PEC News / Events
The administration's 10-year plan lays out a timetable for assisting children, families, and veterans first.
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration Tuesday announced an ambitious plan to end homelessness among some of society's most vulnerable groups within the next decade.
"Opening Doors," described as a "federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness," seeks to build on an earlier Bush administration plan and calls for ending child and family homelessness in 10 years while wiping out homelessness among veterans within five years.
The plan is significant because there has never been such a wide-ranging federal effort to end homelessness, said Nan Roman, the president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
"To me that's really important, because we know that when the Bush administration made a commitment to end chronic homelessness, it really made a huge difference," she said. "It changed how resources were allocated. It caused better coordination, and the result has been that the chronic numbers have gone down.
"Now they're taking that same approach and they're expanding it to the other homeless populations. I think that's significant."
Other advocates also lauded the plan's goals, but they questioned the absence of detail about how some of the proposals would be paid for.
"The big question is whether preventing children and families in the U.S. from becoming homeless is important enough for Congress" to increase homeless-program funding, said Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.
Providing the resources to end homelessness will be cheaper for taxpayers rather than continuing to have people cycle through shelters and hospitals, said Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, one of several cabinet officers who released the plan at the White House.
"Homelessness is a preventable tragedy," Donovan said, "a tragedy we can solve."
"Opening Doors" comes a week after a government report showed that 1.6 million people, including 170,000 families, spent time in shelters last year amid the recession, mounting foreclosures, and record unemployment. There are about 3,000 homeless people in Philadelphia.
The number of families in shelters jumped by nearly 11,000, or 7 percent, from 2008 to 2009. Overall, family homelessness rose 30 percent from 2007 to 2009.
The economic stimulus bill has helped 357,000 people by moving some from homeless shelters into their own apartments and by providing rent payments to prevent others from becoming homeless.
But many agencies that distribute the money already have exhausted or committed their two- and three-year allocations, and some are turning away needy people.
With many shelters at capacity, some homeless families are moving in with friends and relatives in overcrowded households.
Against this backdrop, legislation that President Obama signed in May 2009 required the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness to develop the first national plan to combat homelessness.
The plan proposes federal partnering with state and local governments, private organizations, and others to make current programs for the homeless more effective by more widespread use of successful strategies, such as combining housing and health care and other supportive services.
The Obama proposal is modeled after efforts by the Bush administration, which in 2002 set the goal of ending chronic homelessness in 10 years. Under that initiative, the chronically homeless population fell to 111,000 in 2009 from 156,000 in 2006, after 42,000 permanent supportive housing slots were added.
The new plan calls for more rent subsidies for individuals and families who are at risk of becoming homeless.
It also calls for replenishing a dwindling supply of affordable rental housing by funding the National Housing Trust Fund, created in 2008.
The program is slated to provide up to $1 billion a year for states and local governments to award grants to organizations that build or rehabilitate low-income housing. Congress has yet to fund it.