People are always asking me about the mayor’s “Housing First” plan known as Permanent Supportive Housing.
They want to know when the Department of Human Services will resume housing the homeless like they were doing during the last quarter of 2008, right after the Franklin School Shelter closure.
Well, the word is out on housing and it’s not good. In order to grasp the full gravity of the situation, you must first understand what has transpired so far.
D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty announced his housing plan for the city’s chronically homeless people in April 2008.
That plan called for housing 400 homeless singles and 100 homeless families per year for 5 years (fiscal 2008 thru 2012) and included 2 more years to work out all the kinks.
That would have meant that 2,000 homeless singles and 500 families had been housed by 2014.
This would have also met some of the requirements of the 10-year-plan to end homelessness that was constructed by the administration of former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams. (That plan, which was adopted in December of 2004, actually called for the 2,500 units of Permanent Supportive Housing that I just described above plus 3,500 units of affordable housing. People have all but forgotten about the latter provision.)
In order to justify the Franklin School Shelter closure and pacify the homeless community, the mayor needed to create at least 300 housing units for men – the number of beds Franklin had, with it having been an all-male shelter.
So, from September 11 to December 11 of 2008, DHS housed 403 people – mostly men. As of February 25, 2009, a total of 414 homeless singles and one family had been housed. For those who are not so mathematically inclined, this means that about 135 people were housed per month for the last quarter of 2008 and six people per month have been housed for the first two months of this year.
Due to the mayor’s ambitious housing plan having fallen behind schedule, the goals were lowered during the latter part of 2008. The Department of Human Services now wants to house 800 singles and 80 families by the end of fiscal 2009.
In November of 2008, the D.C. Council cut and froze the budgets of various departments, including that of DHS.
The homeless and their advocates came out in force to protest the massive cuts to the housing programs and managed to have some of the money put back. Even so, the D.C. government’s efforts to house the homeless have slowed considerably.
The D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray stated in November that the council would review the budget in February and possibly return some of the monies that it had taken for a rainy-day fund. February has come and gone. The economy has sunk further into despair. The money has not and will not be returned to the respective departments from which it was taken. And the homeless have been given a new ray of hopelessness.
On February 25, D.C. Government’s Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) held its bimonthly meeting. During that meeting, Fred Swan of the Department of Human Services broke the bad news to us.
He explained that over 3,100 homeless singles and over 360 homeless families had completed assessment forms in an effort to obtain Permanent Supportive Housing, out of which 414 singles and one family have been housed.
He also said that those applicants who’ve already been assigned a caseworker (which is the next step toward being housed) would most likely be housed this year.
Then came the bad news. Those homeless singles who’ve not been assigned a caseworker already most likely will not be housed this year. Fortunately for homeless families, they are becoming the new focus of the Department of Human Services.
All of this brings two truths to mind. One is that, during an economic downturn, we need a social safety net. The other is that, during an economic downturn, social services are the first programs to be defunded.
All in all, the homeless community of our nation’s capital was just told that 2,700 homeless singles and almost 300 families who’ve applied for housing won’t be housed this year. D.C. has at least 6,044 homeless people according to a point-in-time count that was done in January 2009.
The silver lining in all of this (if there is any such thing in this economy) is that President Obama’s stimulus package contains about $40 billion for the homeless and for affordable housing efforts. (The National Alliance to End Homelessness circulated a form at the ICH meeting which gives a breakdown of the funding.)
While I don’t know much about spending that kind of money, I’m inclined to believe that $40 billion amount is putting a band-aid on someone who is experiencing a “general crisis” (the medical term for when a person has suffered numerous life-threatening injuries, such as might happen during a traffic accident.)
Nonetheless, we’ll take what we can get in the way of relief.
Eric is an advocate for the homeless who stays at CCNV shelter.
