12
Street roots
Aug. 3, 2012
McKinney-Vento turns 25; homelessness still grows
Paul Boden is the
executive director of
WRAP, the Western
Regional Advocacy
Project. W RAP is a
consortium of
organization along
the West Coast,
including Street
Roots, working to
expose and eliminate
the root causes o f civil
and hum an rights
abuses o f people
experiencing poverty
and homelessness in
our communities.
BY PAU L BODEN
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
assed in 1987, McKenny-Vento was
intended to address the emergency
needs of homeless people while the
federal government worked to restore the
funding which had been cut from HUD’s
affordable housing programs.
But it didn’t work that way. McKinney-
Vento has spawned an endless array of
continuum-of-care plans, 5-year plans,
Temporary responses
10-year plans — an endless system of
to homelessness that
writing, planning, and researching which
fail to address the
“best practices” should be used to end
systemic causes of
homelessness. At the same time, the federal
homelessness.
government has continued to defund,
dismantle, and sell-off affordable housing
units, thus ensuring that more and more
people become homeless. 360,000 Section
Periodic calls for
8 and 210,000 Public Housing units have
local homeless
been lost since 1995.
It is a shameful trade that robs Peter to
plans based on the
pay Paul.
newest policy.
McKinney-Vento homeless assistance
programs have increasingly become a catch
all system for people who were once
permanently housed by mainstream federal
programs such as HUD and USDA. Yet even
as affordable housing has been decimated
(over 800,000 units lost in 25 years),
eligibility criteria for McKinney-Vento
homeless assistance have been tightened.
instructed HUD to create a new
And to add insult to injury, we are seeing
bureaucratic definition of who is homeless.
a massive PR campaign by federal agencies
By implicitly admitting defeat that the
such as HUD and the Interagency Council
McKinney-Vento model has any chance of
on Homelessness to convince everyone — or
stopping the growing wave of homeless
perhaps to convince themselves — that with
people, the HEARTH act instead redefined
just the right coordination, facilitation, and
“homelessness” out of existence for
cooperation, they will actually end
thousands of families and people without
homelessness. This is self-deception.
homes. A 105-page HUD memorandum
Anyone who has done the math would know. describes who is homeless and establishes
welfare-oriented criteria that determine who
The ongoing new guidelines, new initiatives,
and newly named target populations suggest will qualify. It is particularly hard on families
who live doubled up, tripled up, or in SROs.
that people overseeing this system clearly
Advocacy organizations — be they local,
know it is not working.
statewide or national — that continue to
To provide a context: in the 25 years
focus on McKinney-Vento will never be
since McKinney-Vento passed in July 1987,
catalysts of the change we need. Their
two major events severely impacted the
funding is too contingent upon being seen
numbers of poor people finding themselves
as legitimate by whatever administration is
homeless.
in power, a dependence that moves those in
The first was the 1998 Contract with
power even further away from the actual
America during the Clinton Administration
lives and experiences of poor and homeless
when the Housing Act of 1937 was changed
people.
from “remedy...acute shortage of decent,
Consulting and research firms have
safe and sanitary dwellings” to declaring
probably benefited the most from
that “the federal government cannot...
McKinney-Vento funding because HUD
provide housing of every American, or even
bureaucrats like justifying their proposals by
the majority of its citizens.”
paying researchers. We need no further
The second was in 2009, the last time
consulting or research to understand the
McKinney-Vento was reauthorized in
direct and obvious correlation between
Congress. Renamed the HEARTH Act, it
P
The Vicious Cycle of Homeless Policy
Increased
homelessness.
Stereotypes of
homeless people as
degenerate.
Premise that
homelessness is caused
by the deficiencies of
homeless people.
gver-changing policies
geared toward fixing
different sub-
populations of
homeless people.
WESTERN REGIONAL ADVOCACY PROJECT: WITHOUT HOUSING
Fallen Off
the Edge
A new book by A rt Garcia
"Fallen Off the Edge" Is a chronicle
of one man's experiences after returning
from the Vietnam War. Told through the
eyes of Street Roots columnist Art
Garcia, this book celebrates the major
victories born from a series of
questionable choices. Art's jocular
storytelling takes the reader along with
him in and out of the California prison
system over the course of 10 years until
he found the strength and courage to
pull himself up from the fall.
The book is available online at www.
blurb.com under searchword Art Garcia.
W R A P G R A P H IC
massive affordable housing cuts since 1978,
the opening of emergency shelters in the
early ‘80s, and the continued and growing
existence of homelessness today.
In 2006 and updated in 2010, WRAP
issued a carefully researched analysis on the
systemic causes of homelessness called
Without Housing. Had other studies looked
closely at the underlying cause-and-effect
issues connected with massive numbers of
people without housing, they should have
been able to connect the dots. But they
seem not to have looked.
We need to be honest: too many
organizations and departments, in and out
of government, turn away from the simple
connection between the absence of
affordable housing (cause) and the
increasing numbers of homeless people
(effect). No amount of coordination or
redefinition is going to end homelessness.
McKinney-Vento was created to address the
effects of homelessness and it is time for
HUD and USDA to step up and address the
cause of homelessness.
If the past 25 years have taught us
anything at all, it is that nothing ends
homelessness like a home.
S is te rs 0) The R ood
c r e a tin g c o m m u n ity ,
c r e a tin g c h a n g e , t o g e t h e r
SISTERS
OF THE I
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