Communities across the country face an unprecedented rate of homelessness. Once considered a phenomenon generally confined to big cities by the public and lawmakers, homelessness emerged as an issue in cities and communities across the nation as worsening poverty and the rising cost of living expanded.
The dual crises of the pandemic and housing affordability magnify the problem. In recent years, the number of people becoming homeless has surpassed the number of people transitioning from homelessness to housing.
According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2020 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, on a single night, roughly 580,000 people experienced homelessness in the United States. Between 2020 and 2021, the number of sheltered individuals identified as chronically homeless rose by 20%.
The Biden administration allocated an unprecedented amount of funding to address housing and homelessness. Funds disbursed through the CARES and American Rescue Plan acts include 70,000 emergency housing vouchers, $5 billion in affordable housing grants, and $2.8 billion in funds for local, regional and state efforts. The American Rescue Plan provided an additional $350 billion in COVID-19 recovery funds for pandemic-related homelessness and housing instability.
Alongside this deployment of funds, HUD and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness launched the House America initiative, a companion effort to newly available funding seeking to engage and shepherd communities in the effort to address homelessness. The initiative emphasizes the twin goals of re-housing and affordable housing and promotes evidence-based approaches to alleviating and preventing homelessness. Emphasizing a housing-first approach, the initiative has invited cities, tribes, local and state governments to join the initiative and commit to re-housing 100,000 households and slate 20,000 affordable housing units for development by Dec. 31.
Richard Cho, HUD senior advisor for housing and services, is heavily involved in the House America initiative. Street Roots talked with Cho about the challenges — and importance — of addressing the causes and real-life conditions of homelessness and the House America initiative deployed to support the federal effort to do so.
The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Piper McDaniel: Can you explain why the program focuses on investing in affordable housing?
Richard Cho: The Biden-Harris administration has been, from day one, recognizing that we are in the midst of a housing and homelessness crisis, which has been clearly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. When the administration took office, we had an eviction moratorium in place. But even before COVID, we knew that about (4 million) to 6 million people every year were being evicted.
We saw trends of a growing homelessness crisis prior to the pandemic, where homelessness was rising, and particularly among people who sleep outside or people who are experiencing chronic homelessness. And also just the trends of more and more households paying too much for rent and rising housing costs.
And so one of the very first things that President Biden did was to ensure that we were tackling the housing crisis, first through the American Rescue Plan, putting in emergency resources to provide funding to help prevent evictions. So grew the emergency rental assistance program from $21 billion dollars to $46 billion. And then investing 70,000 vouchers and $5 billion in grants to help address the homelessness crisis, along with $350 billion from the (U.S. Department of the Treasury) to give communities more resources, which they can use for a variety of different uses to respond to the pandemic response and recovery, but also to help tackle the affordable housing crisis.
McDaniel: In addition to providing support for people who are unhoused, addressing other issues like rental rates and the process of eviction, how eviction courts work — is that something that's part of the effort?
Cho: The eviction moratorium was overturned by the Supreme Court, and then the administration started focusing really hard on ensuring that communities were deploying the emergency rental assistance to keep people in their homes, pay rent that was owed. But now, as some of that money is starting to dwindle, a big focus has been on strengthening tenant protections so we can keep people in their homes. (There’s also focus on) supporting communities to either maintain their own eviction moratorium — some of them have those in place — as well as (creating) eviction diversion programs, so that when people go to housing court, courts have programs that can ensure that prior to an eviction moving forward, people are offering some kind of rental assistance or mediation or other kinds of alternative rent payments. And so there's been a big focus on that.
And then another area is just addressing the nation's housing crisis overall. We see rising rents as a result of inadequate housing supply across a number of fronts. So the administration has also released a housing supply action plan that shows all of the administrative steps that we're taking to help communities build more housing, whether that's on reexamining their zoning, to looking at how they can layer various federal resources together to finance housing and pursue kind of more innovative approaches to building more housing.
In a way, that was a strong statement to Congress to say we are doing everything through executive branch action to try to help increase housing. And really, what we need is more resources, more growth. HUD’s budget over the last 30 years has been cut significantly.
McDaniel: You mentioned there are proponents that would like to move in the direction of increasing criminal penalties and taking more of a law enforcement approach to homelessness. Can you speak to that?
Cho: I think it's a combination of things. You know, communities have had these laws on their books that ban sleeping outside or panhandling or public camping, and they've been enforcing them to varying degrees as we've seen more people who are unsheltered, and particularly homeless encampments. Which, you know, if you go back a decade ago, you didn't see these massive encampments in cities. So that's a fairly new development.
But the backlash against those encampments has been that more communities are using law enforcement and enforcing some of the laws against public camping. We in the administration have been clear that we don't think that's a productive approach. First, it harms people. It may violate their constitutional rights, but it also disrupts their pathways to permanent housing if you keep displacing people and moving them around without any offers of help. And essentially, you're interrupting their pathway to obtain connections to housing and services.
And third, the cost of actually doing encampment sweeps without offering help is actually really expensive. And so the irony is that some of the political forces that have espoused this concept of increasing criminal penalties and creating what are essentially state-sanctioned encampments where they would try to provide treatment, it's really coming from this idea that they don't want to recognize that homelessness is at the end of the day, a housing problem, it's a housing issue. And I think because there's a fear that if we can demonstrate that providing housing to people to address their homelessness can work, and we can actually see reductions in homelessness, then the public will support the idea of investing more federal resources into housing assistance. And I think there's some political perspectives that don't want to see federal spending increase for any kind of assistance for domestic spending.
So I think part of what is motivating that focus on criminalization is not just something that communities are resorting to, but (it) has become, unfortunately, a kind of political talking point as well. So what I want to point out to people who are actually even thinking about going down that pathway is just how many millions of dollars it takes — not only in law enforcement costs but to operate these things as state-sanctioned encampments. It was a HUD study we did where we looked at four different cities' approaches to addressing encampments. One of those communities had invested a lot in these kinds of sanctioned encampments, and it turned out they actually spent about three times more money per homeless person than communities that really invested in providing pathways to permanent housing.
McDaniel: In the House America program, where cities are signing up and talking and figuring out how to troubleshoot, I’m wondering if you’re talking about their approaches to criminal law?
Cho: Yes, I mean, both directly and indirectly. When we launched the House America initiative, one of the people who spoke at that launch event was the (acting) Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta at the Department of Justice who spoke about the fact that given that we are providing communities with these unprecedented resources to scale up housing-first solutions, programs that can help people obtain permanent housing quickly, that we felt there was less of a need to resort to the approaches that really just move the problem around right through encampment sweeps without offering help, which doesn't ultimately reduce the problem and actually may grow the problem. So that was part of the messaging overall.
We're trying to help communities to implement housing-first approaches, (to) use federal resources and state and local resources to improve people's connections to permanent housing as quickly as possible. We don't necessarily directly get into how they might change some of their law enforcement practices. But it is something that we continue to message — that (criminalization) is not a productive approach. It's one thing if we weren't giving you any federal resources and telling you ‘don't criminalize homelessness, focus on housing first,’ but we are giving resources, so there's less of a need to go down that pathway. Some states are now passing these sorts of state laws (where they are) trying to increase criminal penalties. So both Missouri, Tennessee, actually Texas as well, have all passed these laws that turn public camping into a Class C misdemeanor.
In addition, we have a number of incentives that we've had in our homeless continuum program for years that discourage communities from criminalizing. In fact, we award more points to communities if … they actually overturn laws or change practices (to) reduce the criminalization of homelessness.
McDaniel: What's HUD's stance on sweeps?
Cho: Sweeps is a very loaded term. You know, I think our perspective is that we don't want encampments to exist. Encampments are not safe places for people who live in them. I know some communities debate whether we should just leave encampments alone, or provide more services for encampments. Our perspective is the best strategy is to actually resolve an encampment. That's the term I like to use, where the focus is on connecting people to housing and services.
A really good example is the city of Houston. We're talking about a large city. ... They have significant numbers of people experiencing homelessness, but they've seen decreases in homelessness, and decreases in the number of people who are unsheltered. And part of their secret sauce is that they'll go into particular encampments and they will engage the people to find out how many people are living there, and then determine if they have enough vouchers or permanent supportive housing or rapid rehousing to offer everybody in that encampment before actually determining whether they're going to resolve an encampment.
And once they determine that they have enough housing capacity, the focus will be on setting a date to resolve an encampment, but connecting every single person to some kind of permanent housing intervention. And then resolving it only by connecting people to permanent housing, sometimes temporary housing in between. But primarily, it's kind of a streets to home approach, and then working with law enforcement to ensure that encampment doesn't come back into that particular area. And I think that's an effective approach. Again, that's not a sweep. I wouldn't consider what Houston is doing as sweeps. What they're doing is resolving encampments by connecting people to housing services. But the ultimate goal is like we want to see fewer encampments, we want to see fewer people sleeping outside, we want to see fewer people experiencing homelessness.
McDaniel: You mentioned that a lot of this came about because there's a temporary flood of funds from the Biden administration prioritizing this as an issue. Is there an urgency to prove that this system works before the next election?
Cho: I think that's what House America is really about to demonstrate that we can use these resources to house a lot of people. We may not see in the near term a net reduction in the number of people experiencing homelessness because the other part of that equation is how many new people are falling into homelessness. And so what we wanted to do was make sure that we could tell the story that these resources are actually helping rehouse an unprecedented number of people who are experiencing homelessness. That's really what this is about, even if larger economic forces — rising rents, the Supreme Court overturning the eviction moratorium — all of those things are kind of working against us in terms of seeing a net reduction in homelessness overall. We want to show that we are getting people off the streets; we are moving people into permanent housing.
McDaniel: What happens to the nation if we don't do a good job of helping prevent homelessness? And also to help people who are currently homeless? What's that look like?
Cho: I mean, I worked in this homeless space for over 20-something years now. And you know, when I first started in this area, we used to do everything we could to get elected officials to pay attention to the issue of homelessness. You never heard governors talk about homelessness. You occasionally heard mayors talk about homelessness. Certainly, very few presidents have even (used) the word homelessness in the State of the Union address. And now, because of the lack of investment in enough housing assistance, and because of rising housing costs, and not enough housing supply — it's just bursting at the seams. And I think it's become the top issue that mayors (have). There was a Boston University survey of mayors that found that homelessness is the number one issue that mayors are facing, but they don't actually know what tools they have to solve this crisis. And now it's something that you hear the President talking about. I mean, President Biden has spoken more about housing and homelessness than any president since maybe FDR. ... Some of this is ultimately about whether we want to be a nation — the wealthiest nation in the (world) — that has people in the most dire and tragic circumstances. That's just not the kind of America that we want to be.
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