Homelessness

Tales from the streets

Homelessness has fallen. But will it stay low?

The Economist | Dec 7th 2013 | From the print edition

SOON after Christy Respress started working with the homeless on the streets of Washington, DC, she became frustrated. “They were stuck on the street,” she says, because in order to get housing her clients first had to bring their serious mental illnesses and addictions under control. It was a tall order.

That was in 1997. Ms Respress is less frustrated these days. She heads Pathways to Housing DC, a non-profit organisation that helps homeless people get an apartment first and then adds “wrap-around” help with treatment, food stamps, and managing personal finances. This model, known as permanent supportive housing, is one of the efforts that has kept homelessness in America at bay through six years of economic woes.

There are 23% fewer vagrants on America’s streets than in 2007, according to figures recently released by the housing department. About a third of the 610,000 homeless found in this year’s count were sleeping rough. The rest were in shelters, where numbers have remained stable.

Government policy has done much to help. A bill passed in 2009, as the recession unfolded, helped more than 1.3m who were on the brink of homelessness to keep their homes (paying rent arrears and utility bills for them) or to quickly find new ones. A $1.5 billion stimulus pot paid for this over three years, boosting by a quarter the housing department’s budget for the homeless. That saved money, says Nan Roman of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, because helping those in short-term financial straits to stay in their homes is cheaper than keeping them in shelters until they can rent again.

About 300,000 are now housed through programmes like Pathways—a 50% increase since 2007. Most of them need intensive care, from help getting identity documents (“A lot of detective work,” says Ms Respress) to daily visits from social workers. But they cost taxpayers more when they are homeless—in emergency-room visits, detox treatment and stints in jail. In 2008 homeless ex-servicemen (one in ten vagrants) got an earmarked pot that now pays for housing 43,000 of them. And government agencies that help them are now better at working together. (Eric Shinseki, the 71-year-old secretary for veterans’ affairs, and Shaun Donovan, his 47-year old colleague at the housing department, both hit the cold streets of Washington with 180 other volunteers to do the annual homeless count last January.) Homelessness among ex-servicemen has fallen by a quarter since 2009.

Now there are fears that the tide may turn. Although employment is recovering, the number of people at risk of becoming homeless is staggering. In 2011 8.5m households were spending over half their income on rent and earning less than half of their area’s median wage. Since then, rents have gone up. But incomes have not, and the poverty rate is unchanged.

Poor households are one small financial crisis away from losing their homes. A common story in the shelters is that of the single mother who gets behind on the rent because her child falls ill and she has no savings to dip into for treatment and time off work. Relatives or friends usually take in—for a time—those who lose their homes. The number of such shared households is up from last year, according to the Census Bureau. But that is a worry, because three in ten people showing up at shelters come from other people’s homes.

The safety net, too, now has big holes. The stimulus funding has expired. And the sequester—a sweeping federal budget cut that kicked off in March—is starting to hurt the programmes that tackle homelessness. A day after sharing the good news from the homeless count, the housing department announced budget cuts which, it reckons, would remove more than 100,000 people from shelters and homes such as those supported by Pathways.

Affordable-housing programmes are also closing waiting lists and rescinding rent subsidies. These subsidies, coupled with other mainstream benefits for the poor such as food stamps and Medicaid (government-paid health insurance), are the exit from homelessness for most who fall into it, says Ms Roman. That exit seems to be closing.