A man experiencing homelessness sleeps on the National Mall near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., in March 2021. Photographer: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

The Biden Administration Pushes Cities to Get Serious About Homelessness

Bloomberg CityLab

Kriston Capps

21/09/2021

The Biden Administration Pushes Cities to Get Serious About Homelessness

A federal initiative called House America will ask cities, counties and states to pledge to curb homelessness, in exchange for federal support and resources.

By Kriston Capps | Posted on 20 September 2021 | Bloomberg CityLab

The White House is launching a new national initiative to combat the rising tide of homelessness, a pact with local governments to commit resources and energy to the people suffering most due to the national housing crisis.

With “House America,” the administration of President Joe Biden is asking leaders of city, county, state and tribal governments across the U.S. to make a public pledge to reduce homelessness. In turn, the federal government will provide guidance and support to achieve two goals: providing permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness and building new affordable units for those on the brink.

Housing Secretary Marcia L. Fudge is announcing the initiative, a signature policy push for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, with Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough and other cabinet officials at a virtual event on Sept. 20, CityLab has learned.

The policy’s first cohort of 25 local and state leaders will include the mayors of Austin, Oakland, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., as well as Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., and the governors of California and Maine. Both Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell are among the first adopters. The hope is to replicate the success of the campaign to end veteran homelessness under President Barack Obama, an initiative that cut veteran homelessness in half by 2016 with the support of some 800 city mayors and county executives.

Asking leaders to publicly announce their commitments, including their targets for housing people and building units, will lend urgency to the issue locally, Biden administration officials say. Such a focus is especially important as city councils and state legislatures make plans to spend billions in federal resources allocated to them under the American Rescue Plan. These pledges will be well above and beyond typical housing placements, according to HUD.

The program is an effort to elevate the issue among local officials, according to a HUD official who declined to be identified. While homelessness does fall in the shoulders of mayors and governors, they don’t always own it as much as they could and should, the official said.

For some communities, House America will look like a moonshot — a public pledge to end homelessness or reach other significant milestones. In a sense, the rocket’s already paid for: Much of the resources for House America will come from the $350 billion in federal relief under the American Rescue Plan for state, local, territorial and tribal governments. Cities and counties that lack the capacity or expertise to assess the problem on the ground will have an engaged federal partner offering technical guidance and support. For cities and counties struggling the most with homelessness — namely high-cost coastal metros like Los Angeles and the Bay Area, where the lack of available housing drives the crisis — the White House push could raise the salience of the issue in spending discussions and force local leaders to set meaningful goals and expectations.

“Oakland is ground zero for the housing crisis,” says Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. “Our county saw one of the greatest increases for homelessness for the state of California during our last point-in-time count.” The California city is committing to provide housing for 1,500 people over the next 16 months while creating 125 new permanent supportive housing units — a small fraction of the city’s estimated homeless population. But dollars and units can’t fully convey what it will mean for older people to have a roof over their heads and for families to gain the dignity of housing, the mayor adds, and for policymakers to see how these dollars translate into health benefits.

Any number of factors complicate a federal effort to bring an end to homelessness, the unstated goal of House America. Even as the White House tries to put a higher profile on housing solutions, the end of the federal eviction moratorium and the failure to distribute billions of dollars in emergency rent relief could dramatically exacerbate the state of need in America. The success of House America may depend in part on whether local and state governments are finally able to get federal relief to renters before they run out of options. Meanwhile, exclusionary local zoning policies that make apartment buildings illegal — a main wellspring of the affordability crisis, housing advocates say — remain in place across much of the U.S., despite the recent wave of state and local efforts to reform them.

The Biden administration will measure the success of House America in two ways. Federal officials will help local partners come up with a meaningful target for finding permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness, and also ask local leaders to commit to putting a certain number of affordable housing units in the development pipeline before the end of 2022. There’s existing federal support for both of these goals: The American Rescue Plan authorized 70,000 emergency housing vouchers for people experiencing homelessness, for example, plus $5 billion in HOME Investment Partnership grants for developing affordable housing and permanent supportive housing.

For Oakland, this support means 515 emergency housing choice vouchers and a one-time allocation of $9.6 million in HOME-ARP grants — about four times what the city receives in federal support from these programs in a typical year.

Schaaf, who currently serves as co-chair for the nonprofit Mayors & CEOs for U.S. Housing Investment, says that she often hears members of Congress and their staff express doubt that lawmakers can do anything to change the bleak housing situation. For them, House America could serve as proof that federal investments in housing and in the safety net writ large can indeed be effective. “We are going to demonstrate how the extraordinary resources that HUD has provided, particularly the emergency housing choice vouchers and HOME grants, can go rapidly to work to get people off the streets and into safe, affordable housing,” she says.

Another secondary goal of the campaign is to get local leaders to ditch counterproductive policies around homelessness. Cities across the country favor clearing out homeless encampments, even though researchers have shown that it’s expensive and wasteful, not to mention disruptive for people who lose their belongings and communities only to be shuffled from one tent city to another. The federal government wants cities and counties (and states) to prioritize the suite of permanent solutions known as Housing First over quicker fixes such as congregate shelters or tiny-home villages.

“We do not want them to build shelters. Shelters are not our answer,” Fudge testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee on federal relief efforts back in April. “We’re hopeful the shelters are going to go away as a consequence of what we’re doing.”

Mayor Steve Adler of Austin, another House America member city, says that local leaders convened a summit earlier this year to develop a plan to eliminate homelessness in Texas’ Capital Region. Representatives from Austin, Travis County, the local chamber of commerce, homeless service providers, and nonprofits such as Austin Justice Coalition and Homes Not Handcuffs set a goal to house 3,000 people over the next three years. The cost? $520 million — unthinkably steep, at least before the American Rescue Plan and House America.

When it came to CARES Act funding, Adler says, the pandemic need was so great that emergency funds had to put out fires everywhere. But when the American Rescue Plan arrived, conversations within the U.S. Conference of Mayors turned to solving bigger problems. For Austin, House America is an opportunity to do something truly transformational — to make homelessness infrequent, non-recurring and short in duration.

“If you’re actually going to house 3,000 people in three years, you have to touch a lot more people than that. You have to divert people from homelessness. To accomplish that goal, you need to build a system,” Adler says. “In Austin, if we actually built out the homelessness response system, if we actually build out the infrastructure, then we can reach equilibrium.”

To support cities in these efforts, the Biden administration aims to convene monthly calls with local leaders who take the House America pledge. Some efforts will be tailored to places with unique housing struggles. In Maine, for example, record numbers for homelessness in recent years reflect both an urban and rural problem marked by a steep loss of existing affordable housing. The House America challenge includes officials from the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services in order to support leaders in rural areas and legacy industrial cities, where the housing crisis takes different shapes. “The technical assistance is just as valuable as the dollars,” Schaaf says.

The lack of affordable housing is an enormous challenge for the nation, one that the Biden administration is trying to tackle on several fronts. Earlier this month, HUD announced an effort to build and preserve 100,000 affordable homes over the next three years. Both Congress and the White House are looking at ways to push local governments to ease restrictive zoning policies. And the federal government is trying to shake things up at the top: To speed the construction of subsidized housing, HUD announced that it will make 5% of funds under the $5 billion HOME-ARP grants available immediately to cities and counties, before any plans are approved.

Homelessness specifically has emerged as a priority for Fudge, who in addition to her work as housing secretary has also taken on the mantle of chair of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates federal policy between 19 different agencies. House America will now test the Biden administration’s commitment to the principle that housing is essential infrastructure.

(Corrects spelling of Chuck Hoskin, Jr. in fourth paragraph.)

Kriston Capps (@kristoncapps) is a writer for CityLab in Washington, D.C., focused on housing, architecture and the built environment.

Article retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-20/biden-and-hud-launch-moonshot-bid-to-beat-homelessness?cmpid=BBD092021_CITYLAB&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=210920&utm_campaign=citylabdaily

Cover Photo: A man experiencing homelessness sleeps on the National Mall near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., in March 2021. Photographer: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images.

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United States, USA, Biden, White House, cities, homelessness, finance, stimulus, governance, inclusion, housing, resilience, House America

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City resilience, City governance, Local economic development, Municipal planning and financing for development, Urban poverty and spatial inequalities

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The Biden Administration Pushes Cities to Get Serious About Homelessness

The Biden Administration Pushes Cities to Get Serious About Homelessness

The Biden Administration Pushes Cities to Get Serious About Homelessness

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