Posts Tagged "U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development"
March 14, 2023
Homelessness: Can You Pass this Quiz?
Do you know the main reason Americans slip into homelessness? Are you aware of the roots of this longstanding crisis?
The best way to counter negative views of homelessness is to develop a better understanding of why it exists and who it affects. The Urban Institute has put together a quick quiz to explore an issue that people with secure jobs and comfortable housing don’t think much about – and might prefer not to think about.
The federal government’s latest estimate of the homeless population makes clear that little progress has been made in reducing it, despite many communities’ efforts to address it. On a single night in January 2022, 582,462 people were homeless and either living on the streets or in homeless shelters or transitional housing. That includes more than 50,000 families.
The homeless population last year roughly matched the January 2020 count and is an increase from 567,715 in January 2019. The 2021 figure, experts agree, is unreliable because many communities curtailed their homeless counts during the surge in COVID cases, which may have actually increased the population.
A better understanding of homelessness is the first step to finding some solutions. Spend five minutes and learn something about the issue. Here’s the quiz. …Learn More
August 15, 2022
Housing Agencies Tend to Go Where Needed
Public housing agencies frequently prioritize people with disabilities on their waiting lists for subsidized apartments and federal rent vouchers. But agency budgets are tight, often requiring state and local governments to stretch a single housing office to serve multiple counties.
Many of the people on the waiting lists are also receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a federal program that makes monthly cash payments to low-income people with disabilities and is one way to verify they qualify for the housing preference.
A new study substantiates this connection: SSI applications are 11 percent higher in counties with housing offices than in counties that lack an office and are being served by a nearby county. The housing agencies also tend to be concentrated in areas with larger non-Hispanic Black populations, which have higher rates of disability than White Americans.
Together, these findings are a pretty good indication that housing officials’ decisions about where to locate their field offices are being driven at least in part by efforts to reach as many people with disabilities as possible, the researchers said in their analysis, which paired federal data on housing subsidies with the Social Security Administration’s records for SSI recipients.
But a more rigorous analysis is needed to determine whether adding a housing office in a county would increase or decrease SSI applications. The answer actually could go in either direction because SSI payments to low-income people are so intertwined with public housing assistance. …Learn More
About Squared Away
Learn more about our blog and its writer, Kimberly Blanton, a former Boston Globe reporter.
