Renowned urban thinker Anthony Downs wrote: “No jurisdiction is an island. Every suburb is linked to its central city and to other suburbs.” But intra-regional social and economic dynamics can sometimes make it appear as though there are actual oceans separating jurisdictional boundaries. The intra-regional social dynamic of homelessness is no exception.
Are there actually homelessness disparities within a region? If so, how large? I examine these questions in this article using the specific case of the national capital region.
But first, some background.
In The State of Homelessness in America 2012 (SOH12), we included an appendix with 2011 homelessness data for the 100 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), as measured at a point-in-time. This includes data on nearly all of the metro areas in the country with populations over 500,000 people. Homeless point-in-time counts are reported to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development at the geographic level known as the Continuum of Care (CoC), which is a local planning network designed to facilitate and encourage coordination of local efforts to address housing and homeless assistance. These CoC boundary lines are organized based on numerous local decisions of which the primary consideration should be to design a system that will most effectively meet the needs of the homeless population.
CoC boundaries may or may not reflect other demographic patterns or economic realities that shape how people interact in the physical environment. MSA boundaries, on the other hand, are determined by commuting to work/employment patterns and, therefore, are more likely to reflect the full human ecosystem. But the truth about MSA boundaries is that they are not representative of an incorporated jurisdiction, like a city or a town. Instead, MSAs are simply a statistical measurement instrument used by the U.S. Census and researchers alike to more effectively comprehend regions.
I’m going a long way to describe CoC and MSA boundaries here for two reasons. The first reason is so that I can say that coming up with estimates for metro areas required some spatial analysis work of matching CoC with MSA boundaries since point-in-time counts data are only reported at the geography of the CoC.
But the other reason I expounded on and on about the geography of the data was to show the value of work that derives estimates for metro area homelessness. And the value is that with such data we can have a more nuanced picture of the regional shape of homelessness in any particular metro area, especially when we take into account other factors, such as the general population. By taking population into account, we can look at rates of homelessness and make comparisons. More specifically, we can identify geographic disproportionality by comparing the rate of a single CoC to the rate of the whole MSA, or the rate between CoCs within an MSA. 
Data on the Washington metro area homeless population show that an estimated 13,205 people were homeless at a point-in-time in 2011, which ranks the area as the 8th highest total homeless population in the country. The area’s homelessness rate is 24 homeless people per 10,000 in the general population (~5.5 million people). Though ranking in nationally at number 8 in overall homeless population, D.C.’s homeless rate ranks as the 21st highest in the country. D.C.’s rate is lower than many major metropolitan areas, including Boston (ranked 20th), New York (13th), San Francisco/Oakland (12th), Los Angeles (6th), New Orleans (2nd), and Tampa/St. Petersburg (1st).
The more interesting data on Washington metro area homelessness, I believe, are found when you look at the geographic distribution of the population in the region (see the map above and table below). Nearly half of the metro area’s homeless population lives in the District of Columbia. Fairfax-Falls Church has 12 percent of the population, followed by Montgomery County (9 percent) and Charles, Calvert and St. Mary’s Counties (9 percent). Prince George’s County is the only other jurisdiction with at least 5 percent of the metro area’s total population. The remaining 15 percent of the population lives in the 6 other CoCs.
But when you take the general population data into account and look at rates of homelessness within the metro area, you can see the disproportionality among the jurisdictions. Four of the eleven CoCs in the Washington metro area have rates of homelessness that are higher than the national rate of 21 per 10,000. These four CoCs are: Arlington (22 per 10,000); Alexandria (30); Charles, Calvert, and St. Mary’s Counties (34); and the District of Columbia (109), which has a rate over 4 times that of the region as a whole and more than 5 times that of the nation as a whole.
The jurisdictions with the three lowest rates of homelessness in the region are: Prince George’s County (9 per 10,000); Fredericksburg/Spotsylvania and Stafford Counties (7); and Loudon County (5).
There are certainly a number of regional and CoC-level dynamics that account for the variation in the rates of homelessness in the Washington metro area—such as differences in housing affordability, jobs, etc.—but one thing that’s clear is that there is significant variation in the available data.
 One thing to note about the analysis of all the jurisdictional variation is that when making comparisons across CoCs, caution should be used as jurisdictions’ methodologies for estimating their population counts do vary. But, still, the rates of the point-in-time counts of people experiencing homelessness do provide us with a method for making reasonable comparisons.
Today’s blog comes from Jennifer Ho, Deputy Director at the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. She writes today about USICH’s initiative to update the Federal Strategic Plan to include further content on youth experiencing homelessness and educational outcomes of homeless or at-risk youth.
Almost two years have passed since we launched Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness. With the help and support from thousands of stakeholders across the United States we have made progress against the bold goals of the Plan by increasing investment in solutions, adopting proven tools to prevent and end homelessness, breaking down silos, and improving data collection, analysis, and reporting. We remain committed to the goals of Opening Doors and to the comprehensive approach described in the Plan.
For this year’s update to Opening Doors, we are responding to requests that additional content and clarity would be helpful in two key areas: early childhood learning and educational outcomes for youth and children experiencing homelessness; and broad strategies on unaccompanied youth up through age 24.
Barbara Poppe and I have toured many youth-serving programs across America since the release of Opening Doors. We have talked with many youth, as well as leadership from providers and advocacy groups. We have also convened an interagency dialogue across the many federal agencies that have youth-specific responsibilities. We have been focused on what is known about the magnitude of the problem and what interventions work best for which groups of youth. We have also been talking with education liaisons for children who are experiencing homelessness and advocates with expertise on early child development, early childhood education, and education generally to understand what is needed to improve educational outcomes for all children and youth experiencing homelessness.
In December 2011, our Council held the first USICH meeting devoted exclusively to homeless youth. A robust conversation led by Commissioner Bryan Samuels from the Administration on Families, Youth, and Children with four Secretaries from Labor, VA, HUD, and HHS made our charge clear. Homelessness for young adults is unacceptable. And while we have a lot to learn about the size of the problem and what works best for whom, we must take urgent action to improve support for youth experiencing homelessness.
Just last month, I had the privilege of joining USICH Chair and HHS Secretary Sebelius in Cincinnati, Ohio where we toured Lighthouse, one of the leading youth homelessness providers in the nation. Secretary Sebelius spoke with Lighthouse’s leader, Bob Mecum, as well as executive directors from youth providers in Seattle, Chicago, and Pinellas Park, Florida. The Secretary also spent time talking with youth who were living at one of Lighthouse’s shelters and in its brand new supportive housing. Hearing from youth directly has been critical in shaping a federal framework for ending youth homelessness.
- Help us end youth homelessness
Feedback from this forum, combined with guidance USICH has received from youth and other experts in the field, will help USICH create:
- A set of actionable steps that states and communities can take to improve educational supports for homeless youth and children.
- A strong framework for preventing and ending youth homelessness that will set us on a path to reaching our 2020 goal.
- A focused set of priorities USICH and our federal partners will pursue in both the short -and long-term.
We are excited to see your creative ideas, which will help us continue to make progress towards our vision that no one should experience homelessness—no one should be without a safe, stable place to call home.
Inviting your Member of Congress or other elected official to visit and tour your homeless assistance program can be one of the most impactful ways to interact with them and engage them in the movement to end homelessness. Site visits involve letting your representatives or senators see first-hand how your program operates and help them meet with staff and consumers, so that they can make the connection between your program working to end homelessness in their district, and the legislation they work on every day in Washington, DC.
So how and when can you conduct a site visit? This blog will give you a little more background, and your opportunity is coming soon! The House and Senate will be in recess, working back in the districts, from April 30 to May 4! With several federal funding bills expected to be released in the coming weeks, the May recess offers a perfect opportunity to explain the importance of increasing federal homelessness funding to better service people at risk of or experiencing homelessness in their districts.
Site visits can be quick tours, or more involved events including speakers and the media. Both are effective, and which type you plan depends on your Member’s availability and your goals for the site visit. Most importantly, you should pick one to two policy issues on which to focus. This will depend largely on your specific program and the types of federal funds you use. For example, do you serve homeless people with McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants? Do you serve youth? Veterans? You should choose a policy issue to discuss with your Member of Congress based on what matters most to your program.
Throughout the site visit, make sure that whatever the Member is seeing or hearing, including program outcomes, personal stories from consumers, and the unmet need in your community, is being connecting to the policy issue and “ask” you’re making of your Member.
The early May recess is truly an ideal time to connect with your Member on federal funding issues or other policy priorities. If you’d like to conduct a site visit, we can help! You can use our advocacy toolkit for a step-by-step guide, or you can reach out to me at email@example.com for help deciding who to invite and on which policy issues to focus. We’re here to help in any way you need and can’t wait to hear about all the visits Members of Congress will be doing to homeless assistance programs in May!
The Center of Capacity Building is always looking for data about successful efforts to reduce homelessness, and here’s one from Richmond, Virginia. Homeward, an organization that works to prevent and end homelessness in the Richmond area, has been working on incorporating rapid re-housing into Richmond’s homeless assistance for several years. In early 2010, they started a rapid re-housing initiative with many private and public partners that re-housed 30 families over the course of a year that significantly reduced the average length of time families were homeless. This summary comes by way of Homeward’s Erika Jones-Haskins:
With the 2009 Community Foundation grant of $100,000, we invested approximately $80,000 in short-term rental and other financial assistance for families. The remaining $20,000 was used to pay for Homeward’s introduction of this concept to our public and private providers, the development of revised intake processes and case management procedures and data collection and outcomes measurement.
Here are the highlights:
- 30 families with a total of 97 individuals were served.
- The average cost per family was $2,666, compared to approximately $3,900 for a month of shelter for a mother with 2 children.
- For the 20 families we were able to track, the median length of homelessness was 25.5 days. This is a significant decrease from our community median length of homelessness for families at 45 days. (Which is, again, a 50% decrease from the 2009 median length of family homelessness of 90 days!)
This is especially relevant, given that reducing the length of homeless episodes is one of the new measures that communities will be working to achieve as part of the HEARTH Act. By the looks of it, Richmond is off to a strong start.
Today’s blog post is a question and answer with Ross Raisin, a British author, most recently of Waterline, a story of man’s descent into homelessness. This Q&A takes a look at his work and homelessness and perceptions of homelessness in the United Kingdom.
Q: Waterline tells the story of Mick Little, an ordinary man who, after a tragedy, slips into under-employment, then unemployment, then eventually homelessness. What drew you to the topic of homelessness?
A: I was interested in the idea of how a person – any person – could disappear, could fall off the map, even though most people would view his life heretofore as one of security, economic and familial. I was especially interested to make the connection between homelessness and de-industrialization – to think about the long-term (governmental) effects of taking away the heartbeat of a community, where that community has been built around heavy industry such as Mick’s community in Glasgow. What happens to the way people interact with each other, indeed even to the way in which they judge and value themselves, when they are told that their way of life, and the way of life of their ancestors, is worthless? There is of course not a direct correlation between these things and homelessness, but Mick is in many senses a very ‘normal’ homeless person, and these things are part of the fabric of his life, and his detachment from society.
Q: During his time on the streets, Mick has to survive not only the pressing concerns of where to sleep and what to eat, but also how to survive the mind-numbing monotony of days without structure. What sort of research did you do into the lives of the homeless?
I have never experienced homelessness myself, and so have been very careful never to express the idea, either in my writing or my talking about my writing, that I am giving voice to people who have experienced homelessness. It’s surprising how often you get asked it in interviews. The problem with such an attitude is that it immediately places the subject, the homeless person, as not having a voice that is as important as my published author voice, and this is of course wrong and unhelpful. If I am giving voice to anyone, it is to a character, a person, who I have imagined with the same care and thoroughness as I would any of my fictional characters. So I didn’t try to pretend that I could research homelessness. I did though feel a responsibility to be involved in the homelessness charity sector, and to talk to, and get to know people who have known homelessness. This is something that I have been doing for a number of years now, in running a writing group in a hostel. Never for research, or material, but for the enjoyment of it, as much as anything else.
A: Certainly homelessness is cracked down on even harder in the US than it is in the UK. Because it is illegal in most American towns and cities to urinate in a public space (even though public toilets don’t seem too common in most places I’ve been to), to sit, lie down, or sleep in public – all of this means that to be homeless is effectively illegal. The dehumanization of the homeless by law must surely have a knock-on effect in how the public at large view such people. And especially when part of the practical effect of harassing individuals is to make them group together – so it is my understanding that in America there are more tent cities than in the UK.
Q: Can you talk about Missing People and your work with them?
A: Missing People got in touch with me after the book was published, to ask if I could be involved with them, helping to promote their work. The main thrust of this is to raise public awareness of their Missing Rights campaign, which aims to improve the rights of families whose loved ones go missing. In the UK, if your house is burgled, you automatically get signposted to emotional and practical support; if your mother, or son, or whoever, go missing, you don’t. So the campaign is for such things as: that family members get directed to Missing People; that a single point of contact within the police force is set up for each family; that bodies of the deceased get automatically cross-referenced with missing people files. One big strand of the campaign looks like it’s having an effect – as the government has announced that it is to change the law regarding the Presumption of Death Act in England and Wales, something that previously has been a huge problem for the families of missing people presumed dead but not in life insurance, or mortgage, terms.
Q: What about your work with Unite, the UK trade union working for improved rights for workers in the restaurant industry? Do you see a connection between homelessness and workers’ rights?
Of course. Many people in the restaurant industry get given a very tough time by their employers. I have been working with Unite on a long-running Fair Tips campaign, which has had the aim of making sure that restaurants give service charge and tips to the waiters, rather than find ways of retaining it for themselves. Hotels, such as the one that Mick finds himself in, can often be places that a person can lose him or herself in, and lose a sense of what their rights are, and that they are being paid under the Minimum Wage. Divide and Rule tactics help some employers to keep their staff disconnected, from each other, and from an awareness of their rights. Obviously this can play into homelessness, both practically, and also as a mindset or, at worst, an acceptance that you have no rights.
Q: To what extent does bereavement play a part in Mick becoming homeless?
First and foremost, I see this as a novel about grief. As with a lot of people who become homeless, there are often several factors at work which combine to create a tipping point, a moment of crisis. So it is often not simply one big life event – like bereavement, but it might be bereavement together with a historical background of family instability (either recent or far back), institutionalization, physical or mental illness, or substance use or reliance, or any other myriad combined factors.
In Mick’s case, the catalyst is bereavement – with, in the background, a more subtle, social bereavement of de-industrialization. That – the effect of the decline of shipbuilding – is quite explicitly suggested in the novel – but as for other things that have occurred in the character’s past, those things are more for the reader to infer and imagine for themselves.
Q: What impact is the current economic climate having on homelessness?
Even official figures show that street homelessness has gone up by over 20% over the last year [in the UK]; the number of families put up by councils in emergency bed and breakfast accommodation has gone up by a third; and none of the figures even begin to address the hugely increased numbers of hidden homeless, who are squatting or sofa-surfing. Pretty much all homelessness services have reported turning away increased numbers of people because of a lack of bed spaces. Cuts to these services, at the very same time as the government is also making massive cuts to housing benefit, disability allowance, child benefit, public sector jobs, the National Health System, mean that the increased number of homeless are meeting with a decreased capacity for aiding them. Young people are being affected especially, partly because of changes to the age threshold of single housing benefit, that mean that thousands are starting to lose their accommodation. It is a bleak picture, looking even worse after the recent budget announcements.
Starting with today’s post, the Alliance is beginning a new “Monthly Wrap” series. These series are intended to highlight and remind readers of the Alliance’s biggest accomplishments and takeaways from the previous month. We start the series off with the month of March.
March was a very busy month at the Alliance! We had a full month of webinars, toolkits, and research releases. Let’s jump right in and start with the big stuff:
- Youth Typology. In early March, the Alliance released An Emerging Framework for Ending Unaccompanied Youth Homelessness and broadcast an accompanying webinar. The framework lays out different categories of unaccompanied youth and estimates the numbers in each group. The goal of the framework is to match those categories with the right interventions and improve the current response to youth homelessness.
- Coordinated Assessment. The Emergency Solutions Grant regulations released by HUD in early December announced that the Continuum of Care regulations, to be released shortly, would include a requirement that communities implement a coordinated assessment (intake) system. In response, the Alliance put together the Coordinated Assessment Toolkit which includes best practices, resources, sample checklists, and guide for communities either implementing or changing their coordinated entry system. Coordinated Assessment can help communities use resources more efficiently and effectively by ensuring that people are diverted where possible and that people are connected with the right interventions as soon as they enter the system. Does your community have a coordinated assessment process? If so, we’d love to share your tools or training materials with other communities! Send them to Kim Walker!
- Housing for Survivors of Domestic Violence. The Alliance placed an emphasis on rapid re-housing as a key solution for survivors of domestic violence in March. In late February, we pulled together a variety of resources to create a Domestic Violence Toolkit. Throughout March, we populated the toolkit with videos, solutions briefs, two webinars (Housing for Survivors and Prevention), and much more! The toolkit aims to share the valuable lessons from communities successfully operating rapid re-housing programs for survivors.
But that’s not all! Lisa Stand, a senior policy analyst at the Alliance, has been keeping us up to date on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the corresponding Supreme Court decision, and the importance Medicaid plays in ending chronic homelessness.
Last week, the House of Representatives passed a budget resolution on a largely partisan vote. Many people are asking what the impact of this “Ryan budget” (named after Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the author) will be and what it means, so I’ll supply a brief explanation here. As Amanda blogged about on March 22, a budget resolution sets the general outlines for Congress’s work on the budget for the year.
The House’s budget resolution, H.Con.Res. 112, would cut federal spending by about $5 trillion total over the next ten years, compared to the already-low spending levels in last year’s big debt deal – the Budget Control Act of 2011. (To put this in context, federal spending totaled just under $3.6 trillion in 2011.) Where would it get those savings?
For the 2013 fiscal year, discretionary spending – which is all of the spending decided annually by the Appropriations Committees – would be reduced even further than in the first round of cuts under the Budget Control Act, by about 2 additional percent to $1.028 trillion – and that entire additional cut could come from domestic programs, with no further cuts to military spending. If enacted, this would put further downward pressure on funding for discretionary spending programs, including all targeted homelessness programs and virtually all HUD programs.
Entitlement programs like Medicaid are not considered discretionary spending (it’s referred to as “mandatory” spending); they, however, would also be reduced under the House budget resolution through a separate process. In the longer run, spending reductions would be even more extreme. These cuts in lifeline programs are coupled with large reductions in taxes for the wealthiest Americans.
So, that’s what the Ryan budget includes – but what will the impact be?
The first important thing to know about the House budget resolution is that, as a comprehensive plan for federal revenue and spending, it is going nowhere. At least, not this year. The Senate leadership and the President have repeatedly said that they will agree to budget changes to address long-term federal deficits in a manner that is “balanced” between revenue increases and spending cuts from both domestic programs and the military. Although the budget resolution itself does not require the President’s signature, the changes it proposes would all require separate legislation to actually go into effect: appropriations bills, changes in the tax code, and overhauls of entitlement programs – none of which the Senate or President will agree to at this point.
The second important thing about the House budget resolution, however, is that one provision could have a real impact right away: its overall limit on discretionary spending will apparently be used by the House Appropriations Committee as it produces the House version of FY 2013 spending bills this spring. The Senate, on the other hand, will produce bills based on the higher limit agreed to in the Budget Control Act, setting up a conflict between the two chambers. Conventional wisdom says that when the two chambers meet to work out final agreements, the totals will come out to the higher levels used by the Senate. This, however, remains to be seen – the House could insist on the lower levels, bringing either additional cuts or a government shutdown when the fiscal year starts on October 1.
The third important thing to know is that the House budget resolution represents a school of thought calling for immense change in the role of the federal government. Its long-term vision is of a federal government that does little other than run retirement and healthcare programs and the military. In the long run, there is no room in this budget for HUD, or for any federal response to homelessness, inadequate housing, or poverty. That a majority of the House of Representatives is willing to endorse such a vision is a new phenomenon in our lifetime. It ignores, among other things, the effective, important work that is being done on homelessness by using federal funds to get excellent results for the most impoverished people in our country.
Last week, we released our Coordinated Assessment/Coordinated Entry Toolkit. In it, we provide tools to help communities plan, implement, and evaluate a coordinated entry system. We’re going to continue to build on the toolkit, adding to it and updating it as new information comes in. And remember – we want you to be a part of that, so keep sending suggestions and feedback to me at firstname.lastname@example.org.
The reason we’re excited about this tool is that we know that coordinated assessment is something that gets results. The perfect example of this is in Dayton/Montgomery County, OH. Though they switched over to a coordinated assessment approach somewhat recently – August 2010 – they have already seen major results. These are just a few of them:
- 18% of families over the past 7 months have been diverted from entering shelter. The vast majority of these families are being diverted without receiving any financial assistance – many of them are able to secure housing outside of shelter with the help of a case manager mediating on their behalf.
- Emergency shelters that had up to 40 families a night last summer now have 7 families per night.
- There were 12% fewer families who had a night of shelter in 2011 than in 2010.
We’ve seen similar results in other communities that are adopting this approach. By using a consistent assessment and referral process with a permanent housing focus, people are entering the system less, moving around within it less, and getting to the program that is best fit to serve and re-house them more quickly. And it’s not just communities that are seeing results – consumers have also reported that the coordinated assessment approach makes things much easier for them, too. Our promise to is that we’ll keep giving you news about interventions that, based on data, are effective for preventing and ending homelessness as long as you keep sharing your successes with us!
A little over a year ago, the Alliance released a paper on using a rapid re-housing model to end homelessness for survivors of domestic violence. This paper was based on the successes and lessons learned by community programs using a rapid re-housing model to serve survivors.
One of the programs featured in that paper and also featured in a separate best practice on the Alliance website is Home Free, a Volunteers of America – Oregon program. Home Free recently participated in a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study that examined the link between stable housing and domestic violence.
Recently, the Alliance hosted a webinar that highlighted some of the findings from that study, including that as housing stability increased:
- Women and children were safer,
- Women had greater job stability and improved income, and
- Children missed fewer days in school and displayed fewer behavior problems.
Perhaps most strikingly, when women who participated in the study were asked what made the biggest difference in their life, they said “having housing.” And, when asked what agencies did that was the most helpful, they stated the provision of housing services.
If that weren’t enough, the study also estimated the cost savings of housing survivors on the basis of decreases in their need of emergency services, including police, emergency medical care, and safety net programs. The total savings for emergency systems based on estimated costs was $535,000.
There is more in store this year than workshops.On Monday evening, July 16, there will be a fun, informal Meet and Mingle reception with cash bar and light fare, at the conference hotel. This will give attendees an opportunity to meet others in the field and relax after a long day of workshops. Additionally, attendees may purchase tickets to attend the National Alliance to End Homelessness 22nd Annual Awards Ceremony, which will be held at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Tuesday, July 17. The Awards Ceremony is an opportunity for the Alliance to honor organizations and individuals who have made significant contributions to ending homelessness in our nation. Awards are presented in the following categories:
- Private Sector Achievement
- Public Sector Achievement
- Nonprofit Sector Achievement
- The John W. Macy Award (The Macy Award is given in certain years for outstanding individual achievement)
Conference attendees who purchase Awards Ceremony tickets online at the time they purchase their conference registrations will receive a discounted rate on Ceremony tickets. Please note these purchases need to be made at the same time.