There hasn’t been much to cheer about on the homelessness front for years. And what’s to come may bring a torrent of tears.
Local and state budgets are tight, teetering on, or dropping into, deficit territory. Reduced funding from those sources combined with increasing costs already meant fewer people can be helped, whether assisting them with shelter or keeping those with housing from losing it.
The region’s overtaxed shelter system that ideally would be a bridge to permanent housing isn’t that for a lot of people. Some 40 percent of those who were able to find a shelter bed ended up back out on the street or living in their cars, according to a recent study by UC San Diego.
Planned federal spending cuts will almost certainly worsen the situation exponentially — in San Diego County, across California and elsewhere in the country. An anticipated economic downturn likely will exacerbate the impact of the cuts. Even President Donald Trump has acknowledged his policies may well hurt the U.S. economy at least in the short-term — a necessary precursor, as he sees it, to making it much stronger.
Money for homelessness programs continued to flow recently, though not as much as in the past, as the city of San Diego recently learned.
Nevertheless, there have been some blips of optimism about how homelessness numbers were trending.
Mayor Todd Gloria noted a break in the two-year string of monthly reports that showed more people falling into homelessness than becoming housed. But that two-month reprieve didn’t last.
Gov. Gavin Newsom called a 3% rise in homelessness last year progress — a slower increase than before and well below the nationwide increase of 18.1%.
That has done little to stem bipartisan criticism that the region and state haven’t gotten much return on the billions of dollars spent to combat homelessness over the years.
In any event, a lot of that money will be going away under plans by the Trump administration. The budget bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress, despite slight increases in some housing programs, suggests a stark outlook.
For instance, the bill provides a total of $32.14 billion for tenant-based rental assistance contract renewals — $3.6 billion higher than the funding for those voucher renewals in the previous fiscal year, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Yet that’s not going to cover the cost of renewals “and is projected to cost the program an estimated 32,000 vouchers upon turnovers,” the coalition said.
Currently, rental assistance programs only help about 1 in 4 low-income households that qualify across the country. Rental assistance is widely considered one of the most effective programs for keeping people from becoming homeless.
Under the voucher system, recipients essentially pay an amount for rent based on their income and the public assistance covers the rest. In San Diego, a voucher costs hundreds of dollars less than providing a shelter bed and services that go with it, according to the city’s housing commission.
More than 180,000 households are on San Diego’s city and county waiting lists for rental assistance. The average wait for a Section 8 voucher is 15 years, as The San Diego Union-Tribune recently pointed out.
Even before the threat of federal cuts, local agencies were so strapped that they stopped accepting new voucher applicants and struggled to provide enough money for those who already have them, according to the Voice of San Diego.
Meanwhile, shifts in federal Homeless Assistance Grants could reduce funds by an estimated $168 million, and “may endanger the housing stability and services of over 18,000 people on the verge of or experiencing homelessness,” according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Further, the federal office that funds housing and other support for homeless people is targeted for deep cuts. The Office of Community Planning and Development, which is within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is slated to lose 84% of its staff, according to National Public Radio, citing an administration document.
Potential Medicaid cuts would not only affect regional plans to expand behavioral health assistance, much of which is aimed at homeless residents, but would make it a struggle to keep what’s already in place.
Also, the federal Emergency Housing Voucher program, a temporary program enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic, is running out of money sooner than anticipated, CalMatters reported this week. That program differs from Section 8 in that it targets those in most dire need: people living on the street or in shelters, those just on the verge of homelessness and people fleeing domestic violence or human trafficking.
The program has helped house about 60,000 renters nationwide, more than 15,000 of them in California and more than 400 in San Diego, CalMatters said. There’s no plan as yet to replace that money.
Ironically, despite all of this, there’s the potential eventually for at least a downward adjustment in the nationwide homeless count.
An immigration surge prior to last year’s homeless count likely distorted the picture of homelessness in the country, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of research by University of Pennsylvania professor Dennis Culhane, a leading national expert on homelessness.
What’s known as the “point-in-time” count does not assess immigration status, but Culhane’s research suggests domestic homelessness probably increased by not much more than 7% nationally rather than more than 18%.
Culhane’s calculations would bring the nationwide total to nearly 680,000 homeless people, down from 772,000.
The surge was curtailed by the Biden administration, and Trump has even stronger actions planned, including mass deportations.
That might mean some lower numbers, but that alone is not going to stop homelessness from becoming a worsening national scourge.
On homelessness and other matters, local and state governments will have to figure out how to deal with the shrinking federal social safety net launched nearly a century ago.
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