The system worked. It just moved too slowly.
When I joined the Tarrant County Homeless Coalition as Director of Operations, the Coordinated Entry system was functional — dedicated staff, committed partner agencies, and a clear process for matching people to housing. But the data told a different story: it was taking an average of 54 days to get someone housed after they entered the system, and 12 days just to get a client to accept a housing match.
The bottlenecks weren't random. The system had been designed around institutional convenience — what was easiest for agencies — not around what would move fastest for clients. Think of it like a comet: the client was just along for the ride, navigating a maze of agencies, paperwork, and handoffs with no clear center of gravity. The people with the highest barriers were the least likely to successfully navigate that maze.
I came in as a system builder — not a homelessness expert. I read the data, asked questions of the people closest to the work, and researched what other communities had tried. What I found was a set of solvable structural problems with one root cause: the system orbited around institutions, not people.
From comet to sun: putting the client at the center.
The core design principle of the redesign was simple: the client is the sun. Every service, every touchpoint, every agency interaction had to orbit around the client — not the other way around. Instead of asking people experiencing homelessness to physically navigate a fragmented system, the system had to move toward them.
The visual above captures the shift precisely. On the left: the old "comet" model, where the client navigated a maze with no clear path. On the right: the new model, where the client stands at the center as the sun — with the Primary Point of Contact, proactive document collection, virtual intakes, and the Padmission housing database all orbiting in service of one person's path home.
Five structural changes, zero new dollars.
Reduced the by-name list from 180-day to 90-day active window, eliminating inactive clients and making prioritization faster and more accurate.
Assigned a dedicated PPOC to every client with a housing match — responsible for acceptance, appointment coordination, and document collection.
Embedded dedicated outreach teams in the field to serve as PPOC for unsheltered clients, starting document collection before a match was identified.
Placed in-reach staff in overnight shelters to begin document collection at first contact — shifting the process earlier and compressing downstream timelines.
Eliminated the requirement for clients to physically travel to agencies. All paperwork moved to virtual completion; case managers offered multiple appointment times.
Replaced individual case manager landlord outreach with a dedicated professional team and a housing database (Padmission) visible to the whole system.
What changed — and by how much.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Average time to housing | 54 days | 35 days (-35%) |
| Match acceptance time | 12 days | 3 days (-75%) |
| Active by-name list window | 180 days | 90 days |
| Landlord engagement model | Individual case managers | Centralized professional team + database |
| Document collection timing | After match acceptance | At shelter entry or first outreach contact |
| Intake paperwork format | In-person, physical paperwork | Virtual — completed from anywhere |
"These results didn't come from new funding or new staff. They came from redesigning the process around the people the system was supposed to serve — and building the data infrastructure to hold everyone accountable to the same timeline."
Why this mattered beyond the numbers.
The CE redesign did more than cut timelines. It built the operational infrastructure — the cohort tracking model, the cross-agency accountability norms, the data-driven decision-making culture — that made everything that followed possible.
When the opportunity came to house 119 chronically homeless households in six weeks at Casa de Esperanza, the system was ready. When 307 Emergency Housing Vouchers arrived under the American Rescue Plan Act, the CoC could deploy all of them in six weeks while other communities struggled. That performance earned an additional 689 vouchers from state and federal sources — representing $8.8 million in new community housing resources.
The redesign was the foundation. Everything else was built on top of it.
What this approach can offer your community.
- 1 Start with the data, not assumptions. The bottlenecks in a slow system are always visible in the data — if you know what to look for. A rigorous diagnostic before any redesign work begins is non-negotiable.
- 2 Design around the client, not the institution. Most systems are built around what's convenient for agencies. The fastest path to better outcomes is asking: where does the client have to do the most work, and how do we remove that burden?
- 3 Accountability needs to be structural, not cultural. Telling people to move faster doesn't work. Building a system where slowdowns are visible to everyone in real time does.
- 4 Every initiative should build infrastructure for the next one. Design each change with the future in mind. The tools and relationships built here became the platform for $8.8M in new resources.