As President Obama’s economic advisors and Congress finish work on the multi-billion dollar stimulus package, the recession’s growing impact on homeless Americans still attracts scant attention. So far, the Administration’s housing efforts aim mainly at providing aid to distressed homeowners.
Federal interventions such as mortgage restructuring, refinancing assistance, foreclosure moratoriums, bankruptcy reform and tax credits have the highest priority. But measures that could help stem the growth of homelessness, and provide badly-needed resources for the longer-term effort to end it are being proposed by concerned advocacy groups.
“Increasing foreclosures and growing unemployment are threatening more and more Americans with homelessness,” warns Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP), “and shelters, soup kitchens and food pantries across the country are reporting surges in demand for help.”
In late November, NLCHP and more than a dozen other national homeless advocacy organizations sent a letter to the presidential transition team urging then President-elect Obama to embrace six key policy recommendations to demonstrate his Administration’s commitment to ending homelessness.
A mid-January report by another of the co-signing organizations, the National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH), documented significant progress in reducing the numbers of America’s homeless individuals between January 2005 and January 2007. But the report also noted that the current recession, with its increases in unemployment, poverty, housing foreclosures and credit constraints, would undoubtedly lead to increases in the number of homeless households and households at risk of homelessness.
That report, “Homelessness Counts: Changes in Homelessness from 2005 to 2007,” analyzes data collected by communities from across the country during the bi-annual, late January, point-in-time counts of sheltered and unsheltered homeless populations. NAEH’s Homeless Research Institute found that changes recorded in 2005 and 2007 indicated a roughly 10% decline in the number of homeless men and women over that period (from 744,313 to 671,859), with even larger percentage declines for persons in homeless families (an 18% decline) and chronically homeless adults (a 28% decline).
But the good news came with an important qualification. The progress documented in “Homelessness Counts” occurred during a period of relative economic stability and increased activism by states and local communities. The current economic crisis, the report warns, threatens to reduce the resources available to local governments and nonprofits just when the demand for homeless services is increasing.
“The count report shows that we’ve started to figure out some things that work,” observed Nan Roman, president and CEO of NAEH. “Sadly, we’re now looking at increases. We need to take what we’ve learned and apply it to this new problem.”
Seeking a Commitment
The recommendations urged on the Obama team by the 15 national advocacy groups that authored the November letter began with a request that the new president demonstrate his commitment to ending homelessness by convening a White House conference at which a federal, inter-agency plan – one with specific goals and timetables – would be presented.
“I don’t think homelessness was a big issue in the presidential campaigns on either side,” Roman remarked. “It didn’t come up very much except with respect to veterans.” So the idea of a White House Conference on Homelessness is seen as a way of bringing attention to the issue, and encouraging greater interagency commitment and collaboration.
President Bush’s U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness concentrated on working with state and local groups to help create 10-year plans to end chronic homelessness and to implement rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing initiatives. “But,” Roman pointed out, “there’s no 10-year plan for the federal government. We need to start a planning effort.”
“A lot of groups feel that there’s a need to get the federal agencies together,” she added. Such collaboration is seen as essential to assuring effective policy and adequate resource allocation.
Proposals
Beyond greater planning for and resources available for the elimination of homelessness, the 15 advocacy organizations recommended specific policy priorities such as increased funding for 150,000 new housing vouchers each year; creating and sustaining 90,000 additional units of permanent housing; ensuring adequate incomes through public income assistance, tax credits, and wage policies; expanding access to health services; ensuring educational services for homeless children and youth; and protecting homeless people from discrimination on voting rights, utilization of public facilities, and access to government buildings. (The full text is available at www.nchv.org.)
On Jan. 8, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), released its report on the increase in homeless families in various areas around the nation in 2008. That report, entitled “Number of Homeless Families Climbing Due to Recession,” was accompanied by estimates of the probable future increases in homeless families, and a recommendation that Congress include one-time funding for 200,000 new, non-renewable housing vouchers in its forthcoming economic stimulus package.
According to the CBPP report, those additional new vouchers, plus a substantial increase for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Emergency Shelter Grant program, will be needed to prevent an additional several hundred thousand families from becoming homeless during the recession. (The full report is available at www.cbpp.org.)
Short-run and Long-run
Just days after releasing its “Homeless Count” report, NAEH also made available a 6-page briefing paper addressing the new problems likely to result from the housing-lead recession. That Jan. 15 paper, “Homelessness Looms as Potential Outcome of Recession,” made the following points:
An estimated 1.5 million additional Americans could become homeless over the next two years absent effective intervention;
Many communities have already begun to experience significant increases in their local homeless population;
Unemployment, poverty, and “deep poverty” (income below one-half the poverty level) could increase to levels not seen in decades and create overwhelming pressures on existing local assistance programs; and
$2 billion in funding for homelessness prevention and rapid re-housing, plus 400,000 in additional housing vouchers, and a substantial increase in the National Housing Trust Fund will be needed to prevent those 1.5 million people from becoming homeless.
In a Jan. 16 letter that NAEH sent to the Obama transition team, Roman divided the group’s recommendations between relatively short-term emergency measures aimed at addressing the immediate economic crisis, and longer-term measures aimed at making continued progress toward the goal of ending homelessness.
Rather than relying on the creation of more shelter beds and soup kitchens, NEAH urges the Obama team to ensure the crisis is met with significantly increased homelessness prevention and rapid rehousing efforts.
NEAH also called for $10 billion in economic stimulus funding for the National Housing Trust Fund to acquire, rehabilitate and subsidize tenancy – targeted to aid those at highest risk of homelessness, and advocated $2 billion in additional funding for HUD’s Emergency Shelter Grant program for use by communities to provide short-term housing assistance, relocation funding, security and utility deposits, mortgage and rent payments, and case management assistance.
Finally, NAEH is urged the funding of 400,000 vouchers to provide housing for at-risk individual and families.
For the longer, post-recession effort, NAEH asked that the Administration pay special attention to homeless veterans – a commitment that Obama economic revitalization plan already mentions. Veterans, NAEH reports, make up nearly one-fourth of America’s homeless population.
The organization also encouraged giving priority to investment in rapid re-housing efforts for homeless families. The goal is to ensure that every child has a home.
And, finally, to keep the movement to end homelessness on track, President Obama is urged to fund the creation of an additional 90,000 housing units for the chronically homeless.
