Tag Archives: homelessness

Homeless in America

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The Department of Housing Urban Development released Part 1 of The 2014 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress.  Part 1 provides Point-in-Time Estimates of Homelessness. Its key findings include,

  • In January 2014, 578,424 people were homeless on a given night. Most (69 percent) were staying in residential programs for homeless people, and the rest (31 percent) were found in unsheltered locations.
  • Nearly one-quarter of all homeless people were children under the age of 18 (23 percent or 135,701). Ten percent (or 58,601) were between the ages of 18 and 24, and 66 percent (or 384,122) were 25 years or older.
  • Homelessness declined by 2 percent (or 13,344 people) between 2013 and 2014 and by 11 percent (or 72,718) since 2007. (1)

The report notes that in “2010, the Administration released Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, a comprehensive plan to prevent and end homelessness in America.” (3) The plan had four goals:

  1. Finish the job of ending chronic homelessness in 2015
  2. Prevent and end homelessness among Veterans by 2015
  3. Prevent and end homelessness for families, youth, and children by 2020
  4. Set a path to ending all types of homelessness (3)

HUD claims success on all four fronts:

  1. The number of individuals experiencing chronic homelessness declined by 21 percent, or 22,892 people, between 2010 and 2014.
  2. The number of homeless veterans declined by 33 percent (or 24,837 people) since 2010, and most of the decline was in the number of veterans staying in unsheltered locations.
  3. Since 2010 the number of homeless people in families has declined by 11 percent (or 25,690 people).
  4. Overall, homelessness has declined by more than 62,000 people since 2010 (62,042), a 10 percent reduction since the release of Opening Doors. (3)

In many ways, the success of American housing policy comes down to the question — can all Americans have a safe and affordable place to call home? The Administration answers this question in the affirmative. And this report appears to demonstrate that the Administration’s plan to end homelessness is working.

While I am skeptical of claims that we have finally figured out how to systematically address homelessness, I am happy to see that it is trending downward over the last few years.  This report was authored by some serious people, including Dr. Dennis Culhane of the National Center on Homelessness among Veterans at the University of Pennsylvania, so there is reason to trust these numbers. One can hope that this trend continues, but given the financial insecurity so many households face, I am worried that it will not.

NYC’s Housing Affordability Challenge

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NYC’s Comptroller Stringer has issued The Growing Gap: New York City’s Housing Affordability Challenge. The report tells

a sobering story—of stagnant incomes, rising rents, and a deepening affordability crunch, especially for the working poor and others at the lower end of the income spectrum. This financial squeeze comes despite significant housing investments during the 12 years of the Bloomberg mayoralty. From 2000 to 2012, this report found:

• Median apartment rents in New York City rose by 75 percent, compared to 44 percent in the rest of the U.S. Over the same period, real incomes of New Yorkers declined as the nation struggled to emerge from two recessions.

• Housing affordability—as defined by rent-to-income ratios—decreased for renters in every income group during this period, with the harshest consequences for poor and working class New Yorkers earning less than $40,000 a year.

• There was a dramatic shift in the distribution of affordable apartments, with a loss of approximately 400,000 apartments renting for $1,000 or less. This shift helped to drive the inflation-adjusted median rent from $839 in 2000 to $1,100 in 2012, a 31.1% increase. In some neighborhoods – among them Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Ft. Greene and Bushwick in Brooklyn, average real rents increased 50 percent or more over the 12-year period.

• The elderly and working poor are making up a growing portion of low-income households with 40 percent of the increase tied to households in which the head is 60 years or older.

• In 2000, renters earning between $20,000 and $40,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars were dedicating an average of 33 percent of their income to rental costs. Twelve years later that average jumped to 41 percent. Their housing circumstances became more precarious even though their labor force participation rates soared.

It is clear that affordable housing remains one of New York City’s most pressing needs. Mayor de Blasio has laid out a goal of creating or preserving 200,000 units of affordable housing over a 10-year period, an ambitious increase over the 165,000 units pledged under Mayor Bloomberg’s 12-year New Housing Marketplace Plan.

Now, with the winding down of one major housing initiative and the launching of another, it is appropriate to take stock of the City’s housing circumstances, to evaluate the changes that have taken place in the city’s housing ecology, and to outline strategies for future housing investment that are informed by the city’s evolving housing landscape. (1)

While the report diagnoses many of the problems in the housing market, it does much less in terms of proposing solutions to them. It also fundamentally misunderstands the role that new housing plays in the housing market (see page 24). The report only focuses on the high rents for the new units without taking into account the fact that those new units reduce the pressure on rents for older units of housing, a process that housing economists refer to as “filtering.” There is no question that the CIty needs to increase the supply of housing if it wants to reduce the cost of housing overall. The de Blasio Administration understands this. We will have to wait and see how the Mayor’s housing plan, to be released in May, will tackle the under-supply problem head on.

Dog Bites Man: Housing Vouchers Are Good

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The Center for Budget and Policy Priorites has issued a short report, Research Shows Housing Vouchers Reduce Hardship and Provide Platform for Long-Term Gains Among Children. Many housing policy researchers favor housing voucher programs over project-specific housing subsidies, although policymakers consistently favor the latter. So while this report isn’t really news, it is important to that its main points are frequently reiterated:

The Housing Choice Voucher program, the nation’s largest rental assistance program, helps more than 2 million low-income families rent modest units of their choice in the private market. Vouchers sharply reduce homelessness and other hardships, lift more than a million people out of poverty, and give families an opportunity to move to safer, less poor neighborhoods. These effects, in turn, are closely linked to educational, developmental, and health benefits that can improve children’s long-term life chances and reduce costs in other public programs. This analysis reviews research findings on vouchers’ impact on families with children, people with disabilities, and other poor and vulnerable households. (1, footnote omitted)

The report is not as precise as I would have liked. It describes a study of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families-eligible families as a study of “low-income” families. (compare text on page one with text in footnote ii). People eligible for Housing Choice Vouchers and TANF are “very low-income,” which is a meaningfully distinct subset of low-income families.Very low-income families have incomes that do not exceed 50% of the area median income whereas low-income families generally have incomes that do not exceed 80% of the area median income. I would guess that the findings about the very low-income subset would not directly apply to the bigger set of low-income families.

With that caveat in mind, here are the report’s main findings about Housing Choice Vouchers. They

  • Reduced the share of families that lived in shelters or on the streets by three-fourths, from 13 percent to 3 percent.
  • Reduced the share of families that lacked a home of their own — a broader group that includes those doubled up with friends and family in addition to those in shelters or on the streets — by close to 80 percent, from 45 percent to 9 percent.
  • Reduced the share of families living in crowded conditions by more than half, from 46 percent to 22 percent.
  • Reduced the number of times that families moved over a five-year period, on average, by close to 40 percent. (1)

These are big effects. Policymakers, pay attention!