Homelessness
Feature 1
Homeless has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. While there were zero visible tent cities a decade ago, they are now commonplace. Federal policy forced upon HUD by organizations outside of the government, and, ironically using an extraordinary amount of federal technical assistance funding directly from HUD, have forced into place policies that have not only normalized but have downright, required chronic homelessness for the purpose of receiving help.
Prevalent street homelessness, once a bi-coastal phenomenon, has been injected throughout America via ham-handed “housing first” policies. As a result, there has been a 3000% increase in a decade of tent cities or “encampments” as they are sometimes called (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2017).
If you have attempted to discuss the human catastrophe playing out across America, you have likely been told you are wrong - things are getting better. The data says so. Family homelessness, for example, has “declined sharply”; even though the share of permanent affordable housing available to families within HUD’s portfolio has declined by nearly 20 percent.
You are routinely asked to suspend your critical thinking skills, ignore what you see before you, and suppress your sense of urgency while you meet with cosmopolitan, spritely consultants to “plan.”
If you have been placed in a holding pattern, and trapped in a mobius strip of consulting firms, for more than ten years and you have used endless office supplies to display your goals and objectives and theories of change on color-coded Post-It notes - do not feel ashamed. You are not alone. However, the time has come to separate yourself and your community AND certainly every man, woman, and child from this dilatory tactic of “planning.”
These advocacy groups and their consultants are simply running out the clock on their own careers so that they don’t have to admit that “housing first” was not a program but a farce and a failed ideology.
All the while mayors, police chiefs, and public and private shelter providers (who have been starved of Continuum of Care funding by design) struggle to keep people from dying of a national public health crisis brewing within the encampments and beyond.
NCHCW offers three policy recommendations to restore compassion and reason to homeless services.
President Trump must ignore the ideologues and act on his observation that homelessness in the US is a growing human catastrophe. He must rescue cities and counties from the “Housing First” farce and declare that homelessness is national emergency and advocate for an emergency supplemental to appropriate $1.7 billion to transfer the annual renewal demand for rental assistance for permanent supportive housing en masse to the Section 8 Housing Certificate Fund.
Eliminate federal targeting and restore HUD to its award-winning role of judging the extent to which a local Continuum of Care application fills the gaps identified in local homeless service array.
Transfer $20 million from HUD’s Community Compass Technical Assistance and Capacity Building initiative directed to national consulting firms to the Housing Certificate Fund.
Click here to read the full concept paper.