More and Less Money for Affordable Housing in DC

Well, Mayor Gray finally said what a majority of District of Columbia residents at his One City Summit implicitly called for a year ago. He’ll invest in affordable housing.

Local advocates have long been beating the drum for a bigger commitment, most recently at the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development’s Housing for All rally.

Now it seems the Mayor has enough confidence in the upward revenue trajectory — and enough confidence that the Chief Financial Officer will acknowledge it — to propose a $100 million investment in preserving and creating more affordable housing.

Affordable for whom is an unanswered question. The Mayor cited seniors, District employees (specifically police officers, firefighters and teachers) and “the most vulnerable residents, like people who are homeless and those with disabilities.”

Needless to say, what’s affordable for a teacher is far from affordable for a homeless family. And we’ve got seniors at all income levels — up to and above the $69,530 that would qualify a couple for housing that could be officially designated as affordable here.

Also unanswered is what the promised investment will achieve. The Mayor cited 10,000 affordable units. A little back of the envelope math shows that would mean, on average, $10,000 per unit.

You can’t produce housing for that, says Bob Pohlman, CNHED’s Executive Director.

Nor would any units created be affordable for the District’s lowest income residents if the investment the Mayor talked about weren’t paired with housing vouchers.

These, notes the DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s housing expert Jenny Reed, require annual funding. And, as she tactfully doesn’t note, it shouldn’t be taken out of another affordable housing program, as the last two budgets have done.

The Mayor’s recognition that a city so flush with cash shouldn’t keep hoarding it all is welcome, however, as is his recognition of those “most vulnerable residents.”

DC General — the District’s main shelter for homeless families — had no vacant units, as of early last month, according to a new, profoundly disturbing report by the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.

The Department of Human Services won’t provide any family with a safe place to stay unless freezing temperatures give it no legal option or there’s room at DC General

And when the winter season officially ends, families with no place to stay will again be on their own, unless some of the units DHS originally planned to use this winter are vacant.

They would be, of course, if families now occupying them could afford to move into housing.

Ironically, both the Mayor’s announcement and the Legal Clinic’s report come at a time when the federal government — long a weak housing partner — is poised to further reduce funding.

The across-the-board cuts I’ve gloomily forecast will include housing assistance programs. Also homeless assistance grants, though it seems reasonable to expect an uptick in homelessness as housing agencies retrench.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities gives us specifics for the nation as a whole and for the District, as well as each state. Briefly:

• The Housing Choice vouchers cut will leave an estimated 111,233 families without this form of housing assistance. Here in the District, 530 fewer families will have these vouchers, according to CBPP’s estimate.*
• Public housing funding will be cut by $298 million, leaving less for both ongoing operations and expenditures to keep — or in some cases, make — facilities livable. The District will lose more than $2.9 million.
• Funding for HOPWA (Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS) will be cut by $15 million. For the District, this will mean about $694,800 less to house and serve one of our highly vulnerable populations.
• Homeless assistance grants will be cut by a total $100 million. The District’s share will be $1.1 million — this on top of original $7 million shortfall that DHS is trying to make up for.

These are far from the only federal fund losses the District will sustain unless Republicans and Democrats in Congress come together on a plan to halt sequestration — or rather, a plan that doesn’t make even larger cuts on the non-defense side of the budget.

Even the sample here, however, shows that the Mayor and DC Council will have challenges barely hinted at in the State of the District address.

Will they view them as occasions to tap the reserves the Mayor is so proud of building, even at the expense of vulnerable residents’ urgent needs?

Or will our rip roaring economy yield enough revenues to close the gaps — and still leave enough for the Mayor’s new affordable housing commitment?

Or will he seek to fulfill that commitment no matter what happens to the homeless individuals and families who need long-term affordable housing right now?

As with the impacts of the commitment itself, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

* The Director of the DC Housing Authority told me several weeks ago that she thought sequestration would require DCHA to hold back about 200 vouchers rather than reissue them when households no longer needed or were eligible for them. I sent her the CBPP report, with a request for her views. She has thus far not responded.

UPDATE: CBPP has just slightly revised its estimates of the total spending cuts for programs subject to annual appropriations, as the various kinds of housing assistance and homeless assistance grants are. This means that the dollar figures above may be somewhat too low.

Dreaming of a Freezing Cold Christmas

Jesse, my husband, hopes for a white Christmas, as he always does. I, a California child, like the Christmas card prettiness of a fresh snowfall. But I hate cold weather. Always have.

I find myself hoping for another cold snap nonetheless — preferably with snow, for my husband’s sake, but without if that’s the best the weather gods can do.

Because unless the forecast calls for freezing temperatures — 32 degrees or less, including wind chill factor — some homeless families in the District of Columbia may have no safe place to bed down tomorrow night.

Nor any night thereafter until we get that arctic blast.

Time was not so long ago when the District’s shelter doors were always open to families who’d otherwise have no safe place to stay, i.e., those the intake system ranked as Priority One.

Then came a significant increase in family homelessness — an acute symptom of recession-related job losses, stagnant (or reduced) wages for those still working and rising rental costs.

What didn’t come were increases in funding for housing vouchers beyond what was needed to pay for those already in use.

So once homeless families were admitted to DC General — the main shelter for them — they tended to stay there longer than they had in the past.

A whole series of failures to fully come to grips with this problem.

Insufficient funding — both local and federal — to support services for the growing number of homeless families.

Formal plans for sheltering homeless families during the winter season that attempted to make everything look okay, funding constraints notwithstanding.

Large costs incurred for motel rooms and related needs because the plans really weren’t okay.

A sharp drop in funds to support the development and preservation of affordable housing. First, because the designated revenue stream shrank when the real estate market went south.

Then because the Mayor, with the Council’s consent, tapped the recovering revenue stream to cover the costs of locally-funded housing vouchers. But only those already issued.

For homeless families, the District had some Recovery Act funds for short-term housing vouchers. But for a variety of reasons, including the terms, they proved only a limited substitute.

So, at some point, the Family Services Administration, which administers the District’s homeless services program, changed the policy for Priority One families.

Henceforward, they’d gain shelter only when they were legally entitled to it, i.e., when the effective temperature was expected to drop to 32 degrees before the following morning.

Now, I’m told, it will also shelter them in less frigid weather if there’s room for them at DC General. Midweek, units were filling up fast. So I don’t know whether any will be vacant by the time you read this.

Jesse and I don’t see homeless families when we take our pre-dinner strolls around the neighborhood. I doubt residents in most other parts of the District do either.

The families are scattered in the safest, warmest places they can find — in their cars, if they’re fortunate enough to have them, in hospital waiting rooms, bus stations, stairwells, etc.

So they probably don’t weigh heavy on our consciences as we prepare to celebrate the birthday of someone whose mother was given shelter when there was no room at the inn.

But I think of them now and hope the forecast for the upcoming week is wrong.

HUD Reports Dropping Homelessness Rates

As you may have read, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has released the nationwide results of last January’s point-in-time counts — the one-night census of homeless people that HUD requires of all its homeless assistance grant recipients.

The headlined news is that homelessness seems to be “holding steady,” as HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan puts it.

The bigger news, I think, is that homelessness rates are apparently lower than they were in 2007. This is true not only for the grand total, but for all the specific groups in the required PIT breakouts.

Some of the long-range percentage declines are so counterintuitive as to make me wonder whether we’re getting a true read or results of some unaccounted for changes in methodology.

After all, we’ve had a major recession, with lingering consequences. Nearly four million homes lost due to foreclosures.

About 4.1 million jobs lost that haven’t been replaced. A record high number of long-term jobless workers. Other labor market woes as well.

On the other hand, we do have some progress that’s fairly easy to explain. So within the definitional limits of the PIT counts maybe the rest is real too.

In any event, here are the key figures.

According to the PIT counts, the total number of people who were homeless during some night in late January was 633,782.

This is a fraction of a percent fewer than reported the year before. The number is 5.8% lower than for January 2007. In other words, 38,106 fewer literally homeless people.

The number of homeless individuals, i.e., not with a family member, ticked down 1.4% to 394,379. In January 2007, there were 6.8% — 28,998 — more of them.

The number of homeless people in families* rose by 1.4%, to 239,403. But the number of homeless families was basically the same as in 2011 — 77,157.

As compared to January 2007, there were 3.7% fewer homeless people in families and 8% fewer homeless families. These percents translate into 9,108 fewer homeless family members and 6,778 fewer homeless families.

We see larger drops in two populations that HUD — and more recently, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness — have made top priorities.

The number of chronically homeless individuals** declined 6.8%, to 99,894. There were 19.3% — 23,939 — more people classified as chronically homeless in January 2007.

It seems reasonable to suppose that these figures reflect increases in permanent supportive housing — a strategy designed for chronically homeless people that’s strongly encouraged by the structure of HUD’s assistance programs, as well as a number of research and advocacy organizations.

Federal policies also account for much, if not all of the reported progress toward the goal of ending veterans’ homelessness.

According to the latest PIT counts, the number of homeless veterans declined 7.2%, to 62,619. This is 17.2% fewer than in 2009, the baseline year for this population.

The big factor here is the HUD-VASH (Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing) voucher program, which has reportedly supported permanent housing, plus supportive services for more than 42,000 veterans since the program started in 2008.

An additional factor I’d guess is that the VA side of the funding can also be used to prevent veterans from becoming homeless, e.g., by paying some one-time costs of moving to housing they can afford.

In this respect, it’s somewhat like the broader Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program that was part of the Recovery Act.

HUD gives HPRP part of the credit for the just-reported homelessness decreases. And it does seem likely that the short-term help the program funded was enough for people who’d suffered temporary setbacks.

And now what? Communities had only three years to spend their HPRP grants. So they’ll have no money from that pot in the coming year — and even in the best of cases, no boost in their basic homeless assistance grants to cover the loss.

They’d share a loss of about $180 million if the “fiscal cliff” negotiations don’t halt the impending across-the-board cuts.

And there’d be lots more homeless people in want of help — more than 282,000 additional households, according to one estimate.

In short, such genuine progress as there’s been could be short-lived.

* These are only people “who are homeless as part of households that have at least one adult and one child.”

** By HUD’s definition, these are people who have a disability, including a mental illness and/or substance abuse problem, and who’ve been homeless for at least a year or at least four times in the last three years.

DC Mayor Plans to Bank Fund Surplus, Leave Poor Families in Crisis

Last Thursday, the Chief Financial Officer for the District of Columbia announced an estimated $140 million revenue surplus for Fiscal Year 2012. The fiscal year ended yesterday.

So the Gray administration has considerably more money than it thought it had when it said it could postpone the scheduled cuts in benefits for families in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program for only six months, rather than the full year the DC Council wanted but couldn’t find the funds for.

And that it couldn’t, as the Council also wanted, afford to temporarily stop the time-limit clock for parents who shouldn’t be expected to meet standard work requirements, e.g., because they’re suffering from domestic violence trauma or have a disabled child to care for.

The Gray administration also presumably has money it didn’t know about when it said it could do nothing for homeless families who are sleeping in bus stations, abandoned buildings and the like.

This doesn’t mean it hasn’t had the money to help them, however. Councilmember Jim Graham announced two weeks ago that he had identified $14 million in unspent funds that could be used to shelter and/or house those families.

No perceptible response from the Gray administration. It chose instead to leave a growing number of shelter units vacant — now in excess of even the large number set aside as backup in the plan for the upcoming winter season.

And it’s used its clout to keep the DC Housing Authority from issuing locally-funded housing vouchers too, though it’s expressed an unarguable preference for affordable housing over shelter.

The CFO rightly expresses concerns about the potential impact of the impending across-the-board cuts in federal spending and other potential threats to the local economy. So it would seem prudent to hold a good portion of the revenue surplus in reserve.

But the Gray administration could do that and also, as the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless recommends, put enough into a separate spending account to address the immediate and foreseeable crises for TANF families and homeless residents.

The DC Fiscal Policy Institute tells us that $5.8 million would cover the costs of a further six-month delay in TANF benefits cuts and the exemptions the Council passed, but left unfunded — unless a rosier revenue forecast indicates there’s money for them in the new budget year.

The Gray administration itself identified a $7 million shortfall for homeless services. The gap-closing funds are at the top of the Council’s list of uses for those hoped-for extra revenues.

The Department of Human Services has said that, without them, it will have to cut shelter capacity for individual men and women in half next April, when the winter season officially ends.

Also eliminate some critical services, including transportation to shelters, job training for occupants and mid-day meals for families at DC General — the main local shelter for them.

What DHS hasn’t said is that it would almost certainly retain its new policy of denying shelter to homeless families, except during the official winter season — even families who have no safe place to stay.

So, in my view, the Gray administration should put into the temporary account more than the projected $7 million shortfall — especially because we’ve got good reasons to believe that DHS won’t be able to carry out its plan for housing homeless families this winter.

Say it put twice as much into the account for homeless services, plus the funding needed to keep well over 6,000 TANF families from utter destitution.

It would still have some $120 million to shore up the budget if the across-the-board cuts — or others Congress substitutes — depress revenues and/or put further stress on safety net programs.

Shortly after Councilmember Graham came up with the $14 million for homeless families, Professor Matt Fraidin observed that the Gray administration was “fumbling an easy” policy choice by refusing to do anything — except perhaps take the children away from their parents.

The CFO’s surplus projection gives the administration a chance to do a reset — though not to undo the damage to homeless children it’s already caused.

The Mayor has reportedly decided to take a pass. Both he and Council Chairman Phil Mendelson say that every penny of the surplus will stay in the bank.

This is what the Council decided would be done with end-of-year surpluses when Gray was Chairman. But, hey, laws get amended all the time.

Gray himself is urging Congress to change or replace the law that’s triggering the across-the-board cuts. Calls the process “completely unacceptable and destructive.”

So, to my mind, is letting his poorest One City constituents suffer when he’s got more than enough new-found funds to avert crises that his budget choices created to begin with.