HUD Charts a Welcome New Course on Homelessness
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently announced a change in its priorities for funding efforts to combat homelessness. This is a welcome new course that signals a departure from the status quo that resulted in year-over-year increases in homelessness for the last 20 years.
HUD funds more than 400 community entities in every part of the country, called “Continuums of Care” (CoCs), by sending out a Notice of Funding Opportunity inviting them to prepare applications for federal funding. Some CoCs get hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal awards, some get hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on the quality of the applications, the number of homeless people they serve, and the points awarded for adherence to HUD’s priorities.
Since 2013, HUD has prioritized the development of permanent supportive housing (PSH)—subsidized apartments ostensibly connected to services. To score points, communities demonstrated their ability to create PSH and house homeless people without any preconditions, such as being sober or having a source of income. Among their metrics were the speed at which they could get someone a key to a unit and their adherence to Housing First, a low-barrier approach to housing.
Critics of this approach, like the Cicero Institute, argued that relying on expensive and slow-to-develop projects made the streets a dystopian waiting room riddled with addiction, crime, and untreated mental illness. They point out that developing units had no impact on reducing the number of homeless people, and that a lack of treatment created government-funded slums. Communities were constrained by burdensome requirements and a one-size-fits-all approach that made little progress in reducing homelessness.
HUD got the message. Their announcement prepares CoCs for new HUD priorities on addressing homelessness. Specifically, it focuses on treatment and recovery, reducing unsheltered homelessness, reducing the number of people who return to homelessness, and increasing the earned income of participants. These metrics maintain the focus on getting people off the street and into housing. They also signal that subsidized housing should result in positive outcomes such as sobriety, stability, and increases in earnings.
Federal assistance is expected to result in positive outcomes. Communities should have the flexibility to adjust their programs to meet metrics that help homeless people and the community.
It’s expected that homeless service providers and CoCs will howl at these changes and threaten catastrophe. It’s par for the course. However, we simply can’t continue awarding more taxpayer money to fuel continued failure. The nearly $4 billion in homelessness assistance funding each year has not produced positive results. Changing priorities of a program that has had more than a decade to demonstrate success isn’t cruel—it’s good governance. HUD’s new focus will increase effectiveness and reduce the suffering on the street. Refusing to change course would be cruel.