What We Know (and Don’t) About the Drops in DC Homelessness Rates

In my last post, I summarized the major results of the latest point-in-time, i.e., one-night, count of homeless people in the District of Columbia.

We see one-year decreases for the homeless population as a whole and for all the subgroups the District reports to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Decreases are longer-term for two overlapping groups — homeless individual men and women, i.e., those not with family members, and individuals classified as chronically homeless.

The District’s report attempts to account for the decreases. It attributes them to an expansion in permanent supportive housing capacity and its investments in homelessness prevention and rapid re-housing.

We’ve got sound evidence for the impact of PSH. The evidence for HPRP — the rapid re-housing component, in particular — is squishy.

It may help explain the one-year declines, but they’re no proof that rapid re-housing will end homelessness for the families that the Mayor — and his Director of Human Services — want to force into the program.

Permanent Supportive Housing

As I previously remarked, the steady drop in the number of chronically homeless individuals counted probably reflects the high priority that both federal and local policies have placed on moving these individuals into PSH.

The report itself provides additional evidence for this. At the time of the latest count, it says, 3,690 individuals and 983 families were in PSH units, thus not homeless for the purposes of the count.

Both these figures are higher than those reported in 2012 — by 18% and 8% respectively.

But this doesn’t mean that the District can take credit for providing housing with supportive services for all these formerly homeless people.

The DC Fiscal Policy Institute reports that the Department of Human Services expects to have 1,350 households in the PSH units it’s funding this fiscal year.

Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing

The PIT count report offers no basis for assessing the impacts of homelessness prevention and rapid re-housing.

A brief by the Community Partnership to End Homelessness says that 762 individuals and 643 families are “stably housed” because of HPRP.

But we have no timeframe for these figures. So we don’t know how long ago the beneficiaries received the one-shot or limited-time assistance — let alone anything about them, e.g., how much steady income they had.

We do, however, have data indicating that a goodly number of individuals and/or families didn’t stay stably housed after their rapid re-housing subsidies expired, presumably because they couldn’t afford to pay the full rent.

A presentation, also by the Community Partnership, says that two-thirds of rapid re-housing participants “exited” the program to “permanent destinations” (HUD-speak for permanent housing) and that 91% of them remain stably housed.

So about 39 out of every 100 households that had the limited-term rent subsidies are in some sort of unstable situation — either at-risk or literally homeless.

We don’t know how long the rest have been stably housed, though a recent statement by David Berns, the director of Human Services, suggests perhaps only one year.*

We do know, however, that some homeless families declined rapid re-housing because they were pretty sure they couldn’t pick up the full rent. So even if the stably-housed figure is fairly long-term, it would reflect some self-selection.

Why Fuss About the Rapid Re-Housing Data?

I’m nattering about the under-supported claims for the success of rapid re-housing because they have immediate policy implications.

As I recently wrote, the Mayor’s proposed amendments to the Homeless Services Reform Act would, among other things, give homeless families a choice between rapid re-housing and life on the streets.

At the time of the PIT count, 18% of homeless D.C. adults with children had no source of income whatever. Twenty-five percent were employed, but obviously not earning enough to pay market-rate rents here.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program was the most commonly reported source of income. The maximum TANF benefit for a family of three is less than a third of the monthly rent on a modest two-bedroom apartment.

How many families who’ve remained stably housed entered the rapid re-housing program with comparable incomes — and comparably doubtful near-term prospects for such significant improvement that they could afford full rent?

For the two-bedroom apartment, that would require a monthly income of nearly $4,707 — more than three times the District’s minimum wage.

Seems to me the DC Council should have a much better grasp on the putative — and prospective — success rates of rapid re-housing before it votes on the HRSA amendments.

A better grasp and a lot more input on other issues too.

* Berns says that “91 percent of those who have been re-housed … remained in stable housing after one year.” He’s apparently using the Community Partnership’s figure as if it were a percent of the whole, rather than of two-thirds.

DC Homelessness Rates Trend Downward, But Still Very High

The upsurge in homelessness in the District of Columbia seems to have abated — at least for the time being. The actual numbers, however, remain very high.

And while homelessness among individual adults is now lower than in 2008, when the recession had just set in, family homelessness is still exponentially higher.

This is the top line news for the District in the just-issued report on the results of the one-night homelessness counts by communities that belong to the Metropolitan Council of Governments.

As I always say, these point-in-time counts don’t tell us how many homeless people there are — only how many meet the restrictive definition the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development mandates.

Nevertheless, they’re all we’ve got for the District’s homeless population and the subgroups reported to HUD.

So here are the figures, with some additional calculations I’ve made to indicate change over time. I’ll deal with how the report explains the recent decreases in a followup post.

The total number of homeless people counted dropped a bit — from 6,954 last year to 6.865. This represents a decrease of 1.3%, but it’s still 16% higher than in 2008.

The number of homeless families also decreased — from 1,014 to 983 or by 3%. Even with the drop, however, the number has increased by nearly 67.5% since 2008.

The count identified 3,169 homeless family members — just 18 fewer than in 2012. Of these, 1,301 were adults and 1,868 were children with them.

The number of homeless individual men and women, i.e., those not with family members, declined for the third year in a row. The latest count identified 3,696 — 22% fewer than in 2008.

These are adults only. The count identified six homeless unaccompanied youth, i.e., kids under 18 who weren’t with a family member.

This presumably reflects major flaws in the count, since a limited survey by the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates found about six times as many who’d fit the definition the count used.

Both local and federal policies have put a high priority on moving chronically homeless individuals into permanent supportive housing.

We see the results in the number counted — 1,764, as compared to 1,870 in 2012. This is the fourth year in a row that the number has dropped.

PSH probably also helps explain the relatively small number of unsheltered homeless individuals counted — 512. This is 25% fewer than in 2012.

The count isn’t complete, of course, but the percent drop is probably fairly accurate. Figures for earlier years may not be comparable because recent PIT reports suggest greater efforts to identify the unsheltered population.

All these numbers speak to choices local policymakers have made — and some facing them right now. More on this tomorrow.

Homelessness in America: Progress, Stasis, Backsliding and Forewarnings

The National Alliance to End Homelessness recently issued its third report on homelessness, both nationwide and in each state and the District of Columbia.

As I’ve said before, NAEH relies mainly, as it must, on federal government sources. For homelessness itself, this means the limited and not altogether reliable point-in-time counts that recipients of homeless assistance grants report to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

That said, it seems reasonable to assume that the methods recipients use generally don’t change much from one year to the next. So the percent changes NAEH reports are probably fairly accurate.

What we see overall are continuing trends — not only for homelessness itself, but for factors that indicate high risks of homelessness.

Homelessness Nationwide

The total number of literally homeless people dropped by 0.4% last year — such a small decrease as to represent more or less a steady state. All told, 633,782 people were counted as homeless.

Decreases for veterans and individuals classified as chronically homeless were much larger — 7.2% and 6.8% respectively.

The number of homeless families remained virtually the same — 77,157, as compared to 77,186 in 2011. However, the rate of family homelessness rose in 27 states and the District.

And the number of homeless people in families rose by 1.4% to 239,403. NAEH translates this into an estimated 3,251 more homeless children who were with an adult.

Over the longer term, homelessness for all the individual populations counted has trended down. We see a few blips up from one year to the next, but lower figures for all since 2005, when HUD standardized point-in-time data collections.

On a less cheery note, 38.4% of the homeless people counted last year — 243,627 — had no form of shelter or housing at all, except perhaps a car, an abandoned building or some other indoor place “not meant for human habitation.”

This is virtually the same number as were counted in 2011.

The decreases in both chronic and veteran homelessness clearly reflect the priority that communities have placed on them in response to direction from HUD and, more recently, targeted funding from the Veterans Administration.

Most permanent supportive housing is for chronically homeless individuals, including veterans. Last year, there were more PSH beds than beds in emergency shelters or transitional housing — a time-limited type of housing that also includes services.

Homelessness Risk Factors

The risk factors NAEH reports fall into two related categories — income and housing costs.

On the income side, the official unemployment rate was lower in 2011 than in 2010 — down to a still high 8.9%.

This is a limited indicator, however, since it doesn’t include people employed part-time who wanted — and, in some cases, used to have — full-time work. Nor does it include people who didn’t look for work because it seemed futile.

The median household income was a bit lower in 2011 and the official poverty rate 0.6% higher, pushing the number of poor adults and children up to more than 48.4 million.

Some of them were undoubtedly beyond the risk stage.

On the housing cost side, fair market rents increased in 38 states. The nationwide FMR for a modest two-bedroom apartment, plus basic utilities rose 1.5%, making for a five-year increase of 15.1%.

More than 6.5 million households spent more than half their income for rent — 5.5% more than in 2010. And the bottom fifth on the income scale spent, on average, a mind-boggling 87% of their income.

Well over 7.4 million people in poor households were living doubled-up with friends or family members. This represents a 9.4% increase over 2010.

HUD reports tell us that doubling up is a major warning sign for future homelessness. In 2011, nearly 32% of people admitted to a shelter had been staying with friends or family immediately before.

The policy implications here seem blatantly obvious. Putting people back to work — and to work for the first time — would help reduce homelessness if the jobs paid a decent wage.

But we need much greater investments in affordable housing too — more support for construction and preservation, more funds for public housing operations and maintenance and considerably more for housing vouchers.

We see marked downturns in the rates of chronically homeless individuals and veterans. They show what could happen if our government got equally serious about the rest of the homeless population.

DC Mayor Slips Harmful Homeless Policy Changes Into Budget Bill

The DC Department of Human Services has a problem. Too many homeless families for the space it’s got to shelter them. And far too many for the permanent supportive housing units it’s funded to give some of them a more suitable place to live.

Mayor Gray has a solution, tucked into his proposed Budget Support Act — the legislative changes supposedly needed to make his actual budget consistent with District laws.

The changes I’m referring to would amend the Homeless Services Reform Act — the law that, among other things, gives homeless families with no safe place to stay a right to shelter or housing in extremely cold and hot weather.

The amendments would allow DHS to force sheltered families into temporarily-subsidized housing — or out onto the streets if they refuse it.

Families it decided weren’t cooperating with caseworkers assigned to assess their needs could also be kicked out of wherever DHS had temporarily parked them — and with none of the due process protections they have now, as the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless explains.

They’d lose them because the amendments give legal authority to a provisional shelter policy that the Legal Clinic successfully contested last winter.

So they’d be highly vulnerable to expulsions based on subjective judgments that they’ve failed to meet demands, even if they couldn’t or didn’t for good and proper reasons.

Experience with sanctions imposed on parents in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families programs shows this is not a far-fetched concern.

And just to ensure that DHS would have fewer homeless families to serve, the amendments would authorize the Mayor to require that they establish and contribute to savings accounts or the equivalent “as a condition of receiving shelter or supportive housing services.”

As if these families have money to squirrel away — even the vast majority at DC General, who rely on the egregiously low cash benefits they get from the District’s TANF program or are poor enough to qualify.

The amendments would also allow providers of supportive housing to establish time limits on residency — a strange redefinition of what’s commonly called permanent supportive housing.

Even stranger because DHS could bar the doors to its PSH units after residents were away for 60 days, even if they’d been in a hospital.

And there would be a fixed two-year time limit on transitional housing — another form of housing that includes supportive services designed to help residents deal with problems that led to their becoming homeless.

Now, as I said, DHS does have a homeless family problem. But it has neither the authority nor the resources to appropriately solve it.

Not surprisingly, the number of homeless families increased when the recession set in. And not surprisingly, it hasn’t decreased, though the local economy is in a recovery mode.

The unemployment rate in the District is still higher than the still-high national rate. And it’s up in the double digits in the poorest parts of the city.

The larger problem, however, is the acute shortage of housing that low-income District residents can afford. This helps account not only for the rise in family homelessness, but for the difficulties DHS has had in moving families out of DC General so that others can move in.

It insisted that it would have enough units there this winter — perhaps more than enough — because its rapid re-housing program would continuously free up space.

Unrealistic, as predicted — and partly because of problems baked into rapid re-housing.

This program, as I’ve written before, provides families with housing that’s subsidized for, at most, a year. It’s good for families that are temporarily down on their luck, but they’re hardly a majority of those at DC General.

Many have looked at the rapid re-housing offer and sensibly concluded they’d be homeless again as soon as they had to pay the full rent — and perhaps then denied shelter because it wasn’t cold enough.

Some, I’m told, have also refused to be rapidly re-housed because the units offered were potentially unsafe or otherwise inappropriate, e.g., because they lacked accessibility features a disabled member needed.

Now the Mayor wants to deny them shelter or supportive housing if they refuse two offers — regardless of the reasons.

Also, as I’ve said, kick them out of transitional housing at the end of two years and potentially — or in some cases, definitely — out of permanent supportive housing.

Here too support would end with no assurance that residents wouldn’t immediately be literally homeless again.

In the long run, their housing prospects may be better because the Mayor wants most of his promised $100 million put into the Housing Production Trust Fund, which is supposed to spend 40% of its money on housing that’s affordable for extremely low-income residents.

He’s also proposing that all the additional $5 million he’s allocated to project-based and sponsor-based vouchers, i.e., those that help cover operating costs, be used to house families with no safe place stay or individuals referred by District agencies.

But he’s not proposing a penny more for vouchers that homeless residents — and those who are about to be homeless — could use to help pay market-rate rents until such time as they didn’t need subsidies any more.

A nice boost in funding for these vouchers would help solve the problem his punitive Homeless Services Reform Act amendments seek to address — and in a way that would provide homeless families with a safe, stable housing situation suitable to their needs.

He’s instead decided to spring major, coercive policy changes on homeless residents, service providers, advocates and the DC Council itself without notice — let alone opportunities for input.

You’d think he’d at least have run the proposals by the Interagency Council on Homelessness, which is supposed to play a lead role in the District’s strategies and policies for meeting the needs of its homeless and at-risk residents.

But he and some of his representatives on the ICH probably wouldn’t have liked what they’d have heard.