Homelessness in the Future

I attended a workshop at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition conference earlier in the spring with the Executive Director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness, Barbara Poppe and a co-presenter, Mark Johnston from the Office of Community Planning and Development.  During the workshop, they discussed HUD has learned what works and what doesn't work in working with the homelessness.  They spoke of the challenges of serving people who are homeless. 

According to Poppe and Johnston, the best strategy is prevention, but how do you identify who truly needs help?  How do they meet the "if not for this, then..." standard?  I think this is probably something that will be struggled with for a long time.

Of those that are homeless, currently 74% of the homeless are in shelters, and 26% are participating in a Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP).  That statistic has to change.  I'm not sure where "on the streets" fit in this, but perhaps this represents the people "in the system."  It should be noted that using HPRP, communities have already "reduced the number of chronically ill, long-term homeless individuals by one-third in the last five years."  Although to be clear, the overall number of homelessness has grown.  With families becoming eligible for HPRP programs, we should see increased effectiveness.

Let me pause here to explain something.  There are two different types of homelessness; there are people who have had some bad luck, who perhaps made some bad decisions, perhaps went through a foreclosure, and become homeless. But they don't always stay homeless for long-they find some other housing and move on with their lives. Maybe they need a helping hand getting back on track.

 And then there's what's called the chronic homelessness, those that have been homeless for quite a while, and can use up a large percentage of the resources in the system, and often cost communities a substantial amount of money in emergency contacts (police, emergency room, etc.).  They often struggle with mental illness and/or alcohol or drug abuse (AODA). This is what much of the research efforts have centered on.

Studies have shown that providing supportive housing, whether it is called Housing First or Rapid Re-housing, has reduced  the costs and the incidences of homelessness.  Results have been so encouraging that it has been embraced nationally. Congress passed the HEARTH Act of 2009 which gave additional emphasis on prevention and more re-housing activities, also gave HUD a legislative mandate to create regulations within 18 months to implement the Act.

HUD officials have been working on developing performance-based standards measures for accountability to be used by the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH), a council of 19 federal agencies chaired by HUD Secretary Donovan. 

Using research and feedback from more than 500 public comments, the ICH created a new plan to end homelessness. The result is Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to End Homelessness.

The Plan is focused on four key goals: (1) Finish the job of ending chronic homelessness in five years; (2) Prevent and end homelessness among Veterans in five years; (3) Prevent and end homelessness for families, youth, and children in ten years; and (4) Set a path to ending all types of homelessness.

The plan has 10 objectives and 52 strategies.  Go take a look.  It's only 74 pages with generous margins.  For a plan this far-reaching, that's pretty concise!