The Framework for an Equitable COVID-19 Homelessness Response
Priorities from Black People
About
Why was this document created?
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold, old patterns are reasserting themselves with historically marginalized communities being left out of the planning and response process. These patterns have resulted in predictable gaps in the pandemic response that have left our most marginalized neighbors at unacceptable risk. There is a clear need for further guidance to local jurisdictions who are planning for the response and recovery of the pandemic, in order to ensure that the priorities of historically marginalized communities are centered in the response.
How was this document created?
The National Working Group on Historically Marginalized Communities
The National Innovation Service (NIS) Center for Housing Justice team, along with other national leaders, started by creating a national working group on historically marginalized communities. The working group brings together a small group of national and local policy experts and advocates alongside direct service providers and people serving the communities most impacted by the pandemic. It includes representatives from mid-sized cities, rural areas, and denser cities.
Listening Sessions
Population Specific Briefs
After conducting the listening sessions, the NIS Center for Housing Justice created population-specific briefs to summarize the ideas of each of the ten communities and offer suggested actions that local jurisdictions can take in response to the concerns and priorities raised by people who are being marginalized. This document focuses on the concerns and priorities of Black community members participating in the listening session.
How is the document organized?
The brief is organized around 4 categories:
Space
Stuff
Staff
Systems
The four categories are based off of Dr. Paul Farmer’s Space, Stuff, Staff, and Systems Framework, a regular theme for Farmer across his work to address global health crises. These four categories are used in this brief to identify and organize essential elements within what people are experiencing and how best to respond to these experiences. You can read more about his framework here.
Under each of the 4 categories there are two sections:
What we heard
What we should do
The what we heard section summarizes the direct response of a listening session with participants who identified as Black. The what we should do section offers up suggested actions from the NIS Center for Housing Justice that local jurisdictions can take in response to the concerns and priorities raised by Black community members in the listening session.
To download an interactive pdf of the information below, click here.
Space
What we Heard
Remove bars from prison cells. The country is demanding that municipalities abolish police and carceral systems. Along with reimagining public safety and the institutions that are tasked with promoting and extending its aims, reimagine how institutional property like prisons could be transformed. Black Americans spoke about getting creative about how prison property itself can be redeveloped or transformed to provide housing or services.
Create communities for people experiencing homelessness. Black Americans spoke about wanting to be a part of building community. Get creative about how to create people-driven supports and services that create an experience of community. Co-locate things that people need alongside housing, and create opportunities for owning land and businesses within these communities. Model them after mutual aid and cooperative-type housing communities.
Make housing the primary goal. Black Americans spoke of the need to always make housing available. With the onset of COVID-19, more people became sheltered and cities began to launch special programs to provide hotel rooms to shelter people in the interest of Public Health. Hotels are good for the short-term but they cannot be long-term solutions; they are always temporary. Consider why the government did not offer these critical services to people experiencing homelessness before the pandemic, if they could muster the capacity to do so because of COVID-19.
What We Should Do
Divest from policing and invest in Black communities. All across the country people are calling for immediate divestment from policing and criminal justice systems and corresponding investment into housing, healthcare, and basic services. With this divestment comes the opportunity to reimagine the ways in which we support Black communities to thrive with affordable housing opportunities, meaningful employment options, and access to health care and education. This can include removing prisons and developing affordable housing in its place, investing in Black operated community based organizations that can offer accessible behavioral and physical health care, and supporting Black owned businesses that can offer living wages. CARES Act Funds and the money being divested from policing and criminal justice must be used to support the reimagination of Black communities. This will require targeting development, prevention, and rental assistance funds to Black communities, funding Black operated community based organizations, and creating service structures informed and monitored by Black people who have experienced homelessness.
Address systemic barriers to accessing crisis options and long-term housing for Black communities. Housing justice agendas must also take into account the historical and systemic racism that have given rise to the housing precarity that many communities are facing today. This includes redlining policies and other explicit policies that were used to limit access to wealth and capital for Black communities. Communities should use CDBG-CV dollars to invest in neighborhoods with high numbers of vacant houses or housing below code in order to create additional housing options for people experiencing homelessness and ESG-CV dollars to target rental assistance to members of marginalized communities to be used in the communities being revitalized and in any neighborhood of their choice. Simultaneously communities should end the decades-long practice of divesting in operating funds. Include long-term operating fund/reinvestment clauses in any new development occurring alongside CDBG-CV dollars. These investments would also allow communities to begin to think about alternative housing development and sustainability models and structures including affordable housing that is fully owned and operated by individuals and housing collectives in the community, removing private landlords from the engagement.
Prioritize housing for Black community members experiencing homelessness in the public health response to COVID-19 and in the long term recovery. The rapid public health response to COVID-19 for people experiencing homelessness in many communities led to individuals receiving non-congregate crisis options, often in hotels and motels. This response serves as a proof point to the ability to offer an immediate crisis response in a non-congregate shelter setting, meeting a person’s basic human needs in a more dignified and safe environment. As communities plan for the use of CARES Act funds, they must ensure that Black people experiencing homelessness continue to have access to non-congregate crisis options and that they are prioritized into long-term housing directly out of any crisis option. This will require targeting rehousing resources to Black people experiencing homelessness based on their increased vulnerability of contracting COVID-19.
Stuff
What We Heard
Make quality health care accessible. Access to medical care and medication is an issue that impacts the ability to become stable in housing. For example, cycling in and out of psychiatric treatment paired with an inability to sustain medication and support makes it difficult to keep a job or succeed in school. People have to make difficult life decisions based on their ability to access health care and impact decision and access to housing.
There is not just one path into housing insecurity. One participant discussed how the opioid epidemic had caused many people to experience homelessness. He explains that substance-use disorder often stems from people trying to self-medicate. Another participant explained that she felt it was because black people did not prioritize their finances correctly and that it was a result of a lack of education. She suggested that there be programs put in place to help educate black people about finances and how to realistically pursue things like home ownership. Another participant mentioned that not being able to stay in school what’s something that can lead to this and the lack of having a family network that is able to support you so that one is not alone.
Remove background checks as a requirement for accessing services. Black Americans spoke of people not accessing services that are available to them because of their fear of being subjected to background checks that can have repercussions in other areas of their life. Release people from the fear of their past being a defining factor for future success.
Recognize that structural racism blocks people from access to economic exclusion. Black Americans spoke of being excluded from having bank accounts due to prior debts or a lack of an ID, or are boxed out of income opportunities. This makes it hard for people to access critical benefits that may be available to them. People spoke about the ways that the gig economy and reliance on alternative income sources have been strained due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact that has on Black people specifically.
What We Should Do
Fund and support Black led health organizations and those that employ Black practitioners. Behavioral and physical health issues continue to be intimately tied up with some communities experiences of homelessness--often in ways that directly relate to that population’s ability to access healthcare writ large. Black communities often have difficulty accessing the healthcare system because of pervasive racism, lack of coverage, and a lack of providers in Black communities. Additionally, there’s quite a bit of evidence to support that the needs of Black people are not adequately accounted for in the treatment methodologies for a wide variety of behavioral health issues. As communities look at CARES Act supportive service spending they should consider investments in health and behavioral health resources that are targeted towards Balck communities and operated by Black community based organizations and providers. States and jurisdictions that have not expanded medicaid should be aggressively working to do so in order to increase healthcare coverage
Address the economic effects of systemic anti-Blackness. Systemic anti-Blackness has led to the economic exclusion of Black communities for centuries. As communities plan for the use of CARES Act funds they must consider the systemic racism that leads to few employment opportunities, increased difficulty in increasing wages, and exclusion from supportive services that can assist. Homelessness prevention funds should be targeted to Black communities through adjustment in coordinated entry policies that ensure racial equity, distributed in flexible ways to include financially supporting kinship housing, and without burdensome documentation or regulations, including background checks that exclude people from service. Rental assistance should also be targeted to Black communities through adjustment in coordinated entry policies that ensure racial equity, should be offered with flexible time limits that account for the barriers to employment and paired with specialized employment navigation and supports that increase networks of employment opportunities in Black communities.
Staff
What We Heard
Create opportunities for people to stay connected to one another. Black Americans noted the social strains that they were feeling as a result of being isolated and disconnected during the COVID-19 pandemic. There has been an entire online and virtual community that has come out of experiencing the social distancing norms of the COVID-19 pandemic, but not everyone has access to those virtual communities, and it becomes even more difficult to maintain access to internet and online opportunities because most affordable options are predicated on limited usage. These types of challenges meant that the pandemic affected people’s ability to connect and maintain their networks of support. Black Americans asked for service and staff support for social connectedness.
Get violent police away from people experiencing homelessness. Police exploit their power and authority all over the country. People described the police in the southeast likened them to the Ku Klux Klan, and discussed the increasing violence. They spoke of outsized police responses that result in unreasonable arrests, and clearing homeless encampments and property as a display of power.
What We Should Do
Build, support, and fund dignity-based services led by Black and other communities most impacted by homelessness. As CARES Act dollars are used to develop new service delivery models, dignity-centered care and service delivery must become the standard across all services and systems. Dignity-centered care in this context means implementing a holistic approach that seeks to comprehensively address the short and long term needs of an individual or family; responding to the need to build and/or retain social connectivity within a person’s community; and increased access to Black operated services in Black communities. Communities should implement new performance management systems that prioritizes feedback from people who are experiencing homelessness, including the Black community, routinely engage frontline staff in identifying policy barriers to serving individuals, and inform local and federal policy changes.
Remove policing from the homelessness system. People experiencing homelessness have consistently reported extremely high levels of unhelpful police engagement; for Black people these police encounters too often lead to violence or even death. As communities plan their CARES Act expenditures it’s clear that these dollars should not be used to fund policing activities--inclusive of ‘outreach’ teams that include police or encampment enforcement that often includes violent sweeps.
Systems
What We Heard
Combat police violence with people power. People discussed the recent deaths of Black people due to police brutality, the national recognition of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Aubery, and George Floyd, and described a wave of empathy against the insidiousness of racism that has become prevalent in some communities. People discussed a strong culture of activism around preventing police brutality that is becoming more active and see it as a platform to build from.
Make more transparent and accessible processes for getting housing. It is unclear to participants who gain access to temporary or permanent housing why and how their access was granted, even when their friends and community members so not gain access. It raises questions about how and why people get access that are hidden and nefarious or perceived to be nefarious. People expressed concern for those who never gain access.
Do not trust housing systems to solve for the lack of affordable housing. There is a justifiable and severe distrust of housing systems. People expressed general distrust of the system, questioned the motives of decision makers when a person can be added to a waiting list and it takes up to ten years to get a place to live, and questioned why people experiencing homelessness rarely are authentically a part of strategy and decision-making for the system.
What We Should Do
Divest from policing and invest a portion of the funds in housing and services to Black and other communities most impacted by police brutality. In addition to restricting CARES Act dollars from funding any police activity, funds from current city, county, and state budgets should be actively divested from policing and moved over to the creation of housing and community support. This includes community based services operated by Black community organizations that can help to put community safety and accountability back into the hands of Black communities.
Create centralized access to homelessness assistance and affordable housing across a community. Homeless assistance and affordable housing programs have differing eligibility requirements, applications processes, and waiting list. This leads to major barriers to accessing housing programs for people experiencing homelessness, with individuals often waiting on multiple waiting lists for multiple years. Coordinated Entry has attempted to solve these issues across homeless dedicated resources but due to lack of adequate resources and lack of coordination with affordable housing programs, the problem remains. As more resources are allocated to homelessness and housing through CARES Act and funds being divested from police, communities must centralize the access to all programs through coordinated entry.
Move decision-making power to people most impacted by homelessness, particularly those from marginalized communities. Housing and service delivery models have historically not been informed by people experiencing homelessness, especially marginalized community members experiencing homelessness. As communities begin to reimagine housing and service structures through the deployment of CARES Act funds, they must engage Black people who have experienced homelessness in the design, implementation, and ongoing monitoring of housing and service delivery models, with the end goal of moving decision-making power to those most impacted.