Those who have never been homeless are thrilled, saying the money will act as a catalyst for much-needed fundraising in the private sector. Those who are homeless or live just a step away in a shelter or single room roll their eyes, saying it’s a nice idea that will only backfire.

Whatever the reaction, the money isn’t likely to buy the bricks and mortar of actual new housing units, as some media outlets suggested last week.

Vince Matulionis, director of United Way’s homeless initiative, says the charity doesn’t envision being a major funder of new building projects. Instead, the agency is looking at how it can use the money, which it will raise over the next two years, to fill the gaps left by public agencies.

United Way can do that in two ways, Matulionis says: Beef up existing efforts at nonprofit housing developers, so they can field more projects each year, and provide scarce operating funds to pay for the type of case management services that are needed to house those who may have a disability, addiction or trouble getting decent work.

“I expect some of our money will go to services and operating costs,” Matulionis says. “I expect some of our money will go into agency capacity building.”

Building capacity among low-income housing developers, he says, would include giving them funds to hire more personnel, raise the salaries of existing key staff, or buy new computers or software systems to increase their efficiency.

The campaign will be led by United Way’s incoming fundraising chair—former Western Wireless chief and billionaire John Stanton—as part of the agency’s regular annual campaign, which is hoping to raise more than $105 million this year alone.

The $25 million for the chronically homeless will be over and above that, Matulionis says, with the funds going to support services at housing units that other agencies will build or convert. The goal, he says, is to support 200 units a year over five years.

United Way will make its own funding decisions, but coordinate with King County’s Committee to End Homelessness, which has developed a 10-Year Plan that calls for adding roughly 900 units of housing each year—a goal on which the CEH is already behind.

To actually build 1,000 transitional housing units, CEH coordinator Bill Block says, would cost about $225 million. But he and Matulionis say the $25 million campaign is a critical first step in getting more corporations and private donors to step up for the chronically homeless—those who have lived outside for a year or more or had cycles of homelessness, sometimes involving repeat emergency room visits or jail stays.

“The chronically homeless population is the most visible homeless segment in the community,” Matulionis says. “By addressing that population and showing results, it can be a larger catalyst [to fund] the full 10-Year Plan.”

Wes Browning, a formerly homeless member of CEH’s Single Adults Committee and columnist for Real Change, says that, however well intentioned, the campaign will only increase long-term homelessness, not reduce it.

The 10-Year Plan, he says, calls for cutting the 2,700 shelter beds available in King County today to 250 as more transitional housing is built or converted. But with shelters full and January’s annual one-night count finding nearly 2,200 people sleeping outside, people who become homeless in the future, he says, are largely guaranteed to end up “chronically homeless” because they’ll have no place to sleep at all, much less stabilize and find new housing.

Building housing won’t solve the problem, Browning says, because private developers are tearing down low-income housing faster than it’s being built—something the Committee to End Homelessness doesn’t count.

Matulionis insists, however, that prioritizing for those most in need is the right approach.

“I’m not particularly supportive of trying to do everything,” he says. “We’ve tried to do that and the result at the end of the day is nothing.”

“We are very cautious about not going down the wrong road and not creating a bigger problem than when we started,” he says of the new campaign. In the future, if “the One-Night count shows the family count is increasing dramatically, we’d have to pay close attention to that.”