The Framework for an Equitable COVID-19 Homelessness Response
Priorities from People Involved with Public Systems
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 People Involved with Public Systems participating in the listening session. Examples of the public systems that people had a history of involvement with include: foster care, mental health systems, affordable housing systems, and public benefits such as food assistance and federal health benefits.
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 listening session participants who identified themselves as having an involvement with a public system. 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 People Involved with Public Systems in the listening session.
To download an interactive pdf of the information below, click here.
Space
What we Heard
Create housing, housing, and more housing. People need housing that is high quality and affordable, and governments should invest in fixing up abandoned buildings, building more and more affordable housing, and ensuring that people with Section 8 vouchers can find apartments that take them.
Create affordable housing in rural and other underserved areas. There is an assumption that the lower cost of living in rural areas means that there are not people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. That is not true. Rural and other underserved jurisdictions should create affordable housing, as well as provide housing services.
What We Should Do
Develop affordable housing in the most impacted communities and target those most impacted by structural inequity. People experiencing homelessness and leaders in the field agree: housing fixes homelessness. 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.
Invest in chronically underfunded and underserved areas. As cities and counties plan their CARES Act funding, as well as potential for money from future bills, they need to pay particular attention to areas that are chronically underfunded and underserved. Often these areas follow other divisions of class and race. Communities should look at rurality, historical redlining, and urban/suburban divides when thinking about where to develop and site new service locations or to provide mobile services. Additionally, jurisdictions should come together to think about how resources might be deployed regionally instead of simply within legal boundaries.
Stuff
What We Heard
Provide all wraparound services in one place. People want access to all the services they need in one place, so they can meet their needs instead of being passed around from one organization to another. This includes good health insurance that allows people to go to doctors who treat them well and are culturally sensitive. One person recommended the Healthcare for the Homeless model, where people can work with doctors, therapists, psychiatrists, and housing case managers.
Provide direct financial support to individuals and families, including for kinship care. Informal kinship networks, people who let young people and other people experiencing homelessness stay in their homes, are left with little to no financial assistance. Many more people would offer this type of housing and support with financial support from the homeless response system.
What We Should Do
Build, support, and fund dignity-based services led by people involved with public systems 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; to directly respond to the mental health, health, employment, and housing needs within the same service structures; and to increase access to services operated by people involved with public systems. Communities should implement new performance management systems that prioritize feedback from people who are experiencing homelessness, including people involved with public systems, routinely engage frontline staff in identifying policy barriers to serving individuals, and inform local and federal policy changes. And as communities create non-congregate care models it will be important to think about how service connectivity is re-imagined. Communities should consider how small multi-functional service hubs might be developed and connected to non-congregate crisis options.
Widely implement simple cash transfers and other low barrier financial supports to individuals and kinship networks. Prevention and diversions services should include financial support and supportive services to kinship networks, as defined by marginalized communities, to include fictive kin. This should include flexible rental assistance or cash support to kinship networks at the same levels it is available to traditional families and direct cash transfers to individuals that can be used to support housing within kinship networks. Communities should use CARES Act funds to the extent possible within the regulations, in combination with funds divested from the police to create these flexible supports to kinship networks as a form of crisis assistance, particularly for youth and young adults within marginalized communities.
Staff
What We Heard
Hire, train, and incentivize case managers who treat people with dignity and help them meet their needs. Many case managers are rude, do not treat homeless people with dignity or respect, and are not knowledgeable about how to navigate the system they are working within. Some shelter staff are also predators who want something in exchange for their help. Even when they want to be helpful, staff’s hands are tied by regulations related to criminal records, past service records, and other things. The better and effective case managers will sometimes bend or break the rules in order to help the people they’re working with, and go beyond their job requirements to take people to the places they need to go and help them navigate the service system bureaucracy. Whether or not someone gets housing depends too much on the will and effectiveness of their case manager. Service providers should actively hire people with training in social work, psychology, and related fields, train them to treat everyone respectfully, and incentivize them to work with people to meet their needs, instead of just providing them a service.
Remove the police from homeless services. People want to be able to rest and get help without having the police called on them. As soon as you involve the police, it becomes a criminal situation, instead of a situation where someone needs help. The police have a lack of sensitivity in dealing with people living outside and are sometimes violent or kill people just because they are homeless and in public. Even when they know someone and want to help, their job requires them to move people out of public places. Homelessness is not a crime and should not be criminalized, and loitering laws should not apply to people experiencing homelessness.
What We Should Do
Build, support, and fund dignity-based services led by people involved with public systems 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; to directly respond to the mental health, health, employment, and housing needs within the same service structures; and to increase access to services operated by people involved with public systems. Communities should implement new performance management systems that prioritize feedback from people who are experiencing homelessness, including people involved with public systems, routinely engage frontline staff in identifying policy barriers to serving individuals, and inform local and federal policy changes. And as communities create non-congregate care models it will be important to think about how service connectivity is re-imagined. Communities should consider how small multi-functional service hubs might be developed and connected to non-congregate crisis options.
Divest from policing, remove police from the homelessness response system, and invest a portion of the funds in housing and services to communities most impacted by police brutality. All across the country people are calling for immediate divestment from policing and corresponding investment into housing, healthcare, and basic services. People experiencing homelessness have consistently reported extremely high levels of unhelpful police engagement; this can be compounded by being system-involved and heightened even more when also Black, Indigenous, or a non-Black Person of Color. 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. Additionally, funds should be actively divested from policing and moved over to the creation of housing and of community supports that are well trained, employ people who have similar identities to those being served, and continually informed by those with lived experience.
Systems
What We Heard
Use the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to defund shelters. Congregate shelters are unsafe and unclean, the staff is negligent, the food is bad, the curfews are burdensome, people die, and there is not enough case management to actually support people with what they need to get housing. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have been moved from shelters into hotels or apartments. There is an opportunity now to make sure that people don’t go back into shelters, and that cities instead invest in emergency options and long-term affordable housing.
Invest in neighborhoods to address long-term disinvestment. People are angry and frustrated about the long-term disinvestment from their neighborhoods and lack of services in their communities. In many places, there are blocks of abandoned houses, food deserts, and closed recreation centers. Governments need to invest in housing, food, and other community services instead of giving developers millions of dollars to build gated communities that keep poor people out.
Invest in alternative models for creating affordable housing. Much of the housing system is driven by profit, and as one person put it, housing is a human right but not for certain people. Cities are privatizing public housing, giving tax cuts to developers who make a profit on affordable housing that is not high quality or well-maintained, and pouring money into the “homeless industrial complex” which makes money off of poor people. Governments and housing organizations should invest in models for creating affordable housing that are not profit-driven, including exchanges of housing for work and building maintenance and public investments in fixing up abandoned buildings.
Reduce the barriers to entry in the housing service and application process. Regulations and rules around service provision are very high-barrier, including many different kinds of checks and specific requirements for different shelters and service providers. There is so much bureaucracy that people experiencing homelessness sometimes don’t feel that it is worth the effort to start the process, as they don’t expect it to be successfully connected to housing. Those regulations and rules should be reviewed, streamlined, and in some cases, eliminated.
What We Should Do
Divest from policing, remove police from the homelessness response system, and invest a portion of the funds in housing and services to communities most impacted by police brutality. All across the country people are calling for immediate divestment from policing and corresponding investment into housing, healthcare, and basic services. People experiencing homelessness have consistently reported extremely high levels of unhelpful police engagement; for Pacific Islander community members these encounters 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. Additionally, funds should be actively divested from policing and moved over to the creation of housing and community supports designed and operated by marginalized communities, including Pacific Islander Americans.
hotel/motel/SRO options for temporary use,
The re-shaping of transitional housing stock to create more dignity based crisis options.
targeted prevention and diversions services, including financial support to kinship networks and direct cash transfers to individuals and families, that leads to less dependence on formal crisis options and
more immediate and direct access to long term housing through rental assistance and the development of affordable housing prioritized for marginalized communities.
The work of many cities, counties, and states to move people into non-congregate temporary crisis settings during COVID-19 serves as a proof point that it is possible to re-imagine the crisis response to homelessness and offer safe temporary options that do not depend on congregate shelters. Communities need to continue and improve upon these efforts with CARES Act funds in order to fully realize a system with no large congregate shelters and adequate safe, temporary, crisis options for anyone in need of shelter in the community.
Address systemic barriers to crisis options and long-term housing for historically marginalized 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 historically marginalized communities. To begin addressing these issues community may begin with the action described above in: Develop affordable housing in the most impacted communities and target those most impacted by structural inequity.
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.