DC 10-year plan to end homelessness in limbo

Slow Progress on DC’s Homeless Plan (Street Sense, USA)

Three years into the District’s 10-year strategy to end homelessness, interviews with public representatives and local advocates revealed that the plan has made little progress in its goal of adding 6,000 units of permanent housing with support services for the homeless.

“Right now [the plan’s] in limbo because we just haven’t had time to work on it,” said Cheryl Barnes, the only formerly homeless member of the D.C. Interagency Council on Homelessness, a council established by Mayor Anthony A. Williams in 2005 to implement the plan.

The District’s 10-year plan, drawn up in 2004 by Williams, aimed to end chronic homelessness by adding 6,000 new units of affordable housing, increasing preventative efforts and providing support services to people on the streets.

More than 90 communities across the country have drawn up 10-year strategies to eradicate homelessness in their communities, encouraged by a blueprint released by the National Alliance to End Homelessness in 2000 that focused on preventative measures and an increase in permanent affordable housing with mental health, medical and other support services for the chronically homeless.

Areas like Portland and Multnomah County, Ore., and Columbus, Ohio, have dramatically reduced their numbers of homeless as a result of long-term strategic partnerships between public agencies, businesses and nonprofits. (See sidebar on Portland’s success on page 5.)

However, the plan in Washington, D.C. has not seen much progress in part because of the change in administrations from Williams to new Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, advocates said. Overwhelming concerns such as improving the city’s public education system have led the city to put eradicating homelessness “on the back burner,” Barnes said. And the city is losing affordable housing units every year to high-priced developers, pushing the goal of 6,000 net additional units farther out of reach.

Tasked by the mayor to create strategies across agencies to end chronic homelessness, the Interagency Council on Homelessness held no meetings during the transition between the Williams and Fenty administrations earlier this year and only met under the Fenty administration for the first time in June.

“We need to be meeting every month,” Barnes said. The city’s 2014 deadline to end homelessness may not be realistic, Barnes said. “I think it might take another 10 years.”

The D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development funded the rehabilitation and construction of more than 4,000 affordable housing units in the last two years. But this funding was not the result of inter-agency collaboration under the 10-year plan, department spokeswoman Najuma Thorpe said.

“We certainly work with the plans that are dictated to us but we are always looking for more ways to increase affordable housing,” Thorpe said.

However, the department has set aside $12.5 million for building permanent housing as a result of long-term planning with the Deputy Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, which oversees the 10-year strategy.

But that earmark does not include funds for any support services like medical or mental health, said Thorpe. Under the 10-year plan, the 6,000 new affordable units must offer permanent supportive housing.

“The city’s commitment to dollars is definitely a good step forward in the right direction, and shows that the city believes in the concept of preventing people from becoming homeless,” said Michael Ferrell, director of the nonprofit D.C. Coalition for the Homeless. “The responsibility lies with the District government.”

Ferrell said that bringing affordable housing is the biggest challenge D.C.’s government faces and that the plan will take time to implement.

“That’s why it’s a 10-year plan and not a five-year plan,” Ferrell said.

Father Jon Adams, the director of one of the largest providers of homeless services in the District, said he believes the plan is making progress. As head of So Others Might Eat (SOME), he noted that providing funds for housing is a step in the right direction to ending homelessness.

“I think [the plan] is going [forward] and I think for one thing the city itself has had enough foresight to have established the Housing Production Trust Fund,” Adams said.

The trust fund was established in the late 1980s to fund the building and rehabilitation of affordable housing. More than 5,000 affordable housing units have been completed or are under development from direct support from the Housing Production Trust Fund, according to a joint report by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute and the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development.

The number of affordable housing units added to D.C. under the trust fund has “grown dramatically” since 2001 to more than 1,500 units in the 2006 fiscal year, the report said.

However, these additions may not include supportive services for mental and medical health and are not the result of inter-agency collaboration for more permanent supportive housing under the city’s 10-year plan. Most alarmingly, these additional units coincide with the District’s loss of thousands of affordable rentals and homes each year.

The city has also not met its own deadlines under the 10-year plan for rehabilitating various homeless shelters. Although the 10-year plan called for mass renovations at Parcel 26/La Casa, Gales School and an unidentified men’s shelter by October 2006, no major renovations have taken place and no men’s shelter has been selected for renovation.

Meanwhile, Franklin School Shelter for men, located downtown, does not have air conditioning for the summer and is scheduled to shut down at the end of the year.

With funds available for construction and further implementation of the 10-year plan, progress should be on the horizon. But the patience of some of District’s homeless and their advocates is wearing thin.

“I’m appalled. They don’t understand the importance of this issue,” Barnes said, expressing her frustration at the pace of work at the Interagency Council. “There are folks who have been in the shelter system for the last seven to ten years. We’re tired of waiting for our piece of the pie.”

Despite numerous attempts to contact representatives from the mayor’s office, they were unavailable for comment on the status of the 10-year plan by press time.

By Daniel Johnson and Kaukab Jhumra Smith
Reprinted from Street Sense in Washington D.C.
© Street News Service: www.street-papers.org

10-year plan to end homelessness point/counterpoint

Street Roots recently asked U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness head Philip Mangano or Paul Carslon who oversees Region X (Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho) with the council to write a point, counterpoint alongside Paul Boden with the Western Regional Advocacy Project on the 10-year plan to end homelessness. Mangano and Carlson declined, but got Regional Director with the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, John Meyers to offer a federal perspective on ending homelessness. Both pieces ran in the June 15, edition of Street Roots and will be published on the Street News Service for other street papers around the globe to run this month. In my opinion, the first piece by Meyers offers us a cheerleading perspective by the federal government. No doubt, great work is being done, but it's still a little far fetched. Boden’s piece hits the hammer on the head, but you can decide for yourself. Enjoy!

Israel Bayer, Street Roots

We can end homelessness in the USA
By John Meyers

Can homelessness be ended in the next ten years? Frankly when asked this question a few years ago I was incredulous. We had accepted homelessness as a social reality, not be ended but to be lived with. As the new HUD director for the Pacific NW and Alaska, I imagined that my job was to oversee the programs that brought some relief to the homeless, perhaps a good number would even leave the streets through our housing programs, but end homelessness? Get serious. The best we could do was to manage the problem so it didn’t get totally out of control. I’d wager to say that my opinion was shared by most public officials, federal, state and local, not to mention by mayors, county commissioners, sheriffs, Democrat and Republican.

All that has changed. It changed because we were persuaded by facts provided by reliable research about the costs of homelessness, and reliable data about solutions. National advocates used these facts and pledged to achieve something social programs rarely do: to produce results.

One of these national advocates was a dynamo named Philip Mangano from Massachusetts, where he had been a leading advocate for the homeless for many years. I met Mr. Mangano and while impressed with his charisma, I was far more impressed with the facts he wielded: people who are living long term on the streets are not without cost to local government, quite the opposite they can cost from $40,000 to as high as $100,000 in jail, law enforcement, ER and emergency services. That was a shocking fact, but there it was laid out in a study by a Dr. Dennis Culhane from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Culhane’s cost study has been verified by nearly every major American city. In Seattle and Portland the cost of these chronically homeless was over $50,000 per person per year. And what did we have after spending all that tax payer money? Just another person homeless on the streets.

But OK, I asked Philip Mangano, what about solutions? I got an equal shock to see the research on proven programs that could produce lasting results for people we thought were beyond hope. For $15,000 a year or less these same American citizens could be brought into decent housing that was coupled with social services and they would stay off the streets. The data convinced me. Homeless people could and must be given a humane alternative to living in squalor on the streets, and cycling through ER, jail or prison. The solution made humane sense, it made fiscal sense.

But would it work? Could we persuade enough mayors, county executives, city council and county commissions to develop their own local plan to end homelessness in ten years? Their leadership was crucial. We also knew that homelessness had gotten too big a social problem for a solution to be found among the efforts of the small cadre of social service providers. We knew we needed the leadership of governors and state agency executives if the large state systems like prisons, mental hospitals and foster care systems were to stop discharging people into homelessness. We had the solutions, but could we persuade enough of these leaders to take a stand and make their local systems accountable for results?

Working with the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, HUD took the lead in bringing together federal agencies to work together in support of the development of these local plans. In the Pacific NW we hired a Regional Homelessness Coordinator whose job it was to visit mayors and county commissions in our four states and make the case. He did. My own experience with Philip Mangano was repeated with an ever growing number of mayors and county commissioners in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska. County sheriffs quickly produced data from local jails that confirmed the escalating costs of homelessness. The result: a network of local plans throughout Washington State, local plans underway in nine Oregon counties with several more starting up this year. Plans underway in Anchorage and Boise with all four states having governor appointed executive level councils dedicated to support the local plans to end homelessness.

But when we would get results? It takes a lot of planning to change an entire social service system. How long would it take to fully implement housing first programs, coordinated entry, PACT case management teams? Could we get our counts of the homeless to be reliable? How long till our homeless management information systems would be operational? Some tough logistical challenges faced these plans and still do.

Portland’s plan (co-led by the city and Multnomah County) was impressive from the start. It had political will, great agencies and determination. An early federal investment of $10 million helped engineer change. The results amazed the mayor, City Commission and County Commission as much as it did me. A 70 percent reduction in chronic homelessness. A 40 percent reduction in the overall street count. Could this really be true after only two years? I sent out our Regional Homelessness Coordinator to check it out. He took me a little too literally and walked the streets of Portland at 2 a.m. and went under the bridges and through the alleys. He talked with not just city officials but providers such as JOIN and Central City Concern. We found out only later that downtown business owners had already gone to Mayor Potter and asked where so many of the homeless had gone to? Answer: to housing, nearly 1,500 of them in one of the most extraordinary efforts in the country.

Can we get results? Emphatically yes. Do we have a long way to go? Absolutely. Portland can’t stand alone in Oregon. Oregon City, Beaverton, Salem, Eugene, Bend, Albany, McMinnville, Corvallis Medford, Grant’ Pass and Newport have to develop effective plans as well.

Most of these same plans have strategies to prevent and end the homelessness of families, veterans and youth. HUD continues to invest over half of its homeless funds towards families. Now new research on effective solutions holds the same promise it does for chronically homeless persons; we can create a system that is accountable at every level, that will produce results.

We are determined. We have solutions. We are getting results. We can end homelessness.

John Meyers is the regional director for the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

Counterpoint:

What is it going to take to end homelessness in the USA?
By Paul Boden

The federal government’s current fixation on local Ten Year Plans to End Chronic Homelessness – with HUD’s McKinney homeless assistance dollars – has many homeless people, service providers and housing developers shaking their heads in dismay, there’s one thing these pla ns have done that many of us have waited years to hear: the federal government is giving lip service to "ending homelessness."

Hey, it’s a start and a long way from where we started 20 years ago!

The trick now is to go from talking, meeting, planning and writing plans to end "chronic" homelessness to actually funding the housing, healthcare, education and employment programs ALL poor people need to avoid or escape homelessness. This is where the head shaking comes in. The Bush administration has invested millions and millions of tax dollars over the past six years going from town to town and state to state rallying business and government "leaders" and getting them to spend thousands of their own local dollars to write plans to end "chronic" homelessness in 10 years; meanwhile, a 25-year trend of defunding the very federal programs that local communities so desperately need to end homelessness continues.

McKinney homeless assistance funding is a miniscule allocation of approximately $1.4 billion this year; compare that to the $52 billion a year (in 2004 dollars) reduction in funding for affordable housing programs since 1979 and the word miniscule makes sense.

Before the reemergence in 1983 of massive contemporary homelessness in the US, poor people in local communities faced many of the same obstacles homeless people face today, but they did have one thing they don’t have today: housing. Not always the best housing, certainly – often not very nice housing – but they had housing nonetheless. When the federal government’s role in supporting housing opportunities was changed in Reagan’s reinvention of government, large numbers of people who were living in the not very nice housing found themselves with no housing at all. They became "the homeless," and 25 years later the Bush administration has chosen to focus on a subsection of "the homeless" that they call "chronic." From poor to homeless to chronically homeless, who will they want us to write plans on next? The left-handed blue-eyed homeless?

What happened to our humanity in addressing poverty? Homeless people are just that, people; they’re not "the homeless." They’re people just like anybody reading this. They love, they learn, they get pissed off, they have good days and they have some really, really bad days as well. They are people living their lives day by day. The only difference is that they live their lives without housing. With all the silly studies that HUD loves to praise people like Dennis Culhane or Phil Mangano for, isn’t it ironic that HUD never praises people who study HUD? But they sure study the hell out of poor people without housing, they study social service programs, and every other week come up with a new "business-based best practices program." They especially love to study Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS) to best "track and count the homeless," so long as "the homeless" being counted aren’t the 914,000 kids without housing in our Public School system.

With more than 480 5-year local Continuum of Care plans initiated by the Clinton administration and more than 300 (and growing) Ten Year Plans initiated by the Bush administration, it’s long past time for HUD to stop studying us and take a good long hard look in the mirror.

We’ll even save them the money of doing another study. Here are the facts:

Since 1996, HUD funding for new public housing has been ZERO, while over 100,000 public housing units have been lost to demolition, sale or other removal in that same period.

In 2005, federal homeowner subsidies totaled more than $122 billion, while HUD affordable housing outlays were only $31 billion – a difference of more than $91 billion.

In 1978 (pre-homelessness), HUD’s budget was $83 billion. By 1983 (when shelters opened nationwide), HUD’s budget had been reduced to $18 billion. In 2006 HUD’s budget was $29 billion.

In recent years over 200,000 private sector rental units have been lost annually, and 1.2 million unsubsidized affordable housing units disappeared from 1993-2003.

For rural communities dependent on USDA Section 515 funding, the Bush Administration is proposing eliminating this funding altogether. Up until 1985 this vital housing development program produced a yearly average of 31,000 new units of affordable housing a year.

The list goes on and on, and goes back to 1979. Emergency shelters opened throughout the country in 1982 and 1983, and by the time the Stewart B. McKinney Act passed in 1987 they were a pretty well established part of local communities, as they are still today. Before Congressman McKinney passed away – and a reluctant President Reagan signed his bill – the McKinney Act was originally called the "Urgent Relief for the Homeless Act." Urgent relief from policy decisions created under the premises that the market would "take care of itself," and that government’s role is to subsidize the market rather then subsidizing places for poor people to live. The market would take care of them.

Before the Great Depression we were told that the market would take care of itself, but the rest of us have to take care of ourselves. After the crash, we – as a nation – put in place systemic safety nets for the poorest among us so that they wouldn’t fall when the market failed.

Homelessness is not an intractable human experience. It is not created by dysfunctional individuals. Homelessness is the result of dysfunctional social policy and funding priorities. When the federal government was investing in housing through HUD and USDA housing and community development programs, we didn’t need the urgent relief of McKinney homeless assistance funding. We had housing.

Paul Boden is the Executive Director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project made up of grassroots homeless organizations up and down the West Coast.

The Canadians Have Caught On

I've found a new hero in Canadian "street nurse" Cathy Crowe. This longtime health professional and homeless advocate worries that Philip Mangano has been spending too much time in Canada spreading the gospel of Housing First for the "chronic homeless" and public/private partnerships such as Project Connect.

Crowe totally has Mangano's number. Which doesn't mean Canadian politicians and human service bureaucrats won't be just as enamored of the corporate-friendly Ten Year Plan strategy to end homelessness as their technocratic brethren to the South. It just means that Canada still has homeless advocates who are willing to question the government.

And if our government isn't questionable, I don't know whose is.

Crowe describes Mangano's Canadian Ten Year Plan road show as promoting a punitive approach to homelessness that is hostile to emergency services and focused on victim-blaming approaches that offer cosmetic change while doing nothing to address root causes of homelessness.

Michael Shapcott and I had a chance to hear Mr Mangano in Calgary earlier in May. He really is a remarkable speaker — you could almost say evangelical — preaching the issues of health, economics and the social evils of homelessness. The trouble is that the American approach is obviously not working. It's a game of smoke and mirrors. So why on earth are our municipal and national leaders looking to the United States for solutions on homelessness?

As Michael Shapcott explains: "So, what's wrong with this picture? While Mangano has been piling up frequent flier points visiting every part of the US to convince state and local governments that they need to take up the responsibility for a "housing first" policy for the homeless, his political boss — President Bush — has been gutting the US federal government's funding for housing. This year alone, there are massive cuts to seniors' supportive housing and disabled housing funding. The US federal housing program for people with AIDS will help about 67,000 people this year — yet an estimated 500,000 people living with HIV / AIDS desperately need housing help.

The problem is so bad that even the rather staid Joint Centre for Housing Studies at Harvard University has proclaimed in its latest annual State of the Nation's Housing that affordable housing and homelessness have reached their worst levels ever, and funding cuts by the federal government are the chief culprit.

Crowe points out that homeless people in cities across America are under attack from law enforcement approaches that target sitting and sleeping in public, feeding people, using parks, panhandling, and other public activities to create an urban environment that is hostile to the visible poor, and says that Canada is beginning to catch America's cold.

In Canada it's the same thing. We are witnessing an almost fetishized emphasis on research, including street counts and investigations into panhandlers' needs, new by-laws against panhandling and by-laws restricting where homeless people can sleep, reduction of funding to programs that do outreach to people who are homeless, and a withdrawal of funding for emergency day and night shelters. Toronto alone has lost over 300 shelter beds just this past winter and it continues to rely on its Streets to Homes program as an answer to visible street homelessness. There are many reports that people who are housed through this program suffer greatly from hunger and isolation and remain at great risk of becoming or do become homeless again.

As we struggle to come to grips with homeless policy in America and break the USICH's growing hegemony over the issue of homelessness, maybe we need to keep a better eye on Canada. They're certainly looking out for us.

NUMBER$ Game

Rural communities assess their homeless population, and how to get the money to fix it

Clackamas County stretches from the outskirts of urban Portland to the wilderness of the Mt. Hood National Park. The county filled with suburban centers, small rural towns and rugged mountain terrain is finding itself at a crossroads in the Bush administration’s dream of ending homelessness in 10 years. On June 7, the county will formerly release its point-in-time count of people experiencing homelessness. It’s not pretty.

An estimated 8,272 individuals were experiencing homelessness in Clackamas County at the end of January, according to documents released to Street Roots. This includes 3,543 people actually counted, plus 4,729 additional homeless persons estimated using statistical modeling based on a formula for counting bird populations. The count estimates that 2,531 children in 1,082 families are homeless in Clackamas County.

“It’s shocking for many people to see so many people living without a home, especially those who see the issue of homelessness as an urban problem,” says Brenda Durbin, interim director with the Clackamas County Department of Social Services.

“No one recognizes the boundaries between Clackamas and Multnomah counties,” says Durbin. “It’s crucial we are working together to address poverty at a regional level.”

The 2007 figures indicate an increase over the previous count in 2005. That year, nearly 2,500 people were counted, and nearly 7,600 people were believed homeless across the county

“Homelessness in the suburbs is about families,” says Martha McLennan, Executive Director of Northwest Housing Alternatives. “Single adults have a tendency to go to the city for services, but families tend to go to the suburbs where they can sleep in their cars, or camp out and feel safe.”

There is only one family shelter in all of Clackamas County. And it can only shelter up to five families at a time. “It’s all about affordable housing,” says McLennan. “Most of the development is high-end and people don’t have a place to go.”

In particular, it’s about rural housing, which has been essentiallly siphoned down to a trickle by the federal government, and the needs of rural communities feeling the impact of a homeless population. That’s according to Barbara Duffield, policy director of the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth in Washington D.C.

“We need to significantly increase investment in all housing programs,” Duffield says. “Particularly the rural housing programs. It can address infrastructure issues like the lack of public transportation that makes it so difficult for families in rural and suburban areas to participate in programs and obtain and maintain employment.

“The federal government must recognize that homelessness doesn't look the same everywhere,” says Duffield. “The ‘one size fits all’ approach of recent years, most evident in the chronic homelessness initiative and in HUD's limited definition of homelessness, simply does not reflect the reality of rural and suburban communities. Of course, the truth is that those policies don't reflect reality in urban areas, either, but they are even more at odds with local experiences in suburban and rural areas. Suburban and rural areas do not have the same service infrastructure as urban areas, but they do have an affordable housing crisis that is as bad as urban areas.”

A difference of philosophy

In terms of how the government tallies it’s homeless population, Clackamas County has broken from the pack. Most cities and counties have chosen to follow federal guidelines in conducting the point-in-time count of people experiencing homelessness. Federal guidelines by the Department of Housing and Urban Development now say homelessness is limited to people who are on the streets or who are staying in shelters.

Clackamas County and some federal programs refuse to use the new definition, choosing instead to follow the more encompassing definition it replaced. The old definition includes individuals or families doubled up with family or friends due to economic conditions, people living in motels and hotels, cars, trailers and campgrounds and children staying in housing not fit for habitation. “There’s a widespread belief that the HUD count is too narrow,” says Durbin.

Instead of getting locked down in a political battle of wills, Clackamas County simply extracts the information HUD requires from the larger count to comply with federal guidelines.

Durbin says the county made it a point to count people doubled up through extensive outreach at food banks, with public schools, and by having people stationed at Department of Human Services locations. At the crux of all these numbers is money. The counts are key in competing for the federal funds available to address the problem.

“The (homeless) plans have divided the advocacy community and providers throughout the state,” says Donna Bolt, homeless coordinator with Oregon’s Department of Education. “Some things have become very difficult. The will to help is there, there are just so may people in rural areas that are living with different circumstances. You have people living outside in a shed, or camping down by the river.”

In another break from program, Clackamas County chose to call its plan a 10-year plan to address homelessness, rather than end it as the federal government suggests. The program was adopted in November.

“The decision was made on the understanding of the macro-issues that effect the issues of homelessness concerning policy and economics,” says Durbin. “We didn’t feel we could say we could end homelessness in 10 years. We can address certain aspects of homelessness, but to actually end homelessness will take more resources that the county can offer.”

In addition to the adoption of the 10-year plan, Durbin says the county enacted an ordinance that gives people a lenient five-day camping notice (Portland’s is 24-hour), and let’s people store their personal belongings with the county for up to 30 days.

It doesn’t all add up

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, counting the number of homeless people in the United States is methodologically challenging and highly political — a dangerous combination with an interesting history. Since the 1980s, the estimated numbers of people on the streets nationwide have changed dramatically, from as low as 250,000 to as high as 3 million.

A one-day count in January found 2,010 people staying in shelters, on the street, in their cars or camping out in Deschutes, Jefferson and Crook counties, an 8 percent increase over previous counts. In Lane County, more than 1,200 individuals were counted in a one-night count with more than 6,000 individuals experiencing homelessness throughout the year. In 2006, more than 1,100 individuals were counted in Washington County.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness claims 16,221 people experienced homelessness in the Oregon in 2005 and 744, 313 nationwide. The numbers have been widely criticized by advocates across the country as far to low.

Sampling figures from seven of Oregon’s 36 counties, Street Roots tallied more than 20,000 people that had experienced homelessness just between the end of 2006 and the beginning of 2007.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness numbers also discount many of Oregon’s homeless kids and youth due to the rigid definitions of homelessness by HUD. Oregon’s Department of Education Homeless Coordinator, Donna Bolt, says more than 13,000 kids and youth experienced homelessness in Oregon in 2005-2006, and “everything we are seeing indicates those numbers are going to be higher this year.”

“We believe that education is a way out of poverty,” Bolt says. “The McKinney-Vento Act had a different set of definitions (for homelessness) and we are under a different part of the McKinney Act that’s not recognized by HUD. Our essential goal is to try to get kids in a position to not drop out and not let the failure of other systems help to keep kids down. If the 10-year plans were really being created to address the actual needs of specific communities, it would be great,” says Bolt.

Rural communities throughout Oregon and the rest of the country are being hit hard by federal cutbacks. In 1976 the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the agency charged with creating affordable housing in rural areas, created 30,175 units nationwide. By 2005 that number had dropped to 783. The Bush administration has proposed to zero out the program altogether.

“Nobody has picked up that money at the other end,” says Paul Boden with the Western Regional Advocacy Project, an organization made up of grassroots organizations along the West Coast, including Sisters of the Road and Street Roots. “Rural communities are losing family housing. And then they’re losing homeless money because the federal government doesn’t want to serve families. They want to serve homeless adults.”

Reform on the hill

On February 6, Representatives Julia Carson (D-IN), Geoff Davis (R-KY), Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Rick Renzi (R-AZ) introduced legislation called the HEARTH Act to the house floor to consolidate the McKinney-Vento Act and Department of Housing and Urban Development three main competitive homeless programs into one. The programs include a Rural Housing Stability Assistance Program to more accurately meet the needs of rural areas; creating a new program authority to fund homeless prevention programs; and providing more flexibility to communities who are offering effective approaches.

The bill would also change the definition of homelessness to include individuals doubled up and living in poor living conditions. The bill currently has 61 sponsors, including many in the Housing Subcommittee.

The HEARTH Act has broad support among people working with homeless children and youth in public schools, including Catholic Charities USA, National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, Volunteers of America, Community Action Directors of Oregon in Salem, and hundreds of others.

According to Barbara Duffield, the bill would, “put communities back in their rightful position of determining how HUD homeless dollars are best spent to meet local needs.”

Clackamas County numbers:
- 3,543 homeless persons counted
- 1,310 children (37%)
- 2,333 adults (63%)

Top places people experiencing homeless slept in 2007:
- Doubled up/overcrowded conditions, 62%
- Outdoors – camps, streets, forest, 10%
- Emergency shelter, 9%
- In cars/trucks, 9%

Top things people say they need to get out of being homeless:
- Money to help pay rent, 52%
- Money to pay rent deposit, 40%
- Help getting a job, 38%
- Medical care, 29%dollars are best spent to meet local needs.”

From the June 1 edition of Street Roots. Written by Israel Bayer

If a house falls in Skid Row, does it make a sound?

Recently the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced the “winners” of this year’s McKinney homeless assistance funding. Los Angeles was one of the big losers.

Because of a bureaucratic accounting dispute between HUD and the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, $13 million in Shelter Plus Care supportive housing grants were denied to that community. This, in spite of the fact that Los Angeles has the largest homeless population in the country.

This denial of funds means the loss of permanent housing options for 250 households.

If LA City had lost $13 million in federal funding for policing
Skid Row, the Mayor’s office and our federal representatives would be all over it! The business community and developers would be shouting from the top of City Hall's tower and in every media outlet in town. There would be no worry about political fallout. There would be only righteous indignation that "public safety" was being jeopardized by bureaucrats in Washington, DC.

But where is the political pressure, where is the righteous indignation when it comes to the housing needs of LA's poorest people?

Attempts by community groups to get the Mayor and most of our federal representatives on record against this calamity have proven futile. The only elected officials who responded to the crisis were the City Council who unfortunately have no effective power to influence this situation in the long term. Councilmember Jan Perry understood the impact on her constituents and directed the Housing Authority to transfer alternative resources to the underfunded projects. So again, local government was forced to rob Peter to pay Paul.

No other voices were heard. Only an unnatural silence. Federal political bureaucrats arbitrarily take affordable housing money away from a community that far and away has the largest number of homeless people in the country, and neither the Mayor nor most LA representatives in Congress speak up. Why?

Mayors are in a bind. They depend on the federal government for all sorts of funding, from infrastructure to environment to policing. The housing needs for the country’s poorest people through HUD’s annual McKinney Act allocations is but a small piece of the overall pie. To kick up a ruckus over this cut in homeless funding could, and probably would, put at risk all the other federal money a Mayor requests and needs. This deplorable reality is well understood by every local official who works on issues that rely in whole or in part on federal funding.

But the story is different for our federal representatives. They do not depend on federal funding. They do not depend on HUD. Quite the reverse – they control HUD's pursestrings. The problem is that our federal representatives inevitably follow the Mayor’s lead: If the Mayor says it’s an issue, then it’s an issue. If the Mayor says it ain’t, well then, it ain’t.

When local groups asked their federal elected officials to fight for reinstatement of the $13 million cut, they heard the same refrain: "What does the Mayor think?" When local groups followed up with the Mayor, they were told it would be taken care of… next year.

This explains why local communities continue to see their federal
affordable housing programs decimated with hardly a peep about it in Washington, DC. The situation is not unique to Los Angeles.

Mayors don't do anything out of fear of biting the hand that feeds them, and federal representatives don't say much as they seem to feel they work for the Mayors rather than the people who elected them and sent them to DC.

Our representatives in Congress are elected by us. They need to hear us, and then they need to deal with federal agencies to ensure that these agencies are accountable and humane to the people in their communities, and that includes homeless people.

Boden plugs the WRAP Without Housing Report

Paul Boden came to Seattle to make fun of the Phil Mangano Rock & Roll Tour and call bullshit on federal housing policy. (2:08 Mins). Download the report.

Counting the Homeless with Philip Mangano

NPR's Scott Simon did a softball interview with Bush administration homelessness czar Philip Mangano on Weekend Edition, and Phil offered a genially upbeat litany of distortions and half truths as he assured us that the "business focused, results oriented" Ten Year Plan strategies are succeeding in ending homelessness. It was disappointing to hear Simon, who is certainly capable of doing a tough interview, defer to Mangano as if he were the reincarnation of Mother Theresa.

Simon sets the stage for Mangano's rap by parroting the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness line that ten percent of the homeless draw fifty percent of the emergency shelter resources, and that the magic bullet to ending homelessness lies in relentlessly focusing our attention on the toughest cases.

The rebuttal to this gets pretty deep into the weeds, which is part of why Mangano's oversimplification works so well. The short version is that the studies upon which this is based exclude several key groups, like families with children. The Ten Tear Plan model also assumes a static reality, which is just weird. For a good overview and critique, see NPACH's Q&A on chronic homelessness.

What I find so maddening about Mangano is how successful he's been in sidelining any discussion of structural poverty in relation to the problem of homelessness. By focusing national attention on the most dysfunctional and stereotypically "homeless" ten percent of the two million or more who are without housing, he has managed to deflect attention from the many ways in which federal policy creates poverty while effectively placing ninety-five percent of the responsibility for a solution on the localities.

He uses the terms chronic homeless, street homeless, and homeless interchangeably, so when he talks about these huge "reductions" that are taking place, any normal person would assume he's talking about homelessness in general. Thus, the illusion is established that major progress has been made when the reality is far less encouraging.

In Portland, for example, Mangano says homelessness has decreased by 70%. Without going into the complexities of the count, let's just say that this is an extremely contested number. The City of Portland claims a 39% decrease. Portland's Street Roots says they're not convinced.

The 2006 Conference of Mayors report says that requests for family shelter in that city actually rose. Outside the city, these rosy reports of ending homelessness turn positively grim. Some advocates claim that rural homelessness in Oregon is up by as much as 300%.

San Fransisco, another of Mangano's successes with a 38% decrease, reports a rise in family requests for shelter as well. Overall, says the Conference of Mayors, homelessness is up by six percent, nearly a third of family requests for shelter go unmet, and the average length of an episode of homelessness is now at eight months, the longest on record.

A recent internal fight within the our own Committee to End Homelessness in King County might shed some light. While some parties within CEHKC, based on the last two years' counts, wanted to report similar declines in homelessness, others argued that changes in the timing and methodology of the annual one night count rendered comparisons less than entirely meaningful. This point of view eventually prevailed.

Something that goes unsaid in all this counting and recounting is that most cities are employing liberal use of the stick right along side the Housing First carrot. Portland, LA, San Fransisco, and a host of other cities have become decidedly less hospitable, and this decreases the numbers as well. LA, for example, sends their police out every two weeks to roust sleeping homeless people under the guise of getting an accurate count. The numbers in LA's skid row have declined sharply.

Over the last three years in San Fransisco, says the Mayor's press release, "1,864 homeless persons left San Francisco to be reunited with friends or family members in other parts of the country through the City's Homeward Bound Program." This is otherwise known as the one-way bus ticket out of town. Long-time San Fransisco advocate Paul Boden reports that his city now counts these as housing placements.

So as Mangano goes around crowing his mission accomplished message, I'm thinking I've heard it before, and it wasn't true then either.

I'm just thankful that he didn't go into his "I'm from Massachusetts and an abolitionist, and Republicans ended slavery and they'll end homelessness too" rap. That just might have sent me right over the edge.

Originally posted on Apesmas Lament.