LWVMM - Homelessness Awareness
Is there a solution?
The simple answer to ending homelessness is to provide housing. But homelessness is not simple — it's complex.
Housing has to be available, accessible, affordable, and free from discrimination. In addition, there must be programs designed to support the needs of various and different groups of homeless individuals (e.g., individuals, families, unaccompanied youth, chronically ill people, people with addiction, veterans). There has to be a financial investment to be able to provide job training, education, healthcare, transportation, rehabilitation, etc.
The federal government has created a framework to reduce overall homelessness. The plan is built around equity, evidence, and collaboration. The government’s plan is to facilitate increased access to housing, economic security, health, and stability. Ending homelessness requires rehousing people who are already homeless while preventing people from becoming homeless. Addressing homelessness takes the federal government, state government and communities all working together to solve this problem.
Evidence-based practices
Housing First
“Housing First is a homeless assistance approach that prioritizes providing permanent housing to people experiencing homelessness, thus ending their homelessness and serving as a platform from which they can pursue personal goals and improve their quality of life. This approach is guided by the belief that people need basic necessities like food and a place to live before attending to anything less critical, such as getting a job, budgeting properly, or attending to substance use issues. Additionally, Housing First is based on the understanding that client choice is valuable in housing selection and supportive service participation, and that exercising that choice is likely to make a client more successful in remaining housed and improving their life.”
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Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH)
“Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) links subsidized housing with access to flexible, voluntary supportive services to help people with disabilities maintain stable housing and live productively in the community. PSH is generally targeted to people who are chronically homeless (disabled and homeless for long periods of time or repeatedly) or highly vulnerable because of chronic disabilities. It is intended to end their homelessness and improve well-being by ensuring they are stably housed.”
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http://www.evidenceonhomelessness.com/topic/permanent-supportive-housing/
Prevention and Stability
“The best way to reduce homelessness is to prevent it.”
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provide eviction-prevention grants to help tenants at risk of becoming homeless pay back rent and remain in their apartments
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provide legal services for low-income tenants in housing court
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https://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/proven-solutions/#Prevention&Stability
Income Opportunity and Services
“A housing crisis is often the result of a financial one. With incomes typically much lower than is needed to comfortably pay average rental costs, millions of people are financially vulnerable to homelessness and housing instability. A reduction in work hours, a lost job, an illness or an unexpected expense can spiral into an inability to pay the rent, an eviction, reliance on extended family for a place to stay, and, sometimes, entry into a homeless shelter.”
“... the majority of people exiting homelessness must depend on income from employment or benefits to help them pay rent.”
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https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/solutions/income/
Crisis Response System
“An effective crisis response system is able to identify and quickly connect people who are experiencing or are at risk of experiencing homelessness to housing assistance and other services. It works because it aligns a community, its programs and services around one common goal — to make homelessness rare, brief, and nonrecurring.”
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https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/solutions/crisis-response/
Coordinated Systems Approach
To end homelessness, a community-wide coordinated approach to delivering services, housing, and programs is needed.
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Coordinated entry
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Planning
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Collecting and examining local data
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Shared data system
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Performance measurement and evaluation
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This approach requires using local data to inform decisions about how to most effectively allocate resources, services, and programs to best address the needs of those experiencing homelessness in the community.
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https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/solutions/creating-systems-that-work/
The COVID-19 pandemic proved that homelessness is preventable.
During the pandemic, the government instituted an eviction moratorium, provided emergency rental assistance, expanded unemployment benefits and the child tax credit, and issued cash directly to millions of lower-income Americans. Poverty dropped by 45%. Millions of evictions were prevented and homelessness remained steady when it was expected to greatly increase.
HUD invested nearly a half billion dollars from January 2023 to November 2024, working toward the goal of housing homeless veterans and helping communities and rural areas lower barriers to housing and healthcare. The Veterans Administration announced it permanently housed nearly 48,000 veterans from January 2023 to November 2024. At the end of 2024, nearly 90,000 veterans were under lease with vouchers through the HUD-VA Supportive Housing Program (HUD-VASH), showing that solving homelessness is not cheap or simple, but it can be done.