#U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness

[pettytiredandjewish]

IMPORTANT

Hey- To those who works in museums and libraries:

Trump just signed an executive order to dismantle the institute of museum and library services

(and six other federal agencies: the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency.)

Please spread the word

[posttexasstressdisorder]

WhatMatters

Your guide to California policy and politics

By Lynn La

May 6, 2025

Presented by California Strawberry Commission, California Community Foundation, Greenpeace and Upway

 

 

Good morning, California.

Grieving mother advocates for treatment coverage changes

Christine Matlock Dougherty after giving testimony in support of Senate Bill 363 at the Capitol Annex Swing Space in Sacramento on April 9, 2025. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters

State lawmakers pushing their bills through committee hearings often invite people to testify how their lives have been affected by the issue at hand. Christine Matlock Dougherty made an impression on lawmakers and witnesses recently as she advocated for two health care bills related to insurance coverage. 

As CalMatters’ Jocelyn Wiener explains, Dougherty’s 23-year-old son, Ryan Matlock, died of a fentanyl overdose in 2021 after his insurance plan declined to continue covering his stay at an addiction treatment center.

Dougherty — who is also suing her health plan — traveled over 400 miles from Yucaipa in San Bernardino County to Sacramento on separate occasions to speak on behalf of two proposals that aim to hold health insurance plans more accountable.

One is Assembly Bill 669, which would require health plans to review a patient’s eligibility to stay in substance use treatment no sooner than 28 days from when the provider first approved the treatment; Matlock’s health plan decided it would no longer cover his stay at the treatment facility just three days into his stay.

The other, Senate Bill 363, would require health plans to report data to the state about how often they deny treatment.

Though it’s been five years since Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a landmark law requiring health insurance plans to provide enrollees with all medically necessary mental health and addiction treatment, serious shortcomings in behavioral health coverage remain. The Legislature is currently considering a handful of bills to address some of these issues, which include the bills Dougherty is championing. She says pushing for the proposals is what Ryan would have wanted her to do. 

Dougherty: “It helps me find a reason why it was him.”

Read more here. 

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Other Stories You Should Know 

‘Millions of people out on the street’

A homeless encampment in West Fresno on Jan. 30, 2025. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local

After President Donald Trump revealed his federal budget plan last week, advocates are sounding alarm bells over spending cuts that could worsen the state’s housing and homelessness crises, write CalMatters’ Ben Christopher and Marisa Kendall.

Trump’s budget plan guts half of the funding for the Housing Choice Voucher program, also known as Section 8, which helps low-income tenants with their rent. He is also proposing to cap how long a single person can receive help under the program to two years. 

To save about $5 billion, the administration is proposing to nix funds for local economic development grants, affordable housing developments and local initiatives that aim to speed up housing. The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which oversees federal homelessness policy, would be eliminated too. In April all its staff was already put on leave following an executive order.

The federal budget for 2024 was $6.9 trillion, so $5 billion would represent a savings of about 0.07 percent. 

These cuts and others would essentially gut programs that California and its local governments depend on for housing and homelessness services, which serve millions in the state.

Matt Schwartz, president of the nonprofit California Housing Partnership: “You’d be looking at millions of people out on the street virtually overnight. There’s no way states could maintain the same level of assistance.”

Read more here.

 

Catch up with CalMatters on the radio

CalMatters reporter Sergio Olmos on a field tour with Border Patrol agents of the El Centro sector in Calexico on Feb. 25, 2025. Photo by Kevin Clancy, Evident

Took a break from the news recently? Didn’t have time to read that 5,000-word investigation? No problem, catch up with CalMatters on the radio! 

Deadly drivers: More than 40% of California drivers charged with vehicular manslaughter since 2019 still have a valid license. That’s just one of the eye-opening findings in Robert Lewis’ investigation into dangerous drivers who are still behind the wheel. Hear his findings in brief on KQED’s California Report and at length on KQED’s Forum.

Immigration raid probe: In January Border Patrol agents traveled to Kern County to conduct an immigration sweep that they said targeted criminals. Hear CalMatters’ Sergio Olmos break down this raid on KQED’s California Report and KVPR’s Central Valley Daily podcasts. CalMatters also partnered with Evident for a short documentary on this coverage.

Mental health crisis: If you live in Sacramento County and you call the Sheriff’s Department because your family member is having a mental health crisis, there’s a chance they may not come. A CalMatters investigation by Lee Romney has found that other police agencies across the state are also backing away from mental health crisis calls. Hear Lee dig into this on LAist’s AirTalk. 

 

And lastly: CA sues over Trump tariffs

The Port of Los Angeles on Oct. 2, 2021. Photo by Ted Soqui, Sipa USA via AP Photo

Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta have filed a lawsuit against Trump’s sweeping tariffs. CalMatters’ Alexei Koseff and video strategy director Robert Meeks have a video segment on how the tariffs could harm California’s economy as part of our partnership with PBS SoCal. Watch it here.

SoCalMatters airs at 5:58 p.m. weekdays on PBS SoCal.

California Voices

CalMatters columnist Dan Walters: California’s biggest issues are as formidable as ever, and their complexities underscore how a dominant party tends to become a collection of hostile quasi-parties.

Other things worth your time:

Some stories may require a subscription to read. 

Trump announces 100% tariffs on movies made overseas // Los Angeles Times

Trump tells FBI, Homeland Security to reopen Alcatraz as a prison // San Francisco Chronicle

CA sues to block Trump and RFK Jr. health cuts that shuttered SF office // KQED

Trump slump hits CA, as state expects first tourism decline in five years // The San Francisco Standard

CA lawmakers try again to pass sweeping changes to charter school oversight // The San Diego Union-Tribune

CA bill aims to restrict probation on children // Bolts

Boat believed to be carrying migrants capsizes off CA coast, at least 3 dead // AP News

How long does it take to get a Real ID in CA? What to know if you miss deadline // The Sacramento Bee

 

See you next time!

Tips, insight or feedback? Email whatmatters@calmatters.org. Subscribe to CalMatters newsletters here. Follow CalMatters on Facebook and Twitter.

 

     

 

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[autumngracy]

President Trump signed an executive order on Friday seeking to dismantle seven additional federal agencies, including the one that oversees Voice of America and other government-funded media outlets around the world. Mr. Trump directed the heads of the agencies, largely obscure entities that address issues like labor mediation and homelessness prevention, to eliminate all functions that are not statutorily mandated. The leaders should also “reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law,” the order said. Like many of the president’s moves in his wide-ranging effort to shrink the government, the order appears to test the bounds of his authority. Voice of America’s parent, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, for example, is congressionally chartered as an independent agency, and Congress passed a law in 2020 intended to limit the power of the agency’s presidentially appointed chief executive. Some of the Trump administration’s moves to slash agencies have been halted by federal judges, including on Thursday, when a pair of court rulings called for agencies to reinstate likely thousands of federal employees who were fired last month because they had probationary status. In an opinion issued Friday evening, a federal judge in California made clear he did not believe the administration’s claims that federal agencies were acting of their own accord when they fired those probationary employees. Judge William H. Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California listed more than a dozen examples of officials telling employees that the mass firings had been carried out at the behest of the Office of Personnel Management. In addition to Voice of America, the Agency for Global Media funds Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. The organization, with a budget of roughly $270 million and more than 2,000 employees, broadcasts in 49 languages. It has a weekly estimated audience of more than 361 million people. By Saturday morning, many journalists and other employees at Voice of America were informed they were being placed on administrative leave, according to an email reviewed by The New York Times. Journalists there said the cuts were so widespread that they would effectively shut down the international broadcaster. The media outlets are intended to provide unbiased news to audiences around the world, but Mr. Trump has criticized its editorial decisions since his first term. Mr. Trump had already stirred fears at the agency by tapping Kari Lake, a fierce loyalist who ran unsuccessfully for governor and Senate in Arizona, to serve as a special adviser there. The other agencies Mr. Trump targeted Friday are the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which works to prevent and resolve work stoppages and labor disputes; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a nonpartisan think tank; the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funds and supports museums, libraries and archives; the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which works to prevent and end homelessness; the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which provides financial assistance to struggling communities; and the Minority Business Development Agency, which aims to bolster minority-owned businesses. Within seven days, the heads of the entities are required to submit to Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, their plans for complying with the order and outline which of their functions are statutorily required.

Since Mr. Trump took office, the billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have sought to drastically reshape the federal government by cutting staff and programs. On Tuesday, the Education Department announced it was firing more than 1,300 workers, and after hundreds accepted separation packages, the agency is set to be left with roughly half the number of employees that it started the year with. Mr. Musk’s group has trumpeted saving taxpayers billions of dollars, though its claims have been undermined by posting error-filled data.

[melyzard]

Sources, if you want to do your own data comparisons of how much housing is available versus how many homeless people there are to be housed.

The Census Bureau’s housing data [Source: Census.gov]

USA Homelessness Data and Trends [Source: US Interagency Council on Homelessness, usich.gov]

https://x.com/hankgreen/status/1750973895824572763?s=46&t=WLunzndd86TYqPF2E217iQ

[jadestormcloud2]

"As outlined by the executive order, Trump selected these seven agencies as he determined them "unnecessary."

...

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service provides conflict management services for enhancing labor-management relationships.

...

The U.S. Agency for Global Media oversees all U.S. non-military, international broadcasting.

...

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution, commonly known as just the Wilson Center, conducts research and provides nonpartisan counsel on global affairs to policymakers internationally.

...

Through grants, research and policy development, the Institute of Museum and Library Services supports museums, libraries, archives and other similar organizations through the United States.

...

The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness coordinates a federal response to homelessness, working to create partnerships with government agencies and in the private sector

....

Part of the U.S. Department of Treasury, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund promotes economic revitalization and community development in underserved communities throughout the country.

...

The Minority Business Development Agency aims to promote growth among Minority Business Enterprises, or MBEs, by providing technical assistance programs.

[stephen-barry]

We can end homelessness in America.

Homelessness is not an individual failure. It is a societal failure...

We’ve made progress because the federal government has promoted evidence-based approaches — and because Congress has long recognized that homelessness is a bipartisan issue, harming individuals and rural, urban and suburban communities.

But the housing shortage and rising rents in communities across the nation are direct threats to the progress we’ve made. Advocates must call on Congress to maintain a commitment to ending homelessness...

[pettytiredandjewish]

To all my Jews who works in museums and libraries/relies on this agency (or currently working on degrees in these fields):

Trump just signed an executive order to dismantle the institute of museum and library services.

The institute of museum and library services is a federal agency that provides funding, support, and resources to museums, libraries, and archives in the United States.

And if anyone of you also works or relies on these other six federal agencies, he is also dismantling them too:

Trump signed an executive order to dismantle seven federal agencies: the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency.

[memoriae-lectoris]

As its name suggests, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act that Clinton signed in 1996 was meant to shift risk from the state onto individuals. It was a signature part of the Republican Party’s Contract with America, which sought to deal a blow to the mythical “welfare queen” whom the party had been complaining about since Ronald Reagan was president. It limited aid and allowed, but did not require, states to tie drug testing to receiving benefits. Together with the crime bill, the welfare bill created an assault on the viral underclass that could, at times, be outright eugenic.

As Cathy Hannabach wrote in 2013, the long-term, injectable birth control drugs “Depo-Provera and Norplant began to be required as a condition of release for women arrested for certain crimes and were forced on women receiving welfare—policies that continue today in various forms.” (Drugs like these needn’t lead to permanent sterilization, but when given under coercion on the U.S. mainland as well as at Guantánamo Bay, as we saw with Haitians diagnosed with HIV in chapter 6, the drugs can stop women, especially when given during their final childbearing years, from reproducing for the rest of their lives.)

One element of the act that made Black people particularly at risk for homelessness was that it banned people with records of criminal arrest—not even with criminal convictions but with mere criminal arrests—from living in public housing. This meant that if the family of someone who was arrested or got out of jail lived in public housing, that person’s moving back home could place the entire family at risk for eviction. Saddled with a record that made it impossible to rent a home in their own name and unable to live with family, record numbers of Black people were rendered homeless upon making contact with the criminal justice system after the 1996 bill passed. And homelessness inevitably led to their committing more “crimes” associated with being unhoused, such as panhandling, lying down outside, working in the informal economy, or urinating in public (the latter of which could lead to being labeled a “sex offender,” which would make securing employment or housing effectively impossible for the rest of their lives). This led to more incarceration, which created more homelessness, in an inescapable whirlpool of catastrophe.

[…] According to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, by 2013, about two-thirds of the unhoused in America were Black, though Black people accounted for only about 12 percent of the population.

[sarcasticcynic]

Trump hates California. From reversing decades of federal policy and revoking California’s higher emission standards, to pulling federal funding from projects in California, to threatening to withhold federal emergency disaster aid, Trump takes every opportunity he can to lash out at his (perceived) bitter enemy. Lately he’s been attacking California for its homelessness crisis, calling it a “disgrace” and threatening in vague terms to “do[ ] something about it,” such as “razing tent camps for the homeless.”

Last month, California Rep. Maxine Waters, a Democrat, sent a formal letter to the Trump administration seeking clarification of Trump’s plans. Among other things, she asked, “Specifically, what role would the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness play in your effort?” The USICH is tasked with coordinating the federal response to homelessness across 19 agencies, including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor, and Commerce.

Trump never responded to Waters. He has, however, just fired the Executive Director of the USICH. So that bodes well.

[thoughtportal]

Being unhoused and the effects of being unhoused

https://www.tiktok.com/@sorenrehkopf/video/7198364041402764586?_r=1&_t=8ZlMD9QnKqE

582,462 and Counting

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/business/economy/us-homeless-population-count.html

By The New York Times

Published Feb. 3, 2023Updated Feb. 9, 2023

To fix a problem like homelessness in America, you need to know its scope. To do that, you need sheriffs, social workers, volunteers, flashlights and 10 days in January.

They go into the streets in search of data. Peeking behind dumpsters, shining flashlights under bridges, rustling a frosted tent to see if anyone was inside. This is what it takes to count the people in America who don’t have a place to live. To get a number, however flawed, that describes the scope of a deeply entrenched problem and the country’s progress toward fixing it.

Last year, the Biden administration laid out a goal to reduce homelessness by 25 percent by 2025. The problem increasingly animates local politics, with ambitious programs to build affordable housing getting opposition from homeowners who say they want encampments gone but for the solution to be far from their communities. Across the country, homelessness is a subject in which declarations of urgency outweigh measurable progress.

Officially called the Point-in-Time Count, the annual tally of those who live outside or in homeless shelters takes place in every corner of the country through the last 10 days of January, and over the past dozen years has found 550,000 to 650,000 people experiencing homelessness. The endeavor is far from perfect, advocates note, since it captures no more than a few days and is almost certainly a significant undercount. But it’s a snapshot from which resources flow, and creates a shared understanding of a common problem.

This year, reporters and photographers from The New York Times shadowed the count, using a sampling of four very different communities — warm and cold, big and small, rural and urban — to examine the same problem in vastly different places.

On any given evening, the forces that drive someone to sleep outside or in a shelter are myriad and complex. A long-run erosion in wages. A fraying social safety net. The fact that hard drugs are cheap and mental health care is not. Year after year, the count finds people experiencing homelessness to be disproportionately Black, disproportionately old and disproportionately sick. Members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community are overrepresented as well.

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There is one factor — the high cost of housing and difficulty of finding anything affordable — that rises above the rest. The numbers bear this out, explaining why expensive West Coast cities like Los Angeles have long had the nation’s worst homeless problems, why growing cities like Phoenix are now seeing a troubling rise, and why it is seemingly easier to solve homelessness in places like Rockford, Ill., a once-thriving factory town that has lost a lot of jobs but where housing remains cheap.

“Housing has become a competition for a scarce resource, and when you have that the people who are most vulnerable are going to lose,” Gregg Colburn, a professor at the University of Washington and a co-author of “Homelessness Is a Housing Problem,” said in an interview.

The 2023 count will provide a crucial understanding of the legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic and the success of government efforts in blunting its effects. Last year’s count — 582,462 — showed homelessness was essentially flat from two years ago, a fact that Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, attributed to widespread eviction moratoriums, billions in rental assistance and an expansion of federal housing vouchers that fortified the safety net. The question for this year, Mr. Olivet said, is “whether we were able to flatten the curve and even start pointing downwards.”

Behind each number are tens of thousands of volunteers, outreach workers and public safety officers who spend the wee hours looking for the most destitute members of their community.

Sometimes, people gladly answer questions and thank volunteers for what they are doing, with a hope that accurate figures will bring more funding for housing and services. Other times, they feel violated and gawked at.

“What are you doing?” a man on a bicycle in Los Angeles asked a team of volunteers in day glow vests as they walked past a downtown sidewalk covered in tents.

“Counting.”

“Counting what?”

“Counting people.”

— Conor Dougherty

Los Angeles, Jan. 25-26

‘Once you enter this whole cycle, you are always on the edge’

In the capital of the capital of homelessness, the people who live outside are used to seeing outsiders. This is especially true in Skid Row, a 50-block neighborhood in downtown where some 3,000 people live in the tents, shanties and recreational vehicles that so thoroughly clog the sidewalks that much of the pedestrian traffic is in the streets. So when dozens of volunteers in reflective vests left the Downtown Women’s Center to count on a recent evening, the people they were counting rarely so much as looked up.

“They constantly have visitors, whether it’s proselytizers, outreach teams, people offering them something to eat, people offering them drugs — people doing a homeless count,” said Suzette Shaw, a volunteer who helped with the tally this year. “This community never sleeps.”

Ms. Shaw is a 58-year-old student who lives in the neighborhood and was once homeless herself. She lived in various forms of transitional housing — hotels, shelters — until she found a permanent subsidized unit in 2016, whose rent is partially covered with a Section 8 housing voucher. Joining the count is one way she tries to make sense of a neighborhood whose scenes of ragged fabric and open fires are some of the bleakest pictures America has to offer.

Given that it has the nation’s worst homeless problem, Los Angeles’s count requires assembling a small army that spends three days and several thousand hours amassing their figures. This ranges from volunteers like Ms. Shaw who comb sidewalks for a few hours, to officers like Lt. William Kitchin, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who along with a team of deputies and outreach workers spent a recent Wednesday driving a stretch of the Los Angeles River to tally the residents who live under overpasses and along the banks.

Unlike smaller cities, which often pair the Point-in-Time Count with interviews and outreach, for sensitivity and safety reasons organizers in Los Angeles discourage volunteers from interacting with the people on the streets.

Some walk, some drive, but for the most part it happens briskly and the numbers they come back with are large. According to last year’s count, about 20 percent of the entire nation’s unsheltered population — about 50,000 people — lived in Los Angeles County.

This has left voters despondent: Surveys consistently show housing and homelessness are the biggest concern of California voters, while a recent poll by the Los Angeles Business Council Institute found residents are furious at the city’s inability to make so much as a dent, with many voters saying they feel unsafe and have considered moving because of the homeless problem.

After a campaign last year that focused almost entirely on homelessness, Karen Bass, the city’s new mayor, declared a state of emergency on her first day in office. This gives her office expanded powers to speed the construction of affordable housing by lifting rules that impede it.

“Tonight we’re counting the people on the street, but we also know that it is most important that we prevent new people from falling into homelessness,” the mayor said to a crowd at a kickoff event in the San Fernando Valley. She joined the count shortly after, along with the actor Danny Trejo.

Ms. Bass summed up the central problem for Los Angeles and other high-cost U.S. cities: Even as they spend billions on new housing and expanded services, more people continue to fall into homelessness faster than these programs can help people already on the streets. Nationally, some 901,000 people exited homelessness each year between 2017 and 2020 on average. That figure would be a huge accomplishment, but for one detail: About 909,000 people entered homelessness each year over the same period.

“Once you enter this whole cycle, you are always on the edge,” Ms. Shaw said.

Phoenix, Jan. 24

‘I stayed there till they kicked me out’

By Jack Healy Photographs by Ariana Drehsler

Daniel Greene never thought he would end up homeless in Phoenix, a city that enticed him from Idaho a decade ago with balmy winters and cheap housing. But when his lease was up for renewal in December, Mr. Greene said his landlord raised the monthly rent on his one-bedroom apartment to $1,400 from $700. Arizona has few restrictions on rent increases. Now, Mr. Greene is sleeping in a park while he tries to scrape together a deposit.

“I would need $4,000,” he said on Tuesday morning, as a volunteer counted Mr. Greene as part of the city’s portion of the annual Point-in-Time Count.

Mr. Greene, 54, is one of thousands of newly homeless people who have been coughed out of the tailpipe of Arizona’s economic engine, casualties of growth that has drawn new factories and hundreds of thousands of new residents, while sending housing costs spiraling.

Advocates say Phoenix’s streets are increasingly filled with people who simply could not afford an increasingly pricey Arizona: Average rent in the Phoenix area has risen by about 70 percent over the past five years, and the number of people in shelters or living on the street has gone up by 60 percent.

“The cost of housing is the biggest thing we see,” said Kenn Weise, the mayor of the suburban city Avondale, Ariz., and chairman of the Maricopa Association of Governments, which runs the Point-in-Time Count.

The path that brought Mr. Greene to a park in downtown Phoenix, repairing a beater bicycle, began, he said, when he fell from a scaffold at his carpentry job a few years ago. Work was impossible after he crushed his leg, but he said he survived on monthly disability checks.

The rent on his apartment near the palms of Encanto Park crept up from $525 to $700 before doubling in December, part of the disappearance of modestly priced rentals around Phoenix. A decade ago, almost 90 percent of apartments around Phoenix rented for $1,000 or less. Now, just 10 percent do.

“I stayed there till they kicked me out,” Mr. Greene said.

He shoved his furniture and most of his clothes into a $100 monthly storage unit and decided to live outside to try to rebuild his finances. A weekly motel might have been safer, but he figured the open air was free. He is camping out with three other men and spends a lot of time scouring roommate websites.

“I’m doing this on my own,” he said.

As the first of nearly 1,000 volunteers crisscrossed downtown Phoenix starting before sunrise on Tuesday morning, they met people sleeping in makeshift tents beside new art spaces and camping out in the shadow of construction cranes.

One volunteer, Katie Gentry, regional homelessness program manager for the Maricopa Association of Governments, walked up to a gas station downtown where people had come to ask for quarters to buy coffee and escape from the chill; she approached them to ask a series of deeply personal questions with a matter-of-fact cheerfulness.

The Point-in-Time Count is part census, part deeply intimate personal history. Volunteers here ask for people’s name, age and ethnicity, but also whether prison time, drug use or mental illness is a factor in their homelessness. One question asks whether people had ever traded sex for shelter.

Gustavo Martinez, 56, said he lost his job as a concessionaire for spring-training baseball games during the early days of the pandemic, and he lost his subleased apartment a few months later. He has been bouncing from friends’ couches to shelter beds to living on the streets ever since. He said that he earned a little money cleaning up after the downtown Phoenix farmers market, and that he often spent his time marveling at how anyone could afford to live downtown in the new high-rises sprouting up around him.

“Everything is just going up and up and up.”

Cleveland, Mississippi, Jan. 24-26

‘They were born there, raised there, and they have become homeless there’

By Campbell Robertson Photographs by Desiree Rios

One of Florida McKay’s colleagues had passed on a tip: There was a woman living in a trailer without heat, light or water in Shelby, Miss., a little hamlet surrounded by the soybean and cotton fields north of town. On a cold and gray morning, Ms. McKay and Robert Lukes, who was helping to administer the Point-in-Time Count in the Mississippi Delta, drove past acres of mud-bogged farmland to find her.

“The Delta’s a little different from other areas in terms of homelessness,” said Ms. McKay, the director of homeless services for the Bolivar County Community Action Agency, a nonprofit organization. There are plenty of people in need here — the median household income in Bolivar County is less than half of the nation’s and the poverty rate is roughly triple — but they are scattered across the region, making the Point-in-Time Count a sprawling exercise in detective work.

On a street corner in Shelby, they parked near a blue and white trailer sagging into the grass. A woman opened the tattered door, hugging herself in the cold, and welcomed Ms. McKay and Mr. Lukes inside. Blankets were stapled over the windows and a rusty propane tank squatted at the end of a bed.

Mr. Lukes began the questionnaire: name, age, how long had she been homeless. Vickey Wells, she said, born on Christmas Day, 1971. She had been living in this dark, cold room for most of a year. Asked how long she had been in the community, Ms. Wells seemed puzzled. She grew up down the street. “This is my home,” she said.

Rural areas are different in terms of homelessness and the Delta is perhaps more different still. In this vast expanse of rural Mississippi, one of the poorest regions of the country, there are very few shelters, very few multifamily housing developments and, relative to the rest of the country, fewer places for rent.

It is a landscape of cropland and modest stand-alone homes, where families have lived — or did live — for generations. Some homes have been empty for years, left behind by a Great Migration of Black people out of the Delta that began early last century and has never really stopped.

In contrast to big cities, where those who are homeless are often people who have moved there in search of opportunities, many of the people without a place to stay in the Delta are those who have never left. In some cases they seek shelter in the homes left by those who went elsewhere.

“People in the Delta that are homeless are from the Delta,” said Hannah Maharrey, the director of the Mississippi Balance of State Continuum of Care, a federally funded program to address homelessness. It’s also the organization that Mr. Lukes works for. “They are literally homeless in their hometown. They lived there, they’re from there, their roots are there, they were born there, raised there, and they have become homeless there.”

Some have been kicked out by family or marooned after the death of a parent; some are escaping abuse; some have fallen prey to addiction in a place where the margin for error is virtually nonexistent. Some never left their homes at all, staying as the structures around them decayed and utilities were cut off, becoming homeless without ever moving.

Jobs in the Delta are scarce, government services are limited and the nonprofit infrastructure is thin, Ms. Maharrey said. The burden of helping the desperate falls largely to churches, neighbors and community groups.

The Point-in-Time Count relies on these local ranks and their network of sources — court clerks, gas station attendants, motel owners, police officers, longtime contacts within the homeless community itself. On cold nights, those seeking shelter find sanctuary anywhere they can, in cars, abandoned homes and vacant strip malls. The only way to really know who is staying where is to live in these communities and know the people firsthand.

The fact that the rural homeless population is harder to see is what makes the yearly census so important, Ms. Maharrey said. “When I talk to other communities, they find it difficult to believe that there’s homelessness in rural Mississippi, or that there’s homelessness in rural America,” she said. “The Point-in-Time Count gives us a reference point.”

In Greenwood, Miss., population around 14,000, the team drove into a wooded lot where Donjua Parris, 43, had been living with her partner since the summer. Four years ago, her partner lost his maintenance job at the apartment building where they lived, she said, and when they were evicted, her family wouldn’t take them in. Ms. Lukes ran through the census questions with Ms. Parris, who shivered in the cold, then he asked her where they should go to find others.

“There is a place,” she said, gesturing toward an area on the riverside of a nearby levee, where she said a pregnant woman was living. “She needs help.”

A few minutes later, Mr. Lukes had climbed down the levee and found a campsite abandoned. If the woman had been there, she was gone now.

Rockford, Illinois, Jan. 23

‘Right now, I don’t got to worry anymore’

By Conor Dougherty Photographs by Jamie Kelter Davis

Empty bridges, empty alleys, an empty shanty behind a strip mall parking lot. Angie Walker ticked off a list of where people have been known to sleep. Outside, it was in the mid-20s with a light layer of snow upholstered on fences and grass.

“Our hope is that nobody is outside,” said Ms. Walker, who oversees the homeless program for Rockford’s Health and Human Services Department. “We don’t usually get that lucky.”

They did not, but they were close. After a three-hour search in a Chevy Suburban that at times went off-road and on bike paths, Ms. Walker and her team, which included a retired police officer and a member of the Fire Department, found only one person — a shivering man in a tent who clasped his hands as she ran through a list of survey questions — on the night of Rockford’s count.

As Ms. Walker had predicted earlier in the evening, most of the night’s numbers consisted of the three-dozen people who laid on rectangles of padding parceled across a gym floor at Second First Church. On winter nights, the church becomes a warming center, providing a captive audience for Ms. Walker and the dozen others who spent an hour counting bodies and performing surveys after the drive.

“Right now, I don’t got to worry anymore,” said Shirley Gill, a 63-year-old who was in for the evening.

Not having to worry anymore: That is the goal of the tens of billions that city, state and federal governments spend each year in their so far futile effort to end homelessness.

Rockford is one of the country’s biggest success stories, having effectively ended the condition for veterans and chronically homeless individuals, or those who have experienced homelessness for at least a year, who have severe addiction problems or live with a disability of some kind.

The road to those accomplishments was a program called “Built for Zero,” a coalition of 105 local governments nationwide whose members commit to reorganizing their social services and gathering monthly data with a goal of drastically reducing their homeless population. (In 2021, Community Solutions, the New York nonprofit that created “Built for Zero,” was awarded a $100 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to expand the program.)

Central to the work is a concept called “functional zero,” or the point at which the number of people going into and out of homelessness is equal each month, and anyone who experiences it isn’t homeless for more than a few weeks. This does not mean no one will ever be seen sleeping on the streets: Community Solutions instead likens its strategy to a hospital that can take care of everyone who shows up, even if the medical staff can’t prevent them from getting sick.

“Before we get to a place where no one ever has to experience homelessness, we need some milestone that shows we have a system that can be responsive,” said Beth Sandor, chief program officer at Community Solutions.

Back at the warming center on the night of the count, Douglas Webb, a 54-year-old Marine Corps veteran, provided an example of good news. The first time Mr. Webb visited the warming center at Second First, he said, was after an outreach worker found him under a mass of blankets in a parking garage. Now he works at the warming center in the winter.

“I was able to pull myself out of it,” he said.

Mr. Webb is part of what is perhaps the most encouraging story in homelessness. Measured by the Point-in-Time Count, homelessness among veterans nationwide has plunged 55 percent since 2010, as the federal government has poured money into housing and support programs for them.

Mr. Webb noted that he paid $620 for a one-bedroom apartment, low by national standards. (Rockford’s rents are about half the national level, according to a rental index compiled by Zillow.) This is a reflection of the city’s economic malaise. In the hours before the count, Ms. Walker gave a brief tour of Rockford, with sights that included an abandoned factory that used to provide good paying jobs, the anchor storefront that used to be a Kmart, the boarded-up school where people sometimes live.

The city of 147,000 is a picture of Rust Belt decline, with problems that are a magnification of the country’s stratifying economy: Over the past several decades, its base of middle-class manufacturing jobs has withered and been replaced by low-wage retail work, creating a cycle of poverty, despair and crime.

As Ms. Walker surveyed a deserted encampment made with tarps and PVC piping, she noted that some of the city’s success in fighting homelessness could be attributed to its decline. In other words, because there’s been so much disinvestment, Rockford’s housing is cheaper and more plentiful than elsewhere. And such is the irony of homelessness: Economically speaking, it’s easier to solve it in places where things are going poorly than where things are going well.

[reasonsforhope]

The U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) announced preliminary results of the 2022 Point-in-Time Count showing an 11% decline in Veteran homelessness since early 2020, the last time a full count was conducted. This is the biggest drop in Veteran homelessness in more than five years.

The data show that on a single night in January 2022, there were 33,136 Veterans who were experiencing homelessness in the United States – down from 37,252 in 2020. Overall, this represents a 55.3% reduction in Veterans experiencing homelessness since 2010. via HUD, via futurecrun.ch/good-news

[mariacallous]

Last month, volunteers across the United States braved frigid temperatures to conduct the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual point-in-time (PIT) count, which tallies the number of people experiencing homelessness in a community. As the numbers are added up, it’s important to ask: What is the nation learning from this data? And more importantly, how are local leaders using it to craft more effective and humane homelessness policies?

Late last year, we published an in-depth analysis of pandemic-era homelessness trends in major U.S. cities and found a complicated picture: While homelessness was up significantly over the last decade in some cities, such as Seattle, others major cities, including Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, saw meaningful and sustained declines. Our research made it clear that there is no “one-size-fits-all” barometer for understanding America’s challenge with homelessness, and instead, paying attention to regional variations in homelessness trends can help policymakers understand what’s working to reduce it.

This piece provides an updated analysis of homelessness in U.S. cities using the most recently published PIT count data, from 2023 (data collected in January 2024 will not be released until the end of the year). We once again find a nuanced patchwork of trends across cities and regions that reveals stark new challenges in some cities (e.g., New York), but also bright spots of success in reducing homelessness in others (e.g., Austin, Texas and Indianapolis). These findings make it clear that cities have the evidence and tools at their disposal to reduce homelessness—there just needs to be the political will to invest in and scale them.

As Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, told us while participating in Washington, D.C.’s PIT count last month, “What we do tonight matters, but what we do tomorrow matters more.”

[liszine]

🌿 About our charity... StandUp for Kids! 🌿

We’re super excited to announce that all Chaos Theory proceeds after production will be donated to StandUp for Kids, a US-based non-profit devoted to ending the cycle of youth homelessness through empowering shelterless and at-risk youth. The organization strives “to build communities where all youth know care, feel loved and have a support system to help them move quickly from surviving to thriving.”

StandUp for Kids aims to ensure that all young people have access to the four core outcomes determined by The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness: Stable Housing, Permanent Connections, Education/Employment, and Social/Emotional Well-Being. They also provide important resources such as basic food/clothing/hygiene, housing support, and health care, for children, teens and young adults up until the age of 25, in addition to hosting four core programs (Street Outreach, Outreach Centers, Mentoring, and Apartment Support). As of 2019, the non-profit has a 4-star rating on Charity Navigator. 

🌿Statistics

🌀“1.7 million U.S. youth experience homelessness every year.”

🐾“Up to 40% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ.”

🌀“Every day, 13 at-risk youth will die due to assault, illness, or suicide trying to survive on the streets – that’s approximately 5,000 per year.”

🐾“Compared to housed youth, homeless youth are 75% more likely to self-medicate and abuse substances as a way to deal with trauma.”

🌿Why this Cause?

After thorough research on organizations targeting immigrant justice and child homelessness, our mods have decided that this non-profit best embodies the zine’s call for action and most importantly addresses issues which the Life is Strange series raises awareness for, particularly youth homelessness, strong interpersonal relationships, education, and racial and sexual diversity. 

StandUp for Kids also harbors Street Outreach programs in 17 locations including Arizona, California and Seattle, Washington- 3 of the states pivotal to the Diaz Brothers’ journey in Life is Strange 2.

Homeless kids are often forced to make tough choices in order to survive, and through this zine we really hope that more lives can be positively touched by these deeply impactful games.

To learn more about youth homelessness, visit here 🌀

To donate to StandUp for Kids, visit here 🐾

To order Chaos Theory, visit here 🌀

[red-stick-progressive]

Julián Castro’s People First Indigenous Communities Policy

Y’all, I’m pretty impressed by this. Honestly, there's more in here than I would have thought to ask for if I had the opportunity to talk to him in person two weeks ago. I really suggest going to his site or following the link I'll attach at the bottom and looking at it all but I'm going to give the highlights here.

1. The first priority will be strengthening Tribal Sovereignty and "the unique government-to-government relationships" between tribes and the federal government.

2. "Create a White House Council on Indigenous Communities to coordinate interagency Native American policy" as well as bring back the White House Tribal Nations Conference.

3. Pass the PROGRESS for Indian Tribes Act to build on the successes of the ISDEAA, which for the most part helped tribes with self-governance and self-determination.

4. "Establish well-resourced Tribal Advisory Committees within all cabinet-level federal agencies by the end of 2024" to "continue the work of executive order 13175 ensuring tribal governments and communities have a voice in federal policymaking" essentially creating a pathway to special advocacy for policy and issues affecting tribes.

5. "Creating pipelines" to hire more Native Americans from "Tribal Colleges, Universities and Native American-serving Institutions" in order to diversify federal agencies. (interesting choice of the word 'pipeline')

6. "Implement a Carcieri fix" (non-natives may have no idea what any of this is but its a pretty big item) reaffirming the authority of the Secretary of the Interior to put Native land into trust for Indian Tribes.

7. Honoring Treaty Commitments in regards to the IHS by fully funding it and bridging the $5000 per capita funding deficit as well as protect it from appropriation gaps.

8. Expand Healthcare infrastructure including technology like telemedicine to Native communities.

9. Incorporate the IHS and tribes into the plans to combat the opioid crisis with funding and training on best practices and incorporation with the broader national strategy.

10. Honoring Treaty Commitments in regards to housing by investing "an additional $2.5 billion over ten years" to top off the ICDBGP and NHHBGP.

11. "Pass the Tribal HUD-VASH Act" investing $5 billion into housing to eliminate homelessness for Native Veterans. Veterans experience homelessness disproportionately to any other demographic and this affects Natives more than any other racial group due to our disproportionate rates of service and veterancy.

12. "$150 billion into public schools over the next ten years" and "investing in universal pre-K and tribal school infrastructure," this is clearly a part of his larger platform.

13. "Recruit and retain teachers from Indigenous communities, Including bilingual teachers who speak Indigenous languages" by organizing a national teacher residency and coordinating with tribal colleges and universities, as well as increasing teacher pay in tribal schools with a teacher tax credit of up to $10k.

14. "Directly support minority-serving institutions, including" Tribal Colleges and Tribal Universities with $3 billion dollars a year.

15. A wide variety of new economic development tools like "competitive grant development programs such as promise zones" as well as steps to reinforce and modernize existing and successful ones such as the Buy Indian Act.

16. "Expand high speed Internet access to tribal communities within five years"

17. "Restore Title II protections for the internet" such as net neutrality in order to protect communities with low competition as is common for the Natives that already have Internet.

18. Broadly work with Tribal leadership to improve and repair infrastructure on tribal lands and prepare it for climate change. He mentions Indigenous communities in Alaska, in particular.

19. "Modernize and codify tribal consultation requirements"

20. "End leasing of federal lands for fossil fuel exploration and extraction... and require free, prior, and informed consent from indigenous communities for major infrastructure projects"

21. "Expand the U.S. Department of Energy's Tribal Energy Program" for a variety of responsible and future-oriented new focuses such as renewables and training.

22. "Defend the Indian Child Welfare Act against legal challenges and other legal efforts that undermine the law."

23. Pass the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Act... to ensure the survival and vitality of Indigenous languages."

24. "Institute a Indigenous Community Cultural Repatriation Fund" to return privately-owned Native cultural materials to tribes and in some cases to museums or proper public institution with the proper consent of the tribe.

25. Pass the STOP Act to punish the illegal trafficking and export of tribal artifacts and cultural properties as well as the NAGPR Act.

26. Dedicate a special fund for "tribes to increase the availability of culturally appropriate food" from the SNAP program and help Indigenous farmers make it to market.

https://issues.juliancastro.com/people-first-indigenous-communities/?source=post_page---------------------------