Today, the lead Cabinet secretaries from the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) – from the U.S. Departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Labor (DOL), Health and Human Services (HHS), and Veterans Affairs (VA) – joined Executive Director of the USICH Barbara Poppe to unveil and submit to the President and Congress the nation’s first comprehensive strategy to prevent and end homelessness. Domestic Policy Council Director Melody Barnes accepted the plan on behalf of President Barack Obama. The full report, titled Opening Doors: Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, is available at www.usich.gov.
The USICH is chaired by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and the Vice Chair is Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. The 19 member agencies span the nation’s housing, health, job, education, and human services to coordinate the Federal response to homelessness and to create a national partnership at every level of government and with the private sector to reduce and end homelessness in the nation, while maximizing the effectiveness of the Federal government in contributing to the end of homelessness.
“As the most far-reaching and ambitious plan to end homelessness in our history, this plan will both strengthen existing programs and forge new partnerships,” said Donovan. “Working together with Congress, state and local officials, faith-based and community organizations, and business and philanthropic leaders across our country, we will harness public and private resources to build on the innovations that have been demonstrated at the local level nationwide. No one should be without a safe, stable place to call home and today we unveil a plan that will put our nation on the path toward ending all types of homelessness.”
By combining permanent housing with support services, federal, state, and local efforts have reduced the number of people who are chronically homeless by one-third in the last five years.
Opening Doors serves as a roadmap for joint action by the 19 USICH member agencies along with local and state partners in the public and private sectors. The plan puts us on a path to end veterans and chronic homelessness by 2015, and to ending homelessness among children, family, and youth by 2020. The Plan presents strategies building upon the lesson that mainstream housing, health, education, and human service programs must be fully engaged and coordinated to prevent and end homelessness, including:
- Increasing leadership, collaboration, and civic engagement, by a focus on providing and promoting collaborative leadership at all levels of government and across all sectors and strengthening the capacity of public and private organizations by increasing knowledge about collaboration and successful interventions to prevent and end homelessness.
- Increase access to stable and affordable housing, by providing affordable housing and permanent supportive housing.
- Increase economic security, expand meaningful and sustainable employment and improve access to mainstream programs and services to reduce financial vulnerability to homelessness.
- Improve health and stability, by linking health care with homeless assistance programs and housing, advancing stability for youth aging out of systems such as foster care and juvenile justice, and improving discharge planning for people who have frequent contact with hospitals and criminal justice systems.
- Retool the homeless response system, by transforming homeless services to crisis response systems that prevent homelessness and rapidly return people who experience homelessness to stable housing.
Meanwhile, a recent UN report reviewing the housing situation in several cities in the U.S. warned that “millions of people are spending high percentages of their income to make their monthly rent and mortgage payment, face foreclosure or eviction, and live in overcrowded and substandard conditions.”
Conducted by the UN special Rapporteur on adequate house, Raquel Rolnik, the report also stated that, “The number of homeless continues to rise with increasing numbers of working families and individuals finding themselves on the streets. The economic crisis has exacerbated this situation.”
While the UN report indicated that the U.S. has a longstanding and established history of commitment to decent, safe, and affordable housing, dating back to the National Housing Act of 1934, it noted certain groups, such as minorities and Native Americans have not benefited on an equal basis. Furthermore, federal funding for low income housing has been cut over the past decades leading to decreased stock and quality of subsidized housing.
So, what comes next?
