Who is a member?
Our members are the local governments of Massachusetts and their elected and appointed leadership.
About 100 government officials, academics, nonprofit housing and community development leaders, private developers, and heads of private, quasi-public, and philanthropic organizations took part in a “Partners for Housing” conference in Worcester on April 7 to discuss issues related to affordable housing.
Jennifer Ho, senior advisor to the secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, delivered a keynote address about federal policy related to housing and homelessness.
Approximately 92,000 people are homeless on any given night nationwide. The Obama administration set a goal to end homelessness among veterans by 2015, and there has been a 24 percent decrease in recent years. The Department of Veterans Affairs has played a critical role by offering supportive services to veterans placed in housing.
The Obama administration set a goal to end homelessness for children and families by 2020. Ho noted some of the challenges in Massachusetts regarding family homelessness, which is rising at a time when many other states are seeing reductions.
Nationally, 10,000 fewer families entered HUD’s homelessness assistance program than last year, but Massachusetts, New York and Washington, D.C., each of which have “right-to-shelter statutes,” collectively saw a 17 percent increase in family homelessness over last year. In recent months, Massachusetts placed as many as 2,000 families in hotel or motel rooms through its Emergency Assistance Shelter program because demand exceeded capacity in family shelters.
An important strategy for reducing family homelessness has become permanent supportive housing, where social services are provided continuously to at-risk individuals or families to keep them in permanent housing, Ho said.
Recent research, she said, shows that mediation is one of the best homelessness prevention tools, as it can result in keeping families in their current housing situations with family or friends, possibly with financial incentives. The biggest challenge is how to finance intensive wraparound services for high-need families, with no formula able to meet the unique needs of each family.
Ho enumerated several questions around housing assistance policy, including:
• For whom is it targeted?
• When should it be available to all who qualify based on income, and when should it be targeted to specific groups?
• What is the right package of services, for whom, delivered by whom?
• Where does housing end and health and human services begin?
She noted that HUD and Health and Human Services collaborate with increasing frequency given the relationship between housing and health.
Others spoke more broadly about the diversity of challenges inherent in housing and community development.
Eric Belsky, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, noted that some municipalities in Massachusetts are seeing strong economic development, creating a challenge of success: waves of investment are driving up prices and rent. Other municipalities are struggling to increase employment and investment, or are still dealing with problems created by the foreclosure crisis.
Barbara Fields, HUD administrator for the New England Regional Office, named four key ingredients for successful community development:
• A vision from community leaders shaped by long-term policy
• Resources and capital
• Community engagement
• Time to experiment, with the recognition that it will be an iterative process
The conference, hosted by Clark University, broadly considered the efforts that partnerships are making to increase and preserve the supply of affordable housing; the challenges they encounter; and the challenges they deem necessary to increase their impact.