HUD's Annual Report to Congress on Homelessness

HUD announced their 2010 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. 

In the press release, HUD points to some interesting trends including a 17% decrease of homelessness in principal cities accompanied by an increase of 57% in suburban and rural areas.  There are also more and more homeless families, but overall a decline in total homelessness since 2007 (even with a jump in 2010 due to the economy).  But this is largely due to a steep drop in Los Angeles, so I'm suspecting they may have some bad data out there.

HUD collects data in the following ways:

• The annual Point in Time Count in January with a massive effort to count as many homeless persons that can be found in a single night.
• The Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) which tracks uses of programs over the year.
• Reported use of housing inventories such as emergency shelters, transitional housing, etc.
• Reports from grantees under the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP)

I doubt many people realize just how much data collection is happening nowadays in an effort to track efforts, document outcomes, and to study ways to improve future efforts.  HMIS is a relatively new system which agencies can access limited data on people who access services at different points (i.e. emergency shelter at one location, employment assistance at another location, then another shelter days later) and reduces the time and effort to repeatedly enter their intake information.  I had concerns about privacy when I first heard about HMIS, but my understanding is that for most agencies, access to data is controlled on a "need to know" basis beyond the basics.

HMIS shows that more than 1.59 million people spent at least one night in an emergency shelter or a transitional housing in 2010, a 2.2 percent increase.  Interestingly, single men in shelters tend to be white males over 30 with a disability, while homeless adults in sheltered families tend to be African-American females without a disability.  That latter bit shouldn't be surprising for those familiar with the high rate of eviction among low-income African-American women. 

I mentioned the decrease in urban areas and the increase in suburban and rural areas.  Perhaps because of more economic opportunities, "...emergency shelter stays in suburban and rural shelters have shortened, which allows these programs to turn beds over faster and serve more people over time. Conversely, occupancy rates in principal cities have not changed but stays have become longer, and these programs are serving fewer people."

Milwaukee has seen some new Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) developments, and HUD reports on the success of those developments across the country.  Nearly 295,000 people nation-wide used PSH units in a year, with 18% exiting to rental housing and just five percent exiting to a homeless shelter, transitional housing, or the streets.  Tenants typically stay between 1-5 years.  Most PSH programs have a disability requirement, so 79% of adult PSH tenants have a disability.

HUD reports that while the 2009 U.S. adult population has a 15.3% disability rate, 24.6% of people living in poverty has a disability.  But 36.8% of those sheltered in 2010 reported having a disability.  So the disability rate of homeless adults is over double that of the general population!  (A small caveat; HUD includes substance abuse as a disability, while the Census doesn't.)  The most common disability is substance abuse, 34.7%, followed by serious mental illness at 26.2%, although there often is an overlap.  The rate of HIV/AIDS in general population is less than .05%, but among the adult homeless population, it is 3.9%.

Domestic violence continues to be a problem, with 12.3% of Point-in-Time counts reporting surviving domestic violence.  This is not collected by the HMIS system since domestic violence programs cannot participate in HMIS by law.

The number of people who are homeless tend to be concentrated in coastal states, particularly California, New York, and Florida, those three states having 40% of the total homeless population, despite having only 25% of the US population.  California and New York have a third of all PSH beds.  Throw in just four more states, and those six states have half of all the PSH beds in America.  Wisconsin has less than 1% of the total PSH beds.

A new approach is to prevent homelessness and rapidly re-house those who become homeless. This is the goal of the HPRP program, and more than 690,000 received assistance in the first year of the program, with 77% receiving assistance to prevent homelessness (such as temporary rental or utility assistance), while others received assistance in being housed permanently.  The success rate of this approach is at 94%.

HPRP is being funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or the "Stimulus" which Secretary Donovan credits with preventing numerous instances of homelessness.

For the first time, HUD’s annual report reveals how the Recovery Act’s Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program (HPRP) helped to mitigate homelessness in America, assisting nearly 700,000 persons in the first year of the program.

“It’s clear that had it not been for President Obama’s Recovery Act, many hundreds of thousands of persons may have fallen into homelessness or remained there ,” said HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. “During the height of our nation’s economic hardship, we’ve managed to stabilize and even prevent homelessness as we work to find permanent housing solutions for the most vulnerable among us.”