The Raleigh City Council held a work session on April 14, 2026, with Mayor Calvin excused. The session featured two presentations: first, an update from Housing and Community Development and Wake County on the Continuum of Care (COC) system performance metrics and a proposed strategic initiative to reduce homelessness; second, a presentation from the Department of Transportation on the Wake Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Northern Corridor Major Investment Study, including recommended route alignments for the Midtown and Triangle Town Center corridors. Councilmembers engaged in extensive Q&A on both topics.
Oh my god. No fair to see it. I need again you find me. Shadow the feel that holds me too. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you all for being here. I am calling our work session to order. And the first item of business is to share that Mayor Cal is absent and excuse. Today's meeting will be first a presentation from housing and community development and Wake County to discuss the Wake County Continuum of Care, and then a presentation from our Department of Transportation about the Wake Bus Rapid Transit Northern Corridor Major Investment Study. So first up, Emily Sutton. Good afternoon, Emily Sutton, the Housing and Community Development Director. It's my pleasure today to introduce to you Eileen Rosa, who is the Continuum of Care Director for Wake County. And she's going to talk to you today about the Continuum of Care system metrics as well as the strategic plan. Thank you, Emily. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for having me. As Emily shared, I do want to share a few system updates for the Continuum of Care or the COC, particularly related to federal funding and some of the updates that we've heard on that front, since I think that was a question and something that came up from our joint city council and Wake County Commissioner meeting earlier this year. So we have some of those completed. We'll provide an overview today, but we'll have more coming out as we have additional data being published. And then finally want to end with the strategic initiative and exciting next next steps on that front. So first and foremost, wanted to share a bit more about the Continuum of Care. And for those who are not as familiar, the Continuum of Care is essentially a program in which HUD, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, distributes funds focused on homeless services and permanent housing down to communities, and so we are structured in what's called a COC or a continuum of care. Our COC that encompasses Raleigh also encompasses the full geographic boundaries of Wake County. And so as the lead agency on behalf of that COC, we are responsible to serve as the collaborative applicant for those federal funds. Given the delay, and given that it was initially issued as a two-year notice of funding opportunity. So since this is the first update, I'll sort of pause and see if there are any particular questions on this front. Okay. All right. And so we'll dive into some data. So with the COC system performance metrics, these are these fall under our duty as the HMIS or homeless management information system lead agency. So we are responsible for compliance and completion of all of the federal reporting requirements as it relates to the COC. And so the SPMs are something that we do on an annual basis, typically submitted in February or in January from the previous federal fiscal year, so October 1, 2024 to September 30th, 2025. And so we just completed that FY25 HUD submission, and they allow us to resubmit our FY24 metrics. And so because the COC has been through a significant transition in terms of leadership and the lead agency, that has impacted a lot of data quality. And so we have some positives and some things that we want to share, but also point out for the community. And so you'll see a couple of measures today. We've kind of combined them for brevity and to see the correlation. But there are ultimately seven measures and a couple of submeasures that basically assess our performance as a continuum of care in the work of preventing and ending homelessness. So length of time homeless, returns to homelessness or recidivism, number of people experiencing homelessness, employment and income growth, number of folks who are experiencing homelessness for the first time, and then how folks are able to maintain housing placement and prevent future homelessness. So first and foremost, want to share, and again, as a follow-up to the joint uh City Council and Wake County Board of Commissioners meeting, we had some questions and discussion about like what is the best data to kind of point to in terms of the state of homelessness in our community. And and there are several, but I I kind of pointed to a great annual metric to look at is our system performance measures. And so we now have those in place. But to draw the correlation, we are also showing here the orange line at the bottom is our point and time count. So the distinction here being point and time count is a one-night snapshot or inventory of folks experiencing homelessness in our community as well as the shelter and temporary housing programs that we have measured against folks who are coming into our system on an annual basis. So the bar chart is the number of uh unduplicated persons served and coming into our continuum of care and homeless services system. The light blue bar are folks who are experiencing homelessness for the first time this past year, and then again the orange line are folks who are on a one-night um snapshot. So you can kind of see the scale versus you know who's actively in our system on a day-to-day time point uh point in time versus the number of folks who kind of come in and out of our system and system of care throughout the year. And so what you can see is our inflow in terms of people experiencing homelessness for the first very first time actually decreased from last year, um, which shows good progress in terms of upstream prevention, but also um uh rapid exit from our system, and we'll draw that that uh connection in the strategic initiative, even though our overall number of persons served increased slightly. And so this is the importance, right, of having a flexible you know set of options to be able to offer folks as they're engaging with our system so that we avoid long-term homelessness.