Report: Fed'l Housing Cuts Cause Homelessness

A coalition of west coast social justice-based homelessness organizations released a report today that documents how more than 25 years of federal funding trends for affordable housing have created the contemporary crisis of homelessness and near-homelessness.
"Without Housing: Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness and Policy Failures," documents the correlation between these trends and the emergence of a new and massive episode of homelessness in the 1980s which continues today. It particularly focuses on radical cuts to programs administered by the US Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the US Dept. of Agriculture (USDA), which administers funds for rural affordable housing. Available at www.wraphome.org, the report also demonstrates why federal responses to this nationwide crisis have consistently failed.
The report uses federal budget data and other sources to document that:
· HUD's budget has dropped 65% since 1978, from over $83 billion to $29 billion in 2006.
· The Emergency Shelter phenomenon was born the same year that HUD funding was at a drastic low point. In 1983, HUD's budget was only $18 billion, the same year that general public emergency shelters began opening in cities nationwide.
· HUD has spent $0 on new public housing, while more than 100,000 public housing units have been lost to demolition, sale, or other removal in the last ten years.
· Federal housing subsidies are going to the wealthy. In 2004, 61 percent of these subsidies went to households earning more than $54,788, while only 27 percent went to households earning under $34,398.
· More than 600,000 identified homeless students went to public schools in the 2003-2004 school year, according to the US Department of Education.
· Federal support helps homeowners instead of poor people. In 2005, federal homeowner subsidies totaled more than $122 billion, while HUD outlays were only $31 billion - a difference of more than $91 billion.
"Without Housing blows apart the myth that homelessness is about anything other than deep poverty, the lack of affordable housing, and misplaced priorities," said Brad Paul, executive director of National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness (NPACH). "Historic cuts to the HUD and USDA budgets have fueled the nation's low-income housing crisis, resulting in the suffering of millions. This report begins to set the record straight on the causes and solutions to homelessness."