Last week, the Building Bridges blog launched a new series, reflecting upon each of the six potential short-term interventions enacted in response to COVID-19 that could become long-term “business as usual” practices. During the past year, there has been an infusion of public and private housing-related assistance to address the impacts of COVID-19 and help keep people housed. Most recently, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) appropriates approximately $50B in housing-related assistance for lower-income households facing housing instability or currently experiencing homelessness; these funds will also indirectly help struggling landlords and property owners. While the COVID-19 relief packages can help address issues caused by the pandemic, they do not resolve the pre-existing conditions of housing instability and homelessness that predated it. Housing instability and homelessness is already trending in the wrong direction and are only likely to worsen as a result of COVID-19. Ending and preventing homelessness is arduous work even in a booming economic cycle, and without the added system stressor of a pandemic. How funding is allocated matters, whether new or pre-existing. How can communities leverage existing resources and ensure new funding goes as far as possible? What new ways can funding be paired or deployed to address structural issues that predate the pandemic? What new funding mechanisms can transition into long-term change catalysts? How can new and existing public and private funding align to maximize impact and drive systemic solutions? This week’s blog post is dedicated to issues of flexibility and sustainability of funding to address housing instability and homelessness in response to COVID-19; and what this could ultimately mean for Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
In response to COVID-19, and throughout the pandemic year, everyone has had to make changes. Routines. Work. School. Childcare. Travel. Time. Businesses have been forced to adapt just to stay afloat. Governments have modified policies and sought to fill in gaps to keep people safe and healthy. Change has been truly the only constant. Importantly, some changes have been good. When looking back, what changes, whether at the individual or organizational level, are worth keeping: How we think about how we spend our time and resources? How we think about and use our space at home and work? How our routines have improved work-life balance? How business practices have empowered employees to be more productive through increased flexibility and enhanced support? How we have increased investment in the lowest income households, who need it most? How we have shifted to non-congregate shelter environments? How COVID has reframed the concept of housing as healthcare? One year ago, the Building Bridges blog launched a series on short-term housing and homelessness interventions enacted in response to COVID-19 that could become long-term “business as usual” practices. One year later, this new blog series will reflect on each of the six potential short-term-to-long-term interventions; provide an update with examples from other communities; and share what this could ultimately mean for Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
Mecklenburg County Community Support Services first released the “One Number” in 2019 as part of the annual Charlotte-Mecklenburg State of Housing Instability & Homelessness Report. Since that initial release, the One Number has become the “go-to” number for the count of people who are experiencing homelessness in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
The One Number is found on the Housing Data Snapshot, a hub for the latest information related to housing and homelessness in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Generated from a By-Name List within the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), the One Number captures the number of people enrolled in Emergency Shelter; Transitional Housing; Street Outreach; Rapid Re-housing (if there is no move-in date to housing yet); and Coordinated Entry inventories in HMIS. The One Number includes both total sheltered homelessness and a portion of the individuals experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. In addition, the One Number can be broken down by both household composition and population type; elements include single individuals, families, unaccompanied youth, veterans, and people experiencing chronic homelessness. The One Number can also be analyzed by inflow to, and outflow from, homelessness. By comparing One Number data over time (including by household composition or by inflow/outflow), the community can identify trends. Once identified, these trends can then inform interventions. To read more about how the One Number works, click here. This week’s blog post provides the most recent One Number update; latest trends and analysis; and what this means for Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
On March 11, 2021, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act was signed into law. This legislation appropriates approximately $50B in housing-related assistance for lower-income households facing housing instability or currently experiencing homelessness. As rental and utility arrears continue to grow, the ARP offers much needed financial relief to struggling tenants and landlords. And, as communities observe increases in both calls for assistance and households falling into homelessness, the ARP provides ways to address the immediate needs of lower-income households. This support will also help the homeless and housing services system to stabilize. Finally, the funding priorities and eligible uses in the ARP provide insight into the types of strategies and solutions that will continue to be advanced; if maximized, these can outline pathways to long-term economic recovery. This week’s blog post provides a high-level overview of the housing-related assistance in the ARP, and what it can mean for Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
For businesses, scalability matters. Scalability means that there is an ability to respond to growth in opportunity and increases in demand. Scalability enables businesses to be competitive, efficient, and meet the needs of customers, despite environmental changes. Scalability can be the difference between a business that remains small, or even fails; and which businesses take off, and sustain success. Scalability should not just be a metric reserved for private industry. Scalability directly applies to solving complex social problems, like housing instability and homelessness. In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, there is a 23,060-unit gap for housing units which are affordable to extremely low-income households. That housing gap should be considered the floor, because it is growing. Such a gulf requires solutions that can effectively bridge this ever-changing problem. These solutions must be scalable. In response to COVID-19, communities have been willing to try new approaches to address housing instability and homelessness. Some of these approaches, such as constructing temporary “tiny houses” to address unsheltered homelessness, are stopgap measures which can help protect individual and public health. Once circumstances improve, interventions that keep households “temporarily housed” or housed in inadequate conditions should be removed and replaced with permanent housing solutions. Sometimes, approaches may have been intended as temporary, but could become permanent “business as usual” solutions, based on scalability. Rehabilitating vacant buildings, like hotels, with the potential for higher intensity use and transforming them to permanent housing is one scalable solution. Given the fact that there are limited resources (including real estate) to address a growing problem that both pre-dates the pandemic and has worsened because of it, it is essential that communities focus on and invest in housing solutions that are scalable. This week’s blog post examines four factors for communities to consider, with specific examples, when determining which scalable housing solutions to advance and/or prioritize, and what this could mean for Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
After the North Carolina Stay at Home Order was issued nearly one year ago, the NC 2-1-1 system was flooded with calls by households seeking housing and financial assistance. 2-1-1 is the number that those facing a housing crisis in the state call to be connected to resources. In addition to an overall increase in callers, there also seemed to be a “new” at-risk population emerging from the shadows: individuals and families who had been paying either day to day or week to week to live in hotels or motels. While this form of homelessness pre-dates the pandemic, it has been considered “hidden” and there are little to no federal, state and/or local resources dedicated to addressing it. Faced with a sudden loss of income from COVID-19-related closures, these households were now on the edge of an entirely different type of homelessness: emergency shelter and/or unsheltered locations like parks, streets, cars and tents. In addition, as the novel coronavirus started to spread locally, the tidal wave of households newly in need of shelter also posed a potential public health crisis. This week’s blog provides an overview of the work to address this segment of the homeless population during the pandemic, and what this work can mean for Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
Mecklenburg County Community Support Services first released the “One Number” in 2019 as part of the annual Charlotte-Mecklenburg State of Housing Instability & Homelessness Report. Since that initial release, the One Number has become the “go-to” number for how many people are experiencing homelessness in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. The One Number is found on the Housing Data Snapshot, a hub for the latest information related to housing and homelessness in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Generated from a By-Name List within the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), the One Number captures the number of people enrolled in Emergency Shelter, Transitional Housing, Street Outreach, Rapid Re-housing (if there is no move-in date to housing yet), and Coordinated Entry inventories in HMIS. The One Number includes both sheltered homelessness and a portion of the individuals experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. In addition, the One Number can be broken down by both household composition and population type; elements include single individuals, families, unaccompanied youth, veterans, and people experiencing chronic homelessness. The One Number can also be analyzed by inflow to, and outflow from, homelessness. By comparing One Number data over time (including by household composition and by inflow/outflow), the community can identify trends. Once identified, these trends can then inform interventions. To read more about how the One Number works, click here. This week’s blog post provides the latest One Number update; trends and analysis; and what this means for Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
In June 2019, Mecklenburg County Community Support Services (CSS) released the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Racial Equity Analysis tool. The Racial Equity Analysis (REA) tool was a critical first step in calling attention to disproportionality in the housing instability and homelessness continuum. The REA tool describes the scope of racial disparities within our housing and homelessness system by analyzing and visualizing the racial and ethnic distributions of local homelessness and poverty rates in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. In March 2020, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released the CoC Analysis Tool: Race and Ethnicity. Utilizing Point-in-Time Count and American Community Survey data, the HUD tool showed the percentage of individuals in each Continuum of Care (CoC) who are living in poverty and/or experiencing sheltered or unsheltered homelessness by race and ethnicity. The REA and CoC Analysis tools laid the foundation for the development of additional local data tools that will support monitoring of Housing Data Snapshot data, disaggregated by race and ethnicity, in order to address the structural and systemic inequities across the entire housing continuum. The Housing Data Snapshot incorporates the “One Number,” which tallies the total number of persons who are experiencing homelessness and have an open Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) project entry in Emergency Shelter, Transitional Housing, Coordinated Entry, Street Outreach, and/or Rapid Rehousing (if there is no move-in date to housing) programs. The Housing Data Snapshot also provides a breakdown of inflow to the local homelessness system (newly identified individuals, persons returning to homelessness from permanent housing, persons returning to homelessness from an inactive status); outflow from the homelessness system (exits to permanent housing, exits to inactive status); and average length of time to housing. This week’s blog post is dedicated to the newly released One Number with data broken down by race and ethnicity.
