Preventing homelessness is a key goal of the new Biden plan: NPR

More people than ever have come out of homelessness in the United States, just over 900,000 per year on average since 2017. The problem is that around the same number or more have lost housing during the last years.

The Biden Administration latest plan to tackle the homelessness crisisreleased Monday morning, calls for more action to stop people losing their homes in the first place.

“We’ve gotten very, very good at providing supportive housing for people,” said Jeff Olivet, executive director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, which developed the plan. “We haven’t done a great job as a nation of turning off the tap.”

The new plan includes a series of means to stimulate the affordable housing supply, as well as increasing the number of emergency shelters and support programmes. But its biggest change is a call for the “systematic prevention of homelessness”, focusing on those struggling to prevent them from losing their homes. It sets the ambitious goal of reducing the number of homeless people by 25% by 2025 and calls on states and local governments to use it as a model.

After a steady rise since 2016, the number of people experiencing homelessness has stabilized, according to data also released on Monday. There were 582,462 in a single night in January this year, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is only slightly more than the previous full count, in 2020, before the pandemic disrupted the process.

Over the course of this year, more than one million individuals and families have been left homeless at any given time, and these have been disproportionately people of color, a disparity the plan aims to close.

Most people were on the streets rather than in shelters – a change that raised awareness of the crisis but also led to more communities. crack down on the camps and criminalize sleep or even sit in certain public spaces.

Olivet and local advocates credit the range of federal financial aid during the pandemic with preventing a sharp rise in homelessness. But with much of that aid now gone, they warn the numbers could rise further.

The latest data also shows big differences between some groups. The number of homeless veterans, families and youth is declining. The number of single adults and people with disabilities is on the rise.

“Where we invest, we see success,” says Olivet. “Where we don’t invest is where we see the numbers go up.”

“We’re losing. … It’s only getting worse”

Paul Downey has worked as a homelessness advocate for three decades and says the focus has always been on how to help people on the streets get into shelter, get services and find permanent housing. . What there hasn’t been, he says, is ‘a lot of talk about how we stop it from happening in the first place’, even though ‘that’s the most obvious thing’. .

Downey runs the nonprofit At the service of seniors in San Diego, where a recent count found that a quarter of homeless people are 55 or older. Over the past year, on average, for every 10 people came out of homelessness, another 13 fell into it for the first time.

“We lose, don’t we? ” he says. “No matter what we do, it’s getting worse and worse.”

Downey had an “aha moment” about prevention when he interviewed hundreds of seniors last year. The vast majority said just a few hundred dollars a month could keep them off the streets. He took this to the local authorities. Now the City of San Diego and County of San Diego have a pilot program to Subsidize rent for seniors at risk and others up to $500 per month.

Downey says that’s a bargain compared to the estimated $35,000 a year it costs for a homeless person in San Diego, taking into account the actions of police and other first responders, the justice system criminal justice and hospital emergency rooms. He plans to study the impact of the rent subsidy pilot project and hopes it is a model that can grow.

“It looks like a good economic solution on top of, of course, being a good human solution,” he says.

Reaching those most at risk of losing their homes is the challenge

At the association place of friendship In Washington, DC, there is a steady stream of homeless people coming for hot coffee, clothes, snacks and housing assistance. With a severe national shortage of affordable housing, Sean Read, community solutions manager, said it was essential to find “creative solutions, for example, three steps before total emergency”.

It could be paying parking tickets, getting a driver’s license reinstated, or fixing a car.

“If you can do an $800 car repair that keeps them working and then they’re able to pay the $2,000 a month rent, you got the problem fixed sooner for less,” Read says.

But identifying those most at risk of losing their homes can be a major challenge.

Los Angeles County is testing a computer model, developed by UCLAwhich tracks data from eight different agencies. social workers Reach out to those flagged as struggling, then spend several months offering financial and other support to stabilize the situation.

Olivet, who helped draft the Biden plan for homelessness, calls it “sophisticated and interesting direction for us” and says the feds can also do a better job of screening for risk. He says one of the priorities should be the groups most vulnerable to homelessness – people coming out of prison, people with addictions or mental health treatment, or foster families.

“At these critical times of transition, we have an opportunity. We know where the people are,” says Olivet. “We could link that experience of being patient, incarcerated or fostered directly into housing. It doesn’t have to end up in shelter or living in a tent.”

Prevention also means “more housing, more housing, more housing”.

The administration’s report cites a range of reasons behind the homelessness crisis, including: a lack of public funding for affordable housing, a severe housing shortage – especially for tenants with the lowest incomesrecord rents, wages that have not kept up with those soaring housing pricesand more climate-fueled weather disasters who destroy homes. Starting last year, the worst inflation in decades has only made the struggle worse for many.

Read of Friendship Place states that preventing long-term homelessness clearly requires “more housing, more housing, more housing.” And Downey, a lawyer in San Diego, says the construction process needs to be faster.

Serving Seniors recently opened a new venue with 117 units – and even with given land and a large sum of money, it took seven years.

“We didn’t have any major hurdles,” Downey said. “It just took that long to go through the system, to get the funding to be able to build the housing.”

Among other things, the Biden administration’s plan on homelessness includes ongoing efforts to facilitate the use of federal tax credits to build housing for low-income people, and encourages communities to change areas for denser development.

President Biden has also called for more federal funding for affordable housing, but Olivet of the Interagency Council on Homelessness says states and localities need to step up. In the November elections, voters in a number of places across the country approve more funding to build or renovate affordable housing.

Separately, the Biden administration has also said it will work with a number of locations across the country to help reduce their numbers of unsheltered people. There’s no additional money, but federal staff will join local officials, using their expertise to help navigate the 19 different US agencies that can provide support.

Specific locations have yet to be named, but officials say the program will launch next year.