Turning Back the Clock: Imagining a Different Outcome

In Indian River County, many streams—the high cost of rent, the scarcity of affordable housing, and the growing numbers of people living in poverty amidst plenty—have converged into a relentless river sweeping too many individuals and families into homelessness. Even with shelters like The Hope for Families Center managing to double in size to house twice as many people, the need continues to outpace our collective capacity to meet it.

That’s why organizations like the National Alliance to End Homelessness have been developing strategies focused on damming the river before it drags people under. The idea is to intervene and provide support before a person has lost their home or spent a night in their car or a shelter.

Prevention relies on creating a standardized “front door” where vulnerable people can receive individualized case management long before the eviction clock starts ticking. The goal is to help people remain housed while developing a plan to achieve long-term stability. This front door can be as simple as a standardized questionnaire used across agencies already involved in helping people in crisis. The questionnaire would identify the degree of vulnerability and point families and case workers toward the sorts of intervention that would be most helpful.

 Marty Mercado, Executive Director at The Hope for Families Center, is enthusiastic about the approach. “Keeping people in homes is huge,” she explains, and it isn’t just because the costs of intervention are typically less than half the cost of providing shelter. It’s mentally and physically exhausting to be homeless. The trauma that people experience from sleeping outdoors or in a car or shelter amplifies their initial problems and makes it even harder to embark on a plan for long-term stability. Prevention can help people avoid that trauma and keep them from having an eviction on their record, which makes securing permanent housing exponentially harder.

“Nobody chooses homelessness for their family,” Mercado says. While homelessness defeats people and drags them down, prevention empowers them. Caseworkers partner with vulnerable people to help them solve problems. Common interventions might include helping someone reunite with a family member who can help or mediating a conflict with a roommate or landlord. In one example, a woman living with her elderly mother was in danger of having to leave because her children’s loud playing was disturbing the neighbors. The caseworker helped the woman discuss the problem with the landlord and enroll her children in after-school programs, which enabled the family to remain in the home.

Interventions can also involve financial support, such as helping with utility bills or car repairs, buying groceries, or paying a security deposit. It can help a person navigate the systems needed to procure essential documents, such as birth certificates or social security cards, or help connect them to other programs that provide support. Overall, it aims to de-escalate crises and remove immediate barriers to housing.

Interventions such as these could turn back the countdown clock that for too many ticks toward eviction. Imagine if Donna Pembroke, evicted in October, had appeared at the program’s front door in July, when she became ill and her paychecks stopped coming. At that point, she had a short-term problem—how to pay her rent until she could resume working. A caseworker might have helped her find a way to do that before everything fell apart and she and her mother lost their home.

Mercado estimates that 40% of the calls she receives at the shelter are from people who could be helped by these interventions. She is working alongside Rayme Nuckles of the Treasure Coast Homeless Services Council to convene a January 2026 meeting of local nonprofit agencies to launch a community-wide initiative to better help our vulnerable neighbors. The goal for the first year is to prevent twenty-five families from losing their homes. It’s both bold in scope for a new approach and modest in terms of the size of the need. 

They’ll need our help. Initiatives like this one call on all of us to imagine an Indian River County where no one accepts the fact that some people live in the woods, or that some children get ready for school in the bathroom of a big box store. Stemming the tide of homelessness will build a better, more resilient community for us all. 

Don’t wait to get involved. As Mercado says, “Every act of generosity makes a difference. Your support—whether through financial gifts or community partnerships—fuels real, lasting change.”

This is a problem well worth solving, and we don’t have time to waste.