing units in various cities (through real estate acquisition, conversion, mixed‐income modeling) as part of its strategy.
Themes & Significance
Systems thinking over isolated programs — One of Haggerty’s key insights is that homelessness is not just about a lack of housing, but broken systems (health, social services, outreach, data, coordination). Her later work focuses on aligning all actors in a community to work toward shared goals.
Data-driven and measurable goals — Projects like 100,000 Homes and Built for Zero emphasize real-time data, accountability, and measurable reductions in homelessness.
Innovation in financing and design — From converting historic buildings to mixed-income housing and deploying private capital, Haggerty has pushed new approaches to financing affordable housing.
Scaling the local to the national — Her strategy has evolved from focusing on New York City to providing frameworks and tools that other communities across the U.S. (and internationally) can adopt via Community Solutions.
