New Math, Old Equations
Do cuts to housing programs equal ending homelessness?
Let’s do the math:
Across the United States and territories, communities are being ‘urged’ by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) to develop ten year plans to end homelessness (some specifically to end "chronic" homelessness). According to ICH, over 100 communities to date have either completed or initiated a local planning process. Sounds pretty impressive.
Meanwhile, as homeless task forces take shape, plans get written, and press conferences held, the Bush administration has proposed cutting $1.6 billion from the Section 8 program, the largest source of federal housing assistance for low-income renters. Put differently, such a cut amounts to roughly $1.53 billion more than the proposed "new" money of the $70 million Samaritan initiative, the cornerstone of the president’s "chronic" homelessness agenda. Homeless families, already low on the priority list of current federal homeless policy, seem to be the group ready to take the greatest hit.
Should we be surprised? Not really. Urging communities to develop local plans to end homelessness, even without the necessary resources, seems consistent with recent policy impulses. After all, devolving federal social investment, responsibility and assistance to localities certainly isn’t a new phenomenon. The very emergence of homelessness corresponded with the larger assault on "big government" and the related cuts to federal social programs beginning in the early 1980s.
Along these lines, it is worth noting that the Administration has never included Section 8 (or any significant investment in new housing) in its plan to end "chronic" homelessness. Instead, we've heard how "chronic homelessness" can be ended cost effectively through a permanent supportive housing set aside in the McKinney-Vento emergency assistance program, better coordination among federal agencies, and mandated data collection.
It's all very simple, really; create a plan, cite "research," click your heels three times and, poof, you're on your way to "ending" homelessness. This magical thinking also underlies the "local problem, local solution" notion that allows the administration to justify its opposition to a tri-partisan national housing trust fund bill, a proposal which would create 1.5 million units of housing within the end of the decade.
It is of course always tempting, albeit clichéd, for Washington policy makers to proudly claim that they are upsetting the applecart, but truth be told federal policy on homelessness has remained essentially locked in the same mould since the explosion of homelessness over twenty year’s ago. We’ve seen plans come and go (the best, to our eyes, Priority Home: The Federal Plan to Break the Cycle of Homelessness, now sits collecting dust in the archives, having just celebrated its ten year anniversary), but given the ongoing cuts to housing and social services, to say nothing of the spurious charge of ending homelessness locally, one might be tempted to characterize the whole initiative as a brilliant set up, or at the very least, slick marketing.
How else might we understand or explain cuts to Sec. 8 and McKinney-Vento, the Administration’s opposition to new housing production, or HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson’s assertion that "being poor is a state of mind, not a condition" – especially against the backdrop of recent federal decisions to deny local requests for housing, shelter and support services?
The facts are that requests for emergency assistance have increased by 13% nationwide, and almost a third of people requesting shelter are turned away for lack of space. But perhaps these facts should concern us less, for the Administration apparently has solved the riddle of modern homelessness: according to its analysis, emergency shelters, outreach workers, providers of transitional housing, soup kitchens, neighborhood organizations, and the non-profits that have traditionally been at the front lines of the crisis, are, it turns out, responsible for "managing" and perpetuating the problem.
"Performance-based, results-oriented" measures, it seems, are what will pull us out of this mess, rather than an assault on poverty and/or a massive investment in affordable housing. And the resources to accomplish these goals? Well, to date, they haven’t been a part of any plan.
Whereas widespread homelessness during the Great Depression was, in large measure, solved by an activist state through the creation of public housing and works programs, social policy over the last quarter century has been driven by three Republican administrations and one New Democrat. And, the balance sheet reveals one constant: a failure to reconcile the dramatic cuts to federal housing and the resultant homelessness.
Sadly, it appears the Bush administration is now ready to hoist a straw man and blame the "liberals," the "doubters," the well meaning providers and people on the front lines for "accommodating" homelessness. Such charges conveniently ignore the 64% cut to the HUD budget since 1978, the annual loss of some 90,000 affordable housing units, and the lack of universal health care, and instead place the burden of federal policy failure on the very people struggling to address the problems created by that failure.
The new math: it just doesn’t add up.