DC Homelessness Figures Buck Nationwide Trends

This year’s State of Homelessness report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness presents, in some ways, a rosier picture than last year’s.

Big headline is that homelessness decreased between 2009 and 2011 — not only the overall rate, but the rates for people in families, veterans and the chronically homeless, i.e., individuals with disabilities, including mental illness and/or substance abuse disorders, who’ve been homeless for a long time or recurrently.

As I noted last year, NAEH relies, for want of an alternative, on the point-in-time counts conducted by communities that receive homelessness grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Its raw figures, therefore, understate the extent of homelessness. Gross changes, however, probably mean something, since the PIT flaws are relatively constant from year to year.

The greater limit in the headlined news is that the nationwide trends mask wide variations among states.

Figures for the District of Columbia are a good case in point. All but one buck the nationwide trends NAEH reports. This is moderately good news in one case. Bad in the rest.

Overall homelessness. In 2011, as compared to 2009, the overall nationwide homeless rate decreased 1.1%. But in the District, it increased 5.11%. Nearly half the states also experienced increases.

Homelessness among people in families. Homelessness in this population, i.e., adults and children who were together when counted, decreased 3.39% nationwide. In the District, it increased 17.8%. There were also increases in 20 states.

Chronic homelessness. The chronic homelessness rate decreased 3.39% nationwide. In the District, it increased 8.84%. Rates also went up in 18 states.

Veterans homelessness. By far and away the biggest progress here — undoubtedly due to the big push at the federal level. Nationwide, the veterans homelessness rate decreased 10.73%. Rates also decreased in 35 states.

Here the District follows the national trend, with a drop of 19.78%. But no state wound up in 2011 with nearly as high a percentage of homeless veterans in its population.

Unsheltered homelessness. Nationwide, the unsheltered homelessness rate, i.e., the percent of homeless people found on the streets or “in other places not meant for human habitation,” rose 1.64%.

But it was 4.98% lower in the District. Rates were also lower in 22 states. As with the District, however, the percentages generally reflect very small numerical changes.

So what do we make of all of this?

For NAEH, the big message is that the temporary Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program created by the Recovery Act worked.

Though nationwide homelessness rates didn’t decline much, they would surely have risen, it says, without the funds communities got for a variety of short-shot types of assistance, e.g., payment of overdue rent or a utilities bill, funds for a security deposit and/or first month’s rent.

So now that communities have exhausted their HPRP funds — or soon will — Congress should put more money into the regular homelessness grants program.

No argument from me about that.

But the state of homelessness in the District — and elsewhere — suggests that funds targeted to people who’ve lost their housing or soon will won’t be enough to end homelessness in our lifetime.

The NAEH report, in fact, indicates as much in two very interesting chapters on risk factors for future homelessness.

Too interesting to cram into this post. So I’ll leave them for another.

But without giving the plot away, I’ll say here that the risk factors point to the need for a range of investments, including funds for lots more affordable housing.

Food Stamp Benefits Will Drop 10 Percent If Congress Doesn’t Undo Cuts

As many of you probably know, the Recovery Act increased the maximum food stamp benefit by 13.6%. For a family of four, this has meant as much as $80 a month more for groceries.

The boost was originally supposed to last until the increase was no greater than the cumulative annual increases in food price inflation. That was expected to happen no sooner than some time late in 2018.

Then came the need to extend two expiring parts of the Recovery Act that provided states with some urgently-needed fiscal relief. The bill couldn’t get through the Senate without a pay-for, i.e., some budget changes that would fully offset the costs.

The Democratic leadership ultimately decided to offset nearly half the costs by moving the end date for the food stamp boost back to April 2014.

Next things you know, there was a need to pay for the reauthorized Child Nutrition Act. And the Senate decided again to tap food stamp benefits. This time it lopped five months off the already-foreshortened boost.

The President’s proposed budget for this fiscal year would have put the five months back. But his budget was effectively dead on arrival in Congress.

So as things stand now, food stamp benefits will revert to what they’d have been if adjusted only for inflation in November 2013.

The Congressional Research Service estimates the initial per person loss at somewhere between $10 and $15 a month — an average of about 10%.

This might not seem like a lot. But as I’ve written before, food stamp benefits are egregiously low, even with the boost.

We’ve got new evidence from the U.S. Department of Agriculture itself.

In 2010, it reports, 41.5% of households that got food stamp benefits had “very low food security.” This means that at least one member of the household sometimes had to skimp on meals or skip them altogether because there wasn’t enough money for food.

Now low-income families may have to get along on considerably less. And our anemic economy may lose the biggest bang-for-the-buck stimulus we’ve got.

The Food Research and Action Center has launched a grassroots campaign to get the cut-off months restored, along with a now-expired suspension of a targeted time limit on food stamp benefits.

It has an online letter we can send to the President asking him to restore the two Recovery Act measures as part of his proposed Fiscal Year 2013 budget.

It also encourages us to weigh in with our Members of Congress.

Not much use if we live in the District of Columbia. But we disenfranchised souls can still do our bit by passing the word along to friends and relatives who live anywhere else in the U.S.

Proposed Wage Rights for Home Care Workers Triggers New Round of Debate

The U.S. Department of Labor has, at long last, moved to close an egregious loophole in its Fair Labor Standards Act rules — the exemption of home care workers from federal minimum wage and overtime pay requirements.

As I wrote some time ago, the exemption reflects an over-broad interpretation of a carve-out Congress made when it extended minimum wage and overtime rights to domestic workers.

That was nearly 37 years ago. So one could say the Labor Department has decided to rectify a long-standing error.

The department itself puts a somewhat different spin on its initiative. Says that home care workers today perform duties and in circumstances that weren’t envisioned when the current regulations were issued.

In any event, it’s issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking — the formal step all federal agencies must take before revising their regulations. Anyone who cares to may file comments on the proposed rule up to February 27.

And you’d better bet there will be comments. Here’s a preview of what I think we’ll see.

Support for the Rule Change

Proponents of the rule change will include organized labor and other nonprofits that advocate for low-wage workers, including home care workers specifically.

They’ll argue, as they have for some time, that home care workers deserve the proposed wage protections as “a matter of basic justice.”

They’ll note, as does the Labor Department, that home care is one of our country’s fastest growing industries. According to its projections, the number of home care aides will have nearly doubled by 2018 — from about 1.7 million to well over 2.5 million.

In short, we’ve got a large and growing group of skilled workers who are currently classified as occasional babysitters for adults.

This is bad for them — not least because it depresses their earnings to the point that some 46% live in households poor enough to qualify for public benefits like food stamps and Medicaid.

Also bad for all of us who want our loved ones — and ourselves, should the need arise — to be cared for professionally and, well, caringly.

Not surprising then to find AARP supporting the core thrust of the rule change on behalf of the older Americans it represents.

Objections to the Rule Change

We’re likely to see formal objections from some, though not all, home care agencies and the associations they belong to.

We’ve already heard from this quarter. And the concerns they raise go to the heart of the debate. It’s not the minimum wage requirement they’re so fussed about. It’s the overtime.

Home care workers already make, on average, $9.25 an hour — a very low wage for what they do, but not one that would be bumped up by coverage under the federal minimum wage rule.

But they’re entitled to overtime in only 16 states.

So for a great many, the wage stays flat, even if they spend far more than 40 hours a week actively tending to clients’ needs. And they often get no pay at all for the time they spend traveling from one client’s home to the next.

Some opponents of the rule change purport to have their interests at heart. Laurie Edwards-Tate, for example, warns that home care workers will earn less because agencies like hers will cut hours back to eight-hour shifts.

Also warns that thousands will be put out of work. The thought here seems to be that agencies will shrink or fold because third-party payers won’t increase reimbursement rates to cover the overtime costs.

But opponents, including Edwards-Tate, focus mostly on harms to seniors and others with disabilities.

“The cost of overtime especially will make in-home non-medical care unaffordable for many, if not most, of the seniors and persons with disabilities we serve,” she says. Dire consequences predicted, including costly, taxpayer-funded institutional care and risks of elder abuse.

“The companionship exemption is a significant factor in helping to keep paid, senior caregiving affordable,” says another home care company president. It “helps seniors protect their assets while receiving the right amount of care.”

This isn’t, I think, an entirely self-serving argument.

Mandatory overtime compensation could increase home care costs, though the Labor Department thinks it’s likely that employers will adjust shifts to eliminate or at least minimize the extra hours.

The first scenario could create more home care jobs, though perhaps also reduce wages for workers who are currently putting in as many as 80 hours a week.

The second would drive up home care costs and/or the already high costs of long-term care insurance. By how much is purely speculative.

For some low-income people, mandatory overtime could mean loss of Medicaid-funded home care — either because states that haven’t had to deal with overtime decide to scale back services or because they won’t reimburse for the additional costs.

In the latter case, agencies refuse to serve Medicaid beneficiaries, as some doctors already do.

Still, I think it’s fundamentally wrong to exclude home care workers from basic labor protections because we’ve got an unresolved — and growing — social problem.

We might as well say the affordable housing shortage justifies exempting construction workers from the minimum wage.

Let’s Recall Poverty Before the Safety Net

Huffington Post blogger Dan Morgan looks back nearly 50 years to tell us what poverty was like in his early reporting days.

This is an important, timely post because it reminds us of how poor people lived — and died — before the creation of today’s safety net.

Here in the District of Columbia, Morgan found “people living in basement apartments with dirt floors. Many were hungry, cold and short of coal for stoves. Some children were staying home because they had no shoes.”

Found a penniless woman with no coat to brave the cold weather for a trip to the social service agency. A blind man who made the trip, but was living with his nine children in an unheated place because the agency wouldn’t — or couldn’t — help him buy fuel.

In California, Morgan met a family that had lost three babies to dehydration while picking cotton there in 1936.

Still dreadful conditions 20 years later, he writes, when Michael Harrington chronicled farm worker poverty in that agriculture-rich state.

Morgan cites some evidence that safety net programs have lifted Americans out of poverty.

For example, the official poverty rate for seniors dropped from 28.5% in 1966 to 9% in 2010, at least partly because the federal government started indexing Social Security retirement benefits to cost-of-living increases.

Two other examples based on the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure. You can see them in this nice infographic from the Half in Ten campaign.

But Morgan’s main point is that safety net programs have changed the quality of poverty.

In other words, poor people, by and large, don’t suffer the same acute, life-threatening deprivations as they did before we began building the network of programs that make up today’s safety net.

Morgan focuses on what may be our biggest success — federal nutrition assistance programs.

“Clinical malnutrition,” he writes, “has given way to what government and private agencies call ‘food insecurity.’”

“Poor nutrition, not malnutrition is the biggest problem” now, says anti-hunger expert and advocate Joel Berg.

And indeed, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2010 figures, children in only 1% of American households sometimes didn’t get enough to eat because their parents couldn’t afford to feed them.

WIC alone, Berg estimates, has prevented 200,000 babies from dying at birth.

“Progressives,” Morgan concludes, “should not be timid about extolling this achievement. And conservatives, above all, should welcome it” because safety net programs “enable millions more people to participate in the great American market,” e.g., by using food stamps to buy groceries, vouchers to pay rent to private landlords.

Many conservatives do appreciate the safety net, Morgan says. But, even by his own showing, many don’t.

For example, he quotes Newt Gingrich, whose latest tome notes that the 2009 poverty rate was about the same as when the War on Poverty began. “What did we get in return?” Newt asks — a rhetorical question if ever there was one.

We hear the same thing from the Republican Study Committee, which counts a large majority of House Republicans as members.

“Americans have spent around $16 trillion on means-tested welfare,”* it says. “Even with all these resources devoted to assistance for the poor, poverty is higher today than it was in the 1970s.”

This is the send-up for its broad-gauge attack on virtually the whole range of federal programs that constitute the safety net.

And RSC member Paul Ryan, who chairs the influential House Budget Committee, has personally championed radical safety net cuts.

As we head into the Fiscal Year 2013 budget season, both the administration and Congress will be looking for ways to reduce non-defense spending by $54.7 billion.

“The safety net will be a fat target,” Morgan warns.

Some major programs won’t get hit by the automatic cuts the failure of the Super Committee will trigger. But that doesn’t mean they’re safe, since Congress is perfectly free to change them — or the law that partly protects them.

Other programs are wide open, as the Congressional committees and subcommittees parcel out the mandated reductions.

We often focus on defects in the safety net — people who aren’t served, people who are but not sufficiently. This is still important.

But, taking a leaf out of Morgan’s book, I feel we urgently need to show how much good safety net programs do — and to revive the history of what poverty in America was like before them.

* This figure comes from the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation — a not always reliable source. The RSC is also indebted to the Foundation for its uniquely expansive definition of “welfare”.