The best fertilizer on any farm is the footsteps of the owner.

Confucius

On November 15 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced that as of December 1st, it would stop paying the room costs of more than 150,000 hurricane evacuees still stranded in motel rooms across the country (the next day FEMA announced that officials in Louisiana and Mississippi would have waiver power to extend the deadline for the estimated 53,000 living in motels in those two states until January 7th).

In addition, FEMA announced it would end reimbursements to cities and states that are currently paying hotel costs or leases for evacuees. Any state or locality that underwrites the lease of an evacuee after December 1st—as the City of Houston has notably done—would not be reimbursed. In short, FEMA’s policy makes it clear that all displaced persons must lease an apartment, stay with friends or family, pay for their own rooms, or end up on the streets. According to FEMA, this long-term housing policy announcement is designed to make evacuees more “self-reliant” and to help them “reclaim some normalcy.” Good theory, but there’s no available housing to match. Tragically, there’s precious little “normalcy” in the Gulf South these days.

The entire nation witnessed the sheer power of Hurricane Katrina as it caused immediate and wholesale devastation to approximately 400,000 units of housing and scattered over a million people to virtually every corner of the map. But three months out from the storm we are just now starting to understand the very dire long-term implications for affordable housing.

Removed from the view of the television cameras and daily press briefings, evictions have started en masse in the City of New Orleans as what little rental housing remains is often leasing at two times its pre-Katrina rate. Entire neighborhoods have been wiped out, public housing remains largely closed to returning residents, and precious few FEMA trailers have been sited. To make matters worse, virtually no emergency shelter is operating in the city as more people return to find they have lost everything. But relief agencies and, sadly, some national advocacy groups have shown little interest in finding a way to provide desperate people with the most basic of emergency shelter, arguing that it “sends the wrong message.”

Tell that to the individual or family that works all day gutting their destroyed home only to sleep in their car at night. Tell that to the individual who never had a home and relied on shelter before the storm. The ‘wrong message’ has indeed been sent, but it’s hardly about shelter. Incremental responses packaged neatly up in “plans,” policies that declare some homeless “more vulnerable” than others, and a myopia from many in the foundation world of funding what is “hot” might be a better place to lay that insidious charge.

The 2006 HUD appropriations bill (H.R. 3058) has worked its way through the negotiation process and is ready to be voted on by Congress. The bill cuts funding for several housing programs and should be passed by the House and Senate by the time this issue of Street Sheet hits the streets.

The bill cuts Community Development Block Grants from the 2005 level of $4.150 billion to $3.748 billion, cuts HOME grant funding from $1.789 billion to $1.707 billion, cuts American Dream Down payment funding in half to $25 million. Furthermore, it flat funds housing for the elderly and housing for persons with disabilities, which the President had sought to cut in half. The bill does, however, provide $42 million more in homeownership counseling, which may be wise given the record rates of foreclosure sweeping the country. The bill provides a modest $100 million increase for homeless assistance grants, but continues the nonsense present in recent HUD bills of requiring communities to essentially game the application process in order to receive funding under the Administration’s “chronic” homelessness initiative.

Equally troubling, the House-passed Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005 makes almost $50 billion in cuts to mandatory programs serving primarily poor people, children, working families, the elderly and disabled. Included in the bill is a $12 billion cut to Medicaid, the elimination of day care subsidies for an estimated 330,000 children, and more than $700 million in cuts to food stamps, knocking out over 200,000 recipients from the program. What’s particularly egregious about all this, however, is that while the House asks more poor people to do without child care, food and health care these cuts will be used to finance capital gains and dividend tax break for millionaires!

Taken together, the HUD bill and the Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act sound an awful lot like the “wrong message.”

In the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, hundreds of thousands of families and individuals displaced from their homes are now living on the street, in emergency shelters, motels, and campgrounds or doubled up with family and friends. This new wave of mass homelessness is a stark reminder that the existing HUD definition of homelessness has long failed to acknowledge the reality of homelessness in America and excludes vulnerable populations from receiving critical resources. Several national organizations—including NPACH—are calling for an amended HUD definition of homelessness that is more inclusive to the needs of families, children, and youth. Specifically, the groups are seeking to expand the HUD definition to include those living doubled up and in motels due to lack of alternatives. Already the U.S. Department of Education acknowledges this reality its definition of homelessness. It’s time for HUD to do the same. Readers of Street Sheet should urge San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to endorse this effort and ask him to support a similar initiative to be discussed at the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ January meeting.

Brad

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.