Syracuse, New York; Feb. 1, 2005 – After a memo leaked earlier this month suggesting President Bush’s 2006 budget may include drastically fewer funds for crucial housing and anti-poverty programs, some communities learned this week that despite an expanded federal budget for homeless initiatives, they will lose assistance for transitional housing programs this year.
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In order to be eligible for grants to fund emergency and hardship facilities, local governments across the country recently conducted surveys of their homeless populations, searching bus depots, hospitals, parks, and freeway underpasses in the difficult task of counting a community that often remains invisible to the larger public.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) mandated the coordinated surveys during the last week of January as part of the grant application process for millions of dollars in funds for emergency shelter and supportive housing, or what federal officials call "Continuum of Care."
HUD also announced federal funding awards for the 2004 applications for homeless program grants, nearly a month later than agencies expected. While a record $1.4 billion is to be distributed, some areas are to receive significantly smaller grants than the previous year and will now be forced to find alternative funding or cut services.
To accomplish the homeless surveys, multiple city, county, and social service organizations pooled their resources and volunteers to locate as many of their unsheltered homeless citizens as possible in a single day. Agencies then compare the data to the number of people in shelters. Organizations evaluate their inventory of services versus their community’s needs and apply to HUD for a sum that covers existing programs and any necessary increases in services.
The need to complete the survey in a single day concerns some homeless advocates, who consider doing so an impossible task.
The need to complete the survey in a single day concerns some homeless advocates, who consider doing so an impossible task, especially in larger communities like Orange County, California where last year’s count estimated 35,000 homeless people.
"This is a logistical nightmare," County Supervisor Lou Correa told the LA Times. "What is the objective of requiring something you know cannot be done? My concern is that we are not going to get a true picture of the serious problem we have."
Smaller communities have the same concern. In Syracuse, New York, the Salvation Army’s Marilyn Woyciesjus said when they conducted the 2004 survey in April, 28 people were found on the street and 304 people were already occupying the area’s 310 available shelter beds. In the bitter Central New York winter where sleeping outside could be fatal, she said survey results are going to be much lower. "If you look at a bigger slice of life, other than one point in time, there is going to be many more people than what you count on a single night," said Woyciesjus.
Woyciesjus has other concerns too, including the increasing competitiveness of the Continuum of Care grants while occupancy at shelters, and lack of housing in general, is skyrocketing. She says some New York programs are starting to see their funding cut. Others share her fear, including Orange County’s Janine Ingram, who works for OC Partnership, an organization that aids the homeless. Ingram told the Times that she is afraid the surveys will be used to cut funding for homeless programs.
When The NewStandard spoke to Woyciesjus at the end of January, Syracuse area organizations still had not heard from HUD about their funding applications from July 2004. Last Tuesday, however, HUD announced a federal commitment of approximately $1.4 billion in HUD grants for more than 4,400 local programs across the US, an amount department officials said is unprecedented.
Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky are two cities that fell victim to the competitive nature of the grants. Organizations there will receive $4.7 million less than last year, reducing their funds to $9.5 million for homeless programs. Krista Mills, a HUD spokeswoman in Louisville, told the Lexington Herald-Leader that the Kentucky programs did not receive funding because "the grant applications weren't good enough."
The programs that lost funding in Lexington and Louisville include a three-year, $741,000 request to build 30 apartments for people who are disabled and homeless, and a three-year, $359,000 request from the Hope Center for Women, an organization providing housing and treatment to women with substance abuse problems, to pay for operation costs.
HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson announced the funding in California, along with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The funding includes $1.2 billion in Continuum of Care grants, competitive awards that are strictly for permanent and transitional housing programs. A significantly smaller amount, $159 million, is distributed to emergency shelters and allocated according to a formula.
According to these latest award distributions, agencies and organizations in Orange County, CA, with its population of approximately 35,000 homeless, will receive about $11 million for Continuum of Care funding, and about $169,000 for emergency shelter grants. Those in Onondaga County, NY, the last survey of which found a population of about 330 homeless, will receive nearly $5.7 million in Continuum of Care grants, and about $92,000 for emergency shelters.
While many organizations will be celebrating news of the 2004 grants for homeless programs, other HUD housing and anti-poverty programs could soon be diminished. The White House Office of Management and Budget sent a memo to HUD last December outlining a Bush Administration plan to reduce the agency’s $8 billion community branch, about one quarter of its total $31 billion budget, according to The Washington Post. The plan, which will apparently be outlined in the February 7 release of the president’s 2006 budget, would eliminate dozens of federal economic development projects and a rural housing program.
The administration could cut nearly half of the $4.7 billion Community Development Block Grant, a 30-year-old program on which many cities have become dependent. The program provides development grants to state and local governments, which are often spent on daycare centers, clinics, and literacy programs in addition to housing development.
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Brian Sullivan, public information officer for HUD, would not comment on whether these cuts will affect future homelessness funding, saying he had not seen the December memo from the Bush administration proposing cuts to HUD, and that he did not have any information on a budget that has yet to be proposed.
