The White House is aiming to reduce homelessness by 25 percent nationwide by early 2025, while major cities across the country grapple with a growing, persistent crisis.
The Biden administration’s plan, released Monday, will offer federal intervention for a problem that has been growing for years. federal According to the administration, the agencies will work with states and cities to focus on unsheltered homeless people, expand housing and services, and try to prevent homelessness before it happens.
“Many Americans live every day without safe or stable housing. Some are in emergency shelters. Others live on our streets, exposed to threats of violence, inclement weather, disease and many other dangers that homelessness exacerbates,” said President Joe Biden. in a statement announcing the plan.
The plan builds on the March 2021 U.S. bailout that gave tens of billions of dollars in rental assistance to people struggling during the pandemic. Biden also requested an increase in spending by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to help the homeless by more than $360 million for fiscal year 2023, the White House said.
The plan aims to “maximize the use of existing resources” and “will inform future budget requests across agencies,” said Caroline Cournoyer, head of communications for the council, which created the plan.
It comes after New York, Los Angeles and Portland stepped up efforts to reduce homelessness. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has announced an unprecedented plan to keep people with chronic untreated mental illness in hospitals, even if they refuse treatment.
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How Will the Biden Administration’s Homelessness Plan Work?
The Biden administration’s Interagency Council on Homelessness will send federal staff to target communities with acute needs and work to create solutions with local leaders, including people who have experienced homelessness.
By working directly with cities, the federal government hopes to quickly mobilize federal funds and streamline the creation of housing and services such as health care and job training, a process that has historically run into administrative hurdles.
“The United States can end homelessness by fixing public services and systems — not by blaming individuals and families left behind by failed policies and economic exclusion,” said Jeff Olivet, the council’s executive director.
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Individualized approaches in each community will mean that solutions to homelessness will not be one-size-fits-all, White House officials said, although they did not share a list of selected areas.
The administration said in a news release that the rise of local strategies in some American cities that force the homeless off the streets is troubling, arguing that it criminalizes homelessness without offering solutions to the problem.
Biden is encouraging state and local governments to use “All In: A Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness” as a model for creating their own goals. The board will host webinars next month to help local leaders plan.
The Biden administration’s Interagency Council on Homelessness includes HUD and the US Departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Education, Agriculture, Labor and 13 other federal agencies.
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Has homelessness worsened during COVID-19?
Along with a new federal strategic plan, HUD released fresh data showing how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected homelessness in the US
Federal data shows that 582,462 people were homeless in January 2022 — roughly the population of Milwaukee. The number includes people living in shelters and people without shelters.
Federal officials said they saw a 0.3 percent increase in homelessness in the U.S. since 2020, but not an overall jump.
Notably, veteran homelessness has decreased by more than 11% since 2020, and homelessness among families and unaccompanied children has also decreased, according to HUD.
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Although federal data do not show a rise in homelessness nationally, encampments have become more visible in many American cities during the pandemic, sparking public debate and concern and putting pressure on elected officials to address the growing problem.
As of 2020, the unsheltered homeless population, which includes encampments, has increased by more than 3%. Chronic homelessness, which includes many people with disabilities, increased by 15%.
According to the Coalition for the Homeless, 65,633 people were living in shelters in New York City in October 2022, up from 57,341 in October 2020. The Los Angeles Times reported that the Los Angeles region, which recently counted 69,144 people experiencing homelessness, increased slightly from 2020 after a large increase of 25% from 2018 to 2020.
Portland has also seen an increase in people living on the streets since the pandemic began, according to the United Homeless Office.
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LA Declares State of Emergency, NYC Hospitalizes Mentally Ill Homeless
Los Angeles and New York, America’s two most populous cities, have by far the largest number of homeless people, according to HUD’s 2021 Homeless Assessment Report.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared a homelessness emergency on her first day in office this month and said she plans to house more than 17,000 people in the first year.
In declaring the state of emergency, Bass said the different branches of government must come together to tackle homelessness, and the city “must have a unified strategy.”
In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams announced last month that city officials can hospitalize homeless people with severe untreated mental illness, even if they refuse treatment.
“The very nature of their illnesses prevents them from realizing they need intervention and support. Without that intervention, they remain lost and isolated from society, plagued by delusions and disordered thinking. They cycle in and out of hospitals and prisons,” Adams said in a press release. conference last month.
“It is not acceptable for us to see someone who clearly needs help and walk by,” he said.
In Portland, Oregon, the City Council last month approved $27 million to build designated camping areas for the homeless after the mayor announced plans to ban tent camping elsewhere in the city.
Contributed by: The Associated Press
