Homelessness has escalated to a crisis point in my home state of Washington, where a shortage of affordable housing is pushing more people to the brink.

The combined forces of a fast-growing economy, rapidly rising rents and stalled incomes are the primary drivers of the crisis. From 2010 to 2016, median monthly rents in the state rose 23 percent at the same time the rental vacancy rate dropped from 5.7 percent to 3.2 percent.1

As a result, the demand for homeless services has grown to where it far exceeds the capacity of our local homeless systems to respond. This imbalance is happening even as systems have become more effective and efficient at housing people who are homeless. In King County (the Seattle metropolitan area), for example, the system was able to house 42 percent more families in 2017 than it did in 20122. And yet, 2,118 families were still waiting for housing assistance at the end of the year3.

Despite our best efforts, the homeless system simply cannot keep up with the number of people who are becoming homeless in our community. More people every year will experience a homeless crisis and more resources – public and private – will need to be spent to house them.

In and around Seattle, as in other major metropolitan areas, a disproportionate number of those getting displaced as a result of the housing affordability crisis are people of color. National data reflects this. For example, Black/African Americans make up 43 percent of all people experiencing homelessness but only 12 percent of the total U.S. population. By comparison, whites make up 49 percent of the homeless population but total 74 percent of all Americans4.

Homeless Prevention: Opportunity for Funders

The organization I lead, Building Changes, helps develop and implement new and innovative strategies that better serve families and young people experiencing homelessness. We pull together government, nonprofits and philanthropy in a collective effort to strengthen homeless systems across the state of Washington. We have experience with how private funders can influence public systems to change their approaches.

If we are going to stem the tide of people becoming homeless, we need to prioritize strategies aimed at preventing homelessness. In general, this type of prevention work receives neither the attention nor resources it deserves. Strapped to the hilt, the homeless field focuses primarily on those already homeless, tending to treat the flow of people into the homeless system as someone else’s problem – the result of other public sectors’ failures.

Private funders can play a crucial role by investing in strategies to prevent homelessness, in addition to emphasizing the need for public investment. In fact, philanthropic support of prevention programs is critical for families and individuals teetering on the edge of homelessness because they are ineligible to receive homeless services under U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) guidelines.

While they are not defined as homeless by HUD, they often are one crisis away – a job loss or unanticipated medical bill, for instance – from becoming so.

Thanks to new screening tools, we now can predict with better accuracy who needs homeless prevention services the most – and therefore can more effectively target our resources. For families, the strongest predictors of homelessness include being a young mother, having a child under 2, a history of housing instability, previous stays in a shelter and traumatic childhood experiences5.

3 Areas to Make an Impact

Building Changes has identified three sectors, among several, where it’s important for philanthropy to direct homeless prevention resources: K-12 public schools, early learning programs, and maternal and child health services.

Homelessness has specific and devastating effects in these sectors: Mothers experiencing homelessness are more likely to have low birth weight babies6, while children who experience homelessness for any length of time are more likely to struggle with developmental delays and toxic stress that put academic success out of reach.7 There are strong incentives for leaders in each of these sectors to help children and families avoid homelessness, and philanthropy could support such work.

Private funders also should consider the racial disproportionality among those experiencing homelessness when deciding where to route their dollars. Funders can target their support to nonprofits that have experience directly serving the populations most at risk of homelessness.

Without philanthropic support of our public systems to identify and serve those on the verge of homelessness, hundreds of thousands of young people – future educators, artists, leaders and advocates – will be forced to overcome traumas that are possible to prevent.

Resource List:

National Alliance to End Homelessness is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization with a stated sole purpose to end homelessness in the United States.

United States Interagency Council on Homelessness drives action among 19 federal agencies to prevent and end homelessness in America.

SchoolHouse Connection is a leading national expert on the early care and education of children and youth experiencing homelessness.

SPARC: Supporting Partnerships for Anti-Racist Communities, an initiative of the Center for Social Innovation, seeks to increase the understanding of – and the response to – racial inequities in homelessness.

Schoolhouse Washington, a project of Building Changes, aims to improve housing stability and advance educational success for the more than 40,000 students who experience homelessness in the state of Washington.

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Original contribution by Helen Howell, executive director of Building Changes.

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1. U.S. Census Bureau. (2017). 2012-2016 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates. Retrieved from https://factfinder.census.gov

2. Building Changes. (2018). Analysis of King County Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) data covering 2012 through 2017. Unpublished Raw Data.

3. All Home. (2018, May). Quarterly Data. Retrieved from http://allhomekc.org

4. Olivet, J. et al. (2018). Supporting Partnerships for Anti-Racist Communities Phase 1 Report. Center for Social Innovation. Total population data are from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates; “Experiencing homelessness” data are from Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS) in five of the six SPARC communities. (See http://center4si.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/SPARC-Phase-1-Findings-March-20181.pdf for more information about the SPARC project).

5. Shinn, M., et al. (2013). Effective Targeting of Homelessness Prevention Services for Families. American Journal of Public Health, 103(52), S324-S330.

6. Cutts, D.B., et al. (2014).  Homelessness During Pregnancy:  A Unique, Time-Dependent Risk Factor of Birth Outcomes, Maternal and Child Health Journal, 19(6), 1276-1283.

7. Administration for Children and Families (2014).  Promising Practices for Children Experiencing Homelessness:  A Look at Two States. Retrieved from https://www.acf.hhs.gov