WASHINGTON — The Obama administration Tuesday unveiled an ambitious plan that aspires to end homelessness among some of society’s most vulnerable groups within the next decade.
“Opening Doors, A Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness,” calls for ending child and family homelessness in 10 years while wiping out chronic homelessness and homelessness among veterans in five years.
According to the 74-page plan, “Stable housing is the foundation upon which people build their lives - absent a safe, decent, affordable place to live, it is next to impossible to achieve good health, positive educational outcomes or reach one’s economic potential.”
Jim Woodell, director of River City Ministry in North Little Rock, applauded the plan’s emphasis on quickly providing permanent housing - a strategy known as “housing first.” Woodell’s group is one of several agencies in Arkansas that are administering grants to help the homeless and people at risk of becoming homeless pay their rent under an economic stimulus program.
“It’s proven that people who have their own residence become more stable, they get stabilized more quickly, than someone who gets bounced around and doesn’t know if they’re staying in a temporary shelter,” Woodell said.
Dennis Beavers, coordinator of the Soar Network in Little Rock, which provides services and shelter to homeless people, said he also supports the concept. He said Tuesday afternoon that he has yet to see the plan, but he was glad it had been announced.
“Just the fact that they’re doing it is a big deal,” Beavers said. “Homelessness doesn’t really make it to the national public policy agenda very often.”
Woodell called the plan’s goals “very ambitious.” He noted that leaders in Little Rock and North Little Rock adopted a 10-year-plan to end chronic homelessness in 2006, and “there are more homeless people now than there were over five years ago.”
“I don’t know what to say about it except that I’m happy we’re working on the problem solving side of this,” Woodell said.
The plan is a significant breakthrough because there has never been a comprehensive federal effort to end homelessness with a timeline and measurable goals, said Nan Roman, the president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
“To me that’s really important, because we know that when the Bush administration made a commitment to end chronic homelessness, it really made a huge difference,” she said. “It changed how resources were allocated. It caused better coordination, and the result has been that the chronic numbers have gone down. Now they’re taking that same approach and they’re expanding it to the other homeless populations.”
Other advocates also lauded the plan’s goals, but they questioned the lack of details about how some of the proposals would be paid for.
“The big question is whether preventing children and families in the U.S. from becoming homeless is important enough for Congress” to increase homeless-program funding, “and I don’t think they’ll do that without enough pressure and leadership from the White House,” said Maria Foscarinis, the executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. “In order to achieve these goals, the funding has to be there, and that means the administration has to really be firm and advocate.”
“Opening Doors” comes a week after a government report showed that nearly 1.6 million people, including more than 170,000 families, spent time in homeless shelters last year as the recession, mounting foreclosures and record unemployment sent people scrambling for shelter.
The number of families in homeless shelters jumped 7 percent by nearly 11,000 families from 2008 to 2009. Overall, family homelessness was up 30 percent in 2009 from 2007.
In January 2009, a one-day count found 1,425 homeless people in the Little Rock area, down from 1,811 in 2008, but some homeless-services workers have expressed doubt about the accuracy of the numbers, noting the difficulty in counting homeless people.
Information for this report was contributed by Tony Pugh of McClatchy Newspapers and by Andy Davis of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 06/23/2010