Policies that Matter
We are committed to learning from parents, young adults, foster children, and front line practitioners about how they believe policies can change to improve lives in the real world.
Fostering stable housing opportunities for youth
The Fostering Stable Housing (FSHO) Coalition, a group of current and former foster youth, led by ACTION Ohio in partnership with the National Center for Housing and Child Welfare (NCHCW), has created a simple but multi-faceted plan to eliminate the gaps through which youth fall into homelessness. HUD’s recently announced Foster Youth to Independence “FYI Initiative was designed and delivered to HUD Secretary Ben Carson by the FSHO. Secretary Carson and his team implemented FYI in record speed. This fact sheet offers some background on this new program.
restoring compassion and reason to homeless services
Yes, you can believe your own eyes. No doubt you have noticed that homelessness has increased dramatically. While there were zero visible tent cities a decade ago, they are now commonplace. Federal policy forced into place by actors outside of the government, and, ironically using an extraordinary amount of federal technical assistance funds (to the tune of $57 million), have forced into place policies that have normalized and, in fact, required chronic homelessness.
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.
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. So you are asked to suspend your critical thinking skills, ignore what you see before you, and suppress your sense of urgency while you plan. If you have been placed in a holding pattern for more than ten years at meeting after meeting after meeting. And you have used endless office supplies to display your goals and objectives on Post-it notes - do not feel bad. You are not alone. However, the time has come to separate yourself and your community AND certainly every man, woman, and child from this mobius strip of “planning.”
The folks involved in this planning are simply running out the clock on their own careers so that they don’t have to admit that “housing first” was a farce. 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 public health crisis within the encampments and beyond.
NCHCW offers three policy recommendations to restore compassion and reason to homeless services.
First: President Trump must declare a national emergency and free up $1.7 billion to transfer all permanent supportive housing renewals en masse to the HUD Housing Choice Voucher account. Private providers of PSH will resist this because they have gotten into the habit of receiving both the subsidy and the administrative fee from HUD through the CoC funding. They will simply have to adjust.
Second: Provide the same amount of funding (just under $3 billion) through the Continuum of Care process. HOWEVER, this process must be restored to it’s original, organic, and award-winning process. It must be driven by communities and how homelessness presents in these communities. Highly paid HUD contractors will no longer be in a position to direct CoC funding and TA contracts to their organizations or member because targeting will no longer be legal.
It is important to point out here that in 1999, prior to federal targeting to PSH for the chronically homeless, CoC funding broke down about thirty percent for emergency shelter, 30 percent for transitional housing, and 30 percent for a few different and effective forms of permanent housing. At that time, street homelessness was at 7 %. After 20 years of targeting, PSH renewals compose 87% of HUD’s CoC funding. Street homelessness is now at a record 36%. This is a policy failure epic proportions. No further evidence is needed to make the case that federal targeting must cease.
3. HUD’s technical assistance line item was around $11 million in the late nineties. Most of this funding went to local communities to assist them in completing their gaps analysis and submitting an application to HUD. That line item has swelled to an unbelievable $57 million and the majority of this money goes to enormous consulting firms on the East Coast. And yet, homelessness has never been worse. HUD must give these firm’s one year’s notice and either eliminate this line item, or preferably, and transfer it to the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Account for the purpose of funding the transfer of the PSH units.
