DC Fails Homelessness Test

Speak for We blogger Michael Dahl recaps a bit of his experience as a long-time advocate for better homelessness and affordable housing policies in Minnesota.

Over the years, he says, homelessness advocates have given top priority to diverse strategies — prevention, supportive housing, rapid re-housing, etc.

He sees a consistent thread in three elements. They aren’t actually common elements in the strategies, however. They’re questions that policymakers and other stakeholders should ask when they decide what their community needs by way of a homelessness system.

They’re painfully apt here in the District of Columbia as the DC Council considers the Mayor’s proposed Fiscal Year 2013 budget.

So here they are (with some minor edits):

• Do we have enough affordable housing?
• Do we have jobs in the community that pay for housing here?
• Do the supports that we rely on when we fall on hard times, e.g., a job loss, poor health, work for our lowest income residents?

These components, Dahl says, “provide stability and a pretty sturdy safety net.” If they’re all in place, the number of homeless people will be small, and the time they spend homeless will usually be short.

If they’re not in place, then “you need a homeless system to pick up the slack.”

Well, the District surely doesn’t have enough affordable housing.

The DC Fiscal Policy Institute took a close look at the situation two years ago. It found that the market had lost 23,700 low-cost rental units between 2000 and 2007 — more than a third of the stock.

Two in every five households were spending more for housing than they could afford, based on the standard 30% of income. Nearly three in five of poor and near-poor households paid at least half their income for a roof over their heads.

We’ve good reasons to believe that the situation has gotten worse. Rental costs have risen. More affordable units have been converted to upscale rentals or condos. More may have fallen into such disrepair as to be uninhabitable — victims of a combination of forces, including the recession.

The Housing Production Trust Fund — the District’s main tool for supporting affordable housing development and preservation — suffered losses when property sales slowed and prices dropped.

Then the Fund was raided to shore up the Local Rent Supplement Program — the District’s locally-funded voucher program. And now the Mayor proposes another raid, leaving the Fund with enough to support only 170 new units next year.

This second fund shift to LRSP would cover the projected costs of all existing vouchers, but no additional vouchers for people who are homeless — or may become homeless in months to come.

Whether the District will be able to renew all federally-funded vouchers is anybody’s guess.

The District does have jobs that pay for local housing, but not nearly all residents have them.

The local unemployment rate seems stuck at 9.8% — and that’s only residents who are actively looking for work. The latest rates for Wards 7 and 8 are 16.3% and 24.3%.

The average income of the poorest fifth of D.C. households was just $9,100 in 2010 — about $4,770 less than the annual rental cost of a modest efficiency unit then.

Even if the District prepares more residents for living wage jobs — and cracks down on enforcement of its living wage law — housing will remain unaffordable for a substantial number of workers.

At the current living wage rate, they’d have to pay more than half their income for rent on that efficiency, assuming they work full-time, year round.

Our safety net is far from sturdy for our lowest income residents.

They can get health care through Medicaid or the DC HealthCare Alliance, though those in the latter might lose essential services if the Council goes along with the Mayor’s savings plan.

Unemployment benefits are available for some, though far from all residents who lose their jobs. But they’ll be cut off sooner due to changes in federal law.

For families with children, we have the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program. But cash benefits are way too low to cover the cost of unsubsidized housing. The maximum cash benefit for a family of three — currently $428 a month — is less than 37% of what the efficiency unit costs.

This is true, however, only for a family that’s been in the program for less than 60 months. For a family that’s been in longer, the benefit is only $257 a month. And the Mayor’s proposed budget would reinstate further cuts that the Council wisely deferred last year.

So it would seem that we truly do need a robust homeless services program. Under the Mayor’s budget, it would have $7 million less than last year.

And it already lacks funds to provide homeless families with shelter or other housing now that the winter season is officially over.

In short, the District fails Dahl’s test on both counts. Not enough stability or safety net support. Not enough in homeless services to pick up the slack either.

DC Gets Top Rating For Risks Of Increased Homelessness

The District of Columbia has achieved the dubious distinction of being rated as a jurisdiction with the highest level of vulnerability to increased homelessness. Only three states got as high a rating from the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Should this set off alarm bells? Probably, though the people who need to hear them don’t seem to be listening to alarms already sounded.

First, a look at how NAEH got to its ratings. The methodology is a little complex. But it helps us understand why many District residents are at high risk of literal homelessness. So bear with me here.

NAEH first identified states that had an elevated level of vulnerability. Two factors got states into this category — a higher rate of homelessness than the national average and multiple risk factors for an increase.

I wrote about these risk factors when NAEH first published them. Ominous nationwide — and specifically for the District.

• A huge increase in the number of people living doubled up with friends or relatives.
• A very high percentage of poor households paying more than half their income for rent.
• A drop in the real value of the income of the District’s working poor.
• And, of course, a large increase in the number of jobless residents looking for work.

These factors, combined with the homelessness rate, got the District into the elevated vulnerability group, along with eight states.

Then NAEH added two new factors — cuts in public sector employment and/or in public cash assistance, e.g., benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

Why only public sector job losses? Maybe because total job loss figures were hard to come by. More likely because NAEH wants to deliver a message to state-level policymakers, who’ve got control over only the public sector payroll.

In any event, only cuts in both categories boosted states into the highest vulnerability group.

No one who’s followed the District’s budget-balancing exercises should be surprised to find it there.

As the DC Fiscal Policy Institute reports, the District’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget wipes out 205 full-time equivalent vacancies. These come on top of nearly 400 positions eliminated in Fiscal Year 2011 and somewhere around 1,300 positions cut in Fiscal Year 2010.

How much these cuts potentially impact the District’s homelessness rate is unclear — at least, to me. Not so the cuts in TANF benefits.

Last December, the DC Council agreed to a 20% cut in TANF benefits for families who’d been in the program for more than five years.

This cut went into effect in April, leaving nearly 7,000 families with even less than the meager cash assistance they’d been trying to get along on.

Meanwhile, as I suspected he would, Mayor Gray reverted to his plan to make additional 20% cuts until the families were left with nothing. The Council decided to delay further cuts until next fiscal year. But they’ll still go forward.

At this point, a temporarily-reprieved family of three is eligible for a maximum of $342 a month. Need I say this falls far short of rental costs in the District?

Which brings me to a risk factor NAEH didn’t include in its rating scheme — significant cuts in funding for the District’s main affordable housing programs.

True, the Council has said it will restore them if revenues are sufficiently higher than the forecast used for the budget.

But the numbers crunched by Bob Pohlman at the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development indicate that not one dollar will go back into the affordable housing programs unless a future revenue forecast comes in more than $3.2 million higher than the latest.

Many, many millions more needed just to get us back to the under-funded levels we’ve had.

So, sad to say, the District has earned its homelessness vulnerability rating. Now, what will our policymakers do when vulnerability turns into a real-world increase in homelessness?

DC Council Finds Funds For TANF, But Poor Families Will Still Be Homeless

So DC Council Chairman Kwame Brown has managed to find $4.9 million for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

This will be used to temporarily halt the phase-out of cash benefits for families who’ve been in the program for more than five years. And a good thing too.

As a number of fellow bloggers have commented, it’s grossly unfair to penalize families for the program’s failures to provide suitable job training and other needed services.

Outrageously unfair to punish children because their parents haven’t been able to find sustained living wage work in our high-skill, recession-battered economy.

Also, as the DC Fiscal Policy Institute has argued, counterproductive because children who live in poverty are less likely to learn what our public schools aim to teach them. Push more of them into even deeper poverty and you set the stage for another generation of poor parents raising poor children.

On the other hand, the TANF program needs more than protection of current cash benefits. It needs enough funding to boost them.

They’ve remained flat for three years, which means they’ve lost value due to inflation. At this point, a family of three can get, at most, enough to put it somewhat below 28% of the very low federal poverty line.

Here’s one indicator of the results. According to the recently-released final figures from the District’s 2011 homeless count, 83% of literally homeless adults in families had some regular income. And the most common primary source was none other than TANF.

The Council, to its credit, put $17 million more into homeless services, thus making up for most of the shortfall. So at least those TANF families should be able to count on shelter this winter.

It also rejected, in principle, Mayor Gray’s plans to gut affordable housing programs.

As DCFPI reports, the Council’s version of the Budget Support Act, i.e., the legislation needed to implement the budget, allocates a portion of the additional revenues it hopes the Chief Financial Officer will project to restoring the $18 million shifted out of the Housing Production Trust Fund.

An additional $1.6 million of the hoped-for revenues would be used to preserve all affordable units subsidized with Local Rent Supplement Program funds for the homeless individuals and families sponsors intended to house.

The mayor’s proposed budget co-opted 175 of them to house people in the permanent supportive housing program. If all goes well, they’ll be housed without foreclosing opportunities for others.

But the first $22 million of new-found revenues will go to moving remaining expenses parked in the capital budget into the operating budget, where they belong.

Half of the remainder will be used to build up funds reserved for future contingencies. And the first $10.8 million of the rest will fund additional police force positions.

If my back-of-the-envelope calculations are right, the upcoming CFO projection will have to show more than $100 million more in expected revenues for both homeless services and affordable housing to be brought up to current funding levels.

Whatever the projection, the Council can still change its mind.

Council Chairman Brown and some of his colleagues reportedly still want to use some $13 million of the found funds to replace the just-passed tax on interest earned from out-of-state bonds.

This now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t approach to balancing the budget was in Brown’s version of the BSA. A bare majority of Councilmembers passed an amendment to block it.

But neither the amendment nor any other part of the BSA will be final until the Council votes again on June 14.

The Save Our Safety Net coalition suggests we stiffen the backbones of Councilmembers who voted for the bond tax amendment and try to move others into their camp.

A one-vote margin is never comfortable, especially when it includes at least one Councilmember who, let’s just say, has proved remarkably unpredictable.