Federal Homeless Policy Update: Fun House Mirrors
On October 20, the Senate passed an annual spending bill for the Departments of Transportation, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Next up, the Senate and House will negotiate differences between their two versions of the bill. Under the Senate bill, the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program would receive $15.6 billion, which is $100 million below the House level and $870 million above the 2005 funding.
While extreme budget cuts and radical changes to the voucher program continue to be successfully thwarted, a disturbing trend of Congress failing to fund any new vouchers persists. It is perhaps hard to imagine, but President Gerald Ford’s request for over 500,000 new vouchers represent a high water mark for the program.
As brutally long Section 8 waiting lists grow or are closed off entirely, people so miserably failed by our broken housing policy will inevitably turn to the homeless “system” for emergency assistance. Yet, the numbers within that account are equally bleak. HUD’s homeless assistance program, which funds the local continuum of care, would receive $1.415 billion in the Senate bill, an increase of $174 million from last year and $75 million above the level set in the House version of the bill. An actual increase? Yes. But as we observe policy makers or national organizations congratulate themselves for such a “victory,” a little perspective is required.
Last year, fifty-one communities didn’t receive any money for their homeless programs and close to 40% of all new funding requests for homeless assistance projects throughout the country were denied. Ultimately, if the $174 million in the Senate bill were devoted entirely to constructing permanent housing, it would provide roughly 34 new units of housing per state. As homelessness increases in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and against the backdrop of the existing housing crisis, such a modest increase to the emergency programs is hardly grounds for celebration.
Rethinking Homelessness
In 1987, Congress passed federal legislation to address the emerging crisis of homelessness. This legislation—the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act—established a set of federal homeless assistance programs administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Through regulation, policy guidance, or specific statutory language, these agencies have adopted diverse definitions of homelessness. While some variation in federal definitions appropriately reflects different agency missions, other discrepancies have resulted in the exclusion of extremely vulnerable populations identified and assisted by one federal program from receiving much needed services provided by another.
In particular, the definition of homelessness employed by HUD has created barriers for many families and youth experiencing homelessness. To remedy this problem, the HUD definition of homelessness should be amended to explicitly include people living doubled-up and motels, as currently covered under the Department of Education’s definition.
The definition of homelessness employed by HUD includes only individuals who have a primary nighttime residence in private or public shelters “designed to provide temporary living accommodations;” in “institutions that provide a temporary residence for individuals intended to be institutionalized;” and in private and public places “not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings.”
The HUD definition of homelessness does not include households who are sharing the housing of others temporarily because they have nowhere else to go (“doubled-up”), or those who are staying in motels and similar places due to lack of alternatives. And, because such households are not included in the HUD definition of homelessness, they are excluded from HUD services.
Programmatic definitions for different HUD programs such as the “chronic homeless initiative” are yet even more restrictive and categorically exclude families and children as well as most individuals. Indeed, the Bush Administration’s almost exclusive focus on “chronic” homelessness, of course, represents a not too subtle attempt to redefine homelessness out of existence. But ignoring the real need for housing and homeless assistance by using a scaled down, limited definition of homelessness does nothing to assist policymakers, service providers, and others in making informed decisions about who is impacted by the affordable housing crisis in our communities and how to meet their needs.
Only by acknowledging the extent of homelessness, and by giving communities the ability to appropriately respond to it, can we begin to address the causes of and solutions to homelessness.
Brad