On a single night in January 2014, 21,237 people experienced homelessness in Massachusetts, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2014 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. In an attempt to lower this number, the Somerville-Arlington Continuum of Care (CoC) coordinates a range of programs and services that support those experiencing homelessness.
There are 19 CoCs across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and each CoC comes up with a plan to address homelessness in its unique geographic region. For the Somerville-Arlington CoC, this plan includes everything from street outreach to transitional housing to permanent supportive housing, Kelly Donato, director of Special Projects and Housing Council for the city of Somerville, explained. The city serves as the lead agency for the Somerville-Arlington CoC, meaning that Somerville functions as the liaison between the CoC and HUD.
“The main kind of purpose of the group [is] really to … strategize about trends within the community that we should be addressing," Donato said. "If there are certain features that are making folks more at risk or unstably housed, it’s something that we try to address, as well as the changing needs within the community.”
Laurie Goldman, lecturer in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning and instructor of the class Homelessness in America, explained the history of the CoC system.
“There is this fragmented system of support for people experiencing homelessness and for all people experiencing poverty in this city, in this state, in this country," she said. "And so the Continuum of Care model was established as part of the McKinney-Vento [Homeless Assistance] Act [of 1987] in order to create that [more fluidly operating] system to make the coordination more feasible.”
Each year, CoCs can apply for homelessness assistance funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Announced in January 2015, the Somerville-Arlington CoC was awarded $2.1 million through HUD’s Continuum of Care Program Competition for FY14, according to the announcement from the city of Somerville.
Of the 15 Somerville- and Arlington-based programs awarded money through this year’s funding, nine of them are permanent housing programs, three are transitional housing programs and three are supportive service programs. Seven of these 15 programs are part of the Somerville Homeless Coalition (SHC). Additionally, the Somerville-Arlington CoC received a planning grant of $25,964 from HUD.
After the federal budget sequestration of 2013, funds for CoCs and homelessness programs became much more competitive to obtain, Donato explained.
“A lot of these programs had been funded for years from HUD, and then ... because of the reduced funding that it was gonna become a more competitive process,” she said.
Donato discussed some of the changes in the application process that have been put into place as a result of sequestration, one of which forces CoCs to rank their programs in tiers based on their presumed necessity.
“So what [HUD has] been trying to do is … to put some of this back on the CoCs in terms of telling us, ‘You’re gonna have to rank your projects, and you can only put a certain amount of the funds that these projects typically get in Tier I, and then the rest of the projects have to go into Tier II, and Tier II could be potentially cut,’” she explained.
According to Donato, in recent years, HUD has placed an emphasis on permanent housing, urging CoCs to prioritize permanent supportive housing programs over supportive service programs or transitional housing, and providing incentives like bonus money to those CoCs that do so.
As a result, CoCs rank their programs accordingly.
“Generally we go along with … HUD’s recommendation -- like HUD has emphasis on permanent housing, so the permanent housing programs in our application are always ranked first, and then transitional housing and then supportive service only programs,” Mark Alston-Follansbee, executive director of the Somerville Homeless Coalition, said.
Because of the ranking, the Somerville-Arlington CoC lost two of its supportive services-only programs last year, Donato said.
“[It] is really difficult because we all know that you can’t just put people in housing without those necessary supportive services,” she said.
Determining where these funds should go and which programs deserve them most is no easy task -- but even if it were, it wouldn’t be that easy to change the existing paradigms, Alston-Follansbee said.
“It’s a little tricky, because we don’t really have that much control,” he said. "It’s difficult to shift the money … once we have it, it’s kind of locked into these silos like everything else. And if we wanted to reallocate some of the funds [HUD] would let us only if we wanted to create a new permanent housing program."
Without this money from the federal government, many of these programs could no longer exist, Alston-Follansbee explained. Because of this fact, his staff spends a large amount of time responding to the Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) from HUD each year.
“I wish we could actually quantify how much time our staff spends filling out paperwork for these federal dollars, but it’s an enormous task,” he said. “We want to keep these programs going, and we don’t have the resources to fund them any other way. Everything would be at risk if we lost that funding.”
But this money from HUD does not come without any strings attached. According to Alston-Follansbee, some of HUD’s guidelines limit who can receive services. For example, a person must live or work in Somerville or Arlington to qualify for Passages, SHC’s case management program.HUD also requires that a person be homeless or within 14 days of homelessness in order to receive case management services, he said.
“There’s a lot of both guidelines and reporting requirements," he said. "It’s like ... you have to fall into homelessness or you have to fall into being chronically homeless to get some of these services. So it’s not helpful for the work that we do in trying to keep people housed.”
While money is extremely important in the fight against homelessness, it isn’t necessarily enough to end homelessness, Goldman warned.
“Not all that needs to happen is about money, requires money," she said. "Questions about some of the societal failures -- money doesn’t fix that. Money doesn’t fix the stigma about mental health, about poverty, the NIMBYism [Not In My Back Yard mentality].”
In order to change homelessness in America, therefore, the mindsets of Americans must change first, Goldman explained.
“We have empathy as a resource," she said. "How do we tap into the asset of empathy?”
Alston-Follansbee agreed that societal change is necessary in order to see real positive change.
“Unless we as a society decide what our priorities are, that it’s not acceptable that 25 percent of the kids in this country have to depend upon food stamps because they’re hungry, or that we’ve got millions of people every year who are homeless -- you know, if we put our minds to it as a society we’d be able to change that paradigm quickly,” he said.
Realistic solutions are not out of reach, Alston-Follansbee said.
“It’s much less expensive to have somebody in an apartment than it is to have them homeless," he said. "It’s astounding how much we spend on this emergency response, and if we were able to convert all of that money into what people really need, which is a home, we would all be better off.”
Somerville-Arlington Continuum of Care receives grant to combat homelessness
