Long-term Relief for Children Experiencing Homelessness

General Recommendations

Quick action from the President and Congress is needed to prevent and end the unnecessary tragedy of child homelessness in America. The situation is more pressing than ever given the current foreclosure crisis and economic recession that are catapulting many children and their families onto the streets. We know what must be done to prevent and end child homelessness. Now we have to muster the public and political will necessary for action.

As we respond to the current challenges our nation faces, we must remember that the homelessness crisis is fundamentally a housing crisis. Therefore, any solution must have housing at its core. However, for many families and children, housing is not enough. If we are concerned about the well-being of family members and the future of our children, we must adopt a comprehensive approach that includes adequate services and supports. Along with housing, we must address income, employment, education, family preservation, health care, hunger, and violence. Only then can we end child homelessness.

Our recommendations reflect the belief that preventing and ending homelessness for children requires a coordinated federal, state, and local response. The federal mandate that homeless children are entitled to enroll in school is a critical component to addressing this issue, but without compliance at the school district level, homeless children will not be able to succeed academically. Furthermore, local communities cannot prevent homelessness or re-house homeless families without new federal funds for housing assistance. To accomplish the goal of ending child homelessness, all levels of government must plan, coordinate activities, and provide resources.

Federal Activities

Housing

• Increase access and encourage collaboration among local agencies by permitting families to be referred for housing vouchers by a wide range of stakeholders, including groups such as public schools and Head Start programs along with more traditional homeless and housing assistance providers.
• Keep homeowners stably housed by requiring banks and other mortgage holders to approve affordable loan modifications.
• Enact renter protections so that tenants who are evicted when their landlords’ homes have been foreclosed have at least 90 days to move and have the resources necessary to find new housing.
• Provide more homeless families with the housing and services they need by better aligning HUD’s definition of homelessness with the definitions used by other federal programs.
• Expand the definition of chronic homelessness to include families. Researchers and practitioners agree that due to disability, chronic illness, or other challenges, a small but significant subgroup of families need more than housing and basic supports and services to stabilize.
• A new initiative must be undertaken to discover what works to improve outcomes and keep these families together.
• Promote educational stability and positive health outcomes for children and families by completing the job of safely housing families who have been homeless since the Gulf Coast Hurricanes of 2005.
• Prepare and implement a comprehensive plan to ensure that victims of future major disasters can be re-housed as quickly and as safely as possible so that they do not become homeless.
• Ensure that families who are homeless and families who are served by the child welfare system are given priority access for Section 8 vouchers. Provide bridge subsidies to these families when no Section 8 vouchers are available.
• Enforce the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and provide training on VAWA to courts and landlords. This helps prevent homelessness among survivors of domestic violence by ensuring that they do not face eviction due to violence perpetrated against them.
• Ensure that survivors of domestic violence who are fleeing their living situation are included in HUD’s definition of homelessness.

Several of the housing recommendations have also been supported by other national homelessness advocates, including National Alliance to End Homelessness; National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty; and the National Low Income Housing Coalition (2008).

Income

• Include resources to help TANF recipients access higher education and job training opportunities.
• Suspend time limits when families are fleeing domestic violence, become homeless, or experience major illness and other catastrophic events.
• Ensure access to high quality and affordable child care for TANF recipients.
• Assist homeless parents who are disabled to enroll in the Social Security Disability Income/Social Security Income (SSDI/SSI) programs so they can obtain a stable monthly income.
• Eliminate criminal history restrictions on parents that prevent families from obtaining housing assistance, TANF benefits, and other government aid they need to avoid homelessness.

Family Preservation

• Using HUD’s Family Unification Program (FUP) and other resources, ensure that youth aging out of foster care do not become homeless, and families are provided with the housing and services they need to stay together instead of relinquishing children to foster care.
• Expand the age limit to allow children to remain in foster care until their 22nd birthday in all states.
• Repeal the “one strike” law that permits local Public Housing Agencies to evict an innocent tenant from public or subsidized housing due to the criminal activity of another family member who is outside the tenant’s control.

Health Care

• Provide comprehensive and affordable health insurance to every child and youth until age 21 through Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) or other means.
• Include mental health insurance coverage so that children do not have to be placed into the foster care or juvenile justice systems in order to receive the care they need.
• Expand addiction and mental health services at Community Health Centers (CHC) and Health Care for the Homeless Programs (HCH) that are targeted to children and their families. This would require increased funding for services at existing CHC and HCH grantees, not just funding for new sites.

Hunger

• Restore expedited Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility for all homeless individuals and families.
• Automatically qualify all homeless families for WIC assistance.
• Ensure that all homeless children are enrolled in free school meals and have access to free summer food service programs.
• Increase funding for per meal reimbursements in the school meals, summer food service, and child and adult care food programs to address the rising cost of food.
• Update meal pattern requirements for the school meals, summer food service, and child and adult care food programs on a regular basis to stay current with nutrition science and best practices.
• Update the WIC food package on a regular basis to stay current with nutrition science and best practices.

Education

• Strengthen the education of homeless children through the reauthorization of the education subtitle of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act to enhance identification and support, help increase school stability, address the needs of preschool children and improve data collection.
• Increase McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act funding for grants to states and local education authorities to support idenification, enrollment, and support for homeless children.
• Improve access of young homeless children to early childhood education and child care. Every homeless family that needs Head Start and/or child care services should be able to obtain these vital resources. To achieve this goal, more program slots must be made available.
• Create a dedicated funding stream for transporting homeless children.
• Require schools of origin to immediately send school records to enrolling schools to facilitate the enrollment of homeless children.
• Require state-funded pre-school programs to identify and prioritize the enrollment of homeless children.
• Include all children in out-of-home care situations (e.g. foster care, kinship care families, group homes, and child care institutions) in the definition of eligibility for services.
• Make a commitment to ensuring that all federal agency-funded programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the No Child Left Behind Act (ESEA/NCLB) are trauma-informed.
• Improve federal oversight of states’ compliance with educational assessment and reporting requirements. Data on the educational progress of homeless children should be more comprehensively collected and analyzed across the country.

Planning, Research and Data Collection

• Ensure that the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness and other federal agencies working to end homelessness include the needs of children, youth, and families in any federal plan.
• Permit communities to provide a flexible range of housing and supportive services to families in crisis through the annual HUD Notice of Funding Available (NOFA) for McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act grant programs.
• Encourage additional research on the needs of homeless children and effective programs to address child homelessness.
• Support additional research focusing on risk factors for homelessness, so prevention efforts can be better targeted.
• Fund research to better understand the pathways that link children in foster care to homelessness.
• Require that all federal programs serving low-income people collect data on the housing status of program beneficiaries.
• Ensure that all future national data collection efforts involving children include questions about residential status and stability. Currently, comprehensive national data regarding the health and well-being of America’s homeless children are very limited.
• Ensure that adequate questions are asked about the health, education, and safety of their children in studies involving homeless adults.
• Encourage research on homeless families to include the family as a unit of analysis.

Workforce Development

• Require state grantees under the U.S. Department of Labor’s Workforce Investment Act (WIA)to ensure that homeless youth and parents are provided with job training services that help them improve their job skills, maximize their earning potential, and place them in decent paying stable jobs.
• Require providers of mental health and substance abuse services to demonstrate competencies in trauma-informed and trauma-specific program models.
• Provide the homeless workforce with higher salaries and improved training and support to encourage recruitment and retention of highly qualified staff.

State and Local

Housing

• Create state and local housing trust funds to complement the National Housing Trust Fund.
• Use National Housing Trust Fund, Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTCs), and HOME dollars to produce new units of affordable housing dedicated to homeless families and those most at-risk of homelessness.
• Focus on minimizing shelter stays and quickly moving families into housing.
• Place families directly into permanent housing rather than into motels. In addition to being a safer and more stable option, it is less expensive to pay a family’s rent than to pay for their stay in a substandard motel.
• Pay for stabilization services for families exiting the shelter system, helping them remain stably housed.
• Expand state efforts to provide short-term financial assistance to at-risk households including help with back rent and utility payments, security deposits, or first month’s rent to obtain new housing for people about to be displaced, and payments or loans to households facing foreclosure.
• Create or expand state efforts to prevent the eviction of families through landlord-tenant mediation and legal services.

Income

• Ensure that states use TANF dollars to provide housing assistance for homeless families along with child care and other work supports that keep parents employed.
• Waive TANF time limits if a family is homeless at the end of their five year limit or becomes homeless in the future and needs support to regain housing and stability.
• Permit all TANF recipients to pursue educational opportunities that offer the potential to increase their future income and decrease the likelihood that they will need public assistance.
• Ensure that families who are homeless are given priority in the distribution of child care vouchers through the Child Care and Development Fund.
• Adopt fully refundable state Earned Income Tax Credits, funded with TANF dollars, to help families become more financially secure. Enroll families into federal entitlement programs such as Medicaid, SNAP, and WIC rather than paying for costly emergency services (e.g., emergency room visits).

Family Preservation

• Require state child welfare agencies to invest in homelessness prevention – an upfront cost that will improve outcomes and save money over time.
• Prevent children’s placement into foster care due solely to homelessness or unstable housing by providing families with intensive wrap-around services (e.g., income supports, job training, health care, trauma-specific services, supports for parenting, and programs for children).

Health Care

• Increase the number of children who are insured by enrolling eligible children in Medicaid or SCHIP.
• Improve access to primary, dental, and mental health care by incentivizing collaborations between agencies that serve homeless families and the health care community.
• Provide policy leadership from the Governors’ offices and funding incentives to de-emphasize categorical or diagnosis-driven service delivery and to invest in holistic services and supports for homeless families and children.
• Provide all homeless family members with deemed eligibility and priority access to state-funded mental health services.
• Ensure that families involved with the child welfare system are given priority access to mental health and substance abuse services that are funded and/or provided by state agencies.
• Ensure that all providers serving homeless children and families have demonstrable competencies in trauma-informed and trauma-specific program models. This should become a responsibility of state mental health authorities.
• Encourage state mental health, substance abuse, and child welfare authorities to incentivize partnerships among clinical service providers and schools, health centers, and shelters in order to improve access.
• Recognize complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as an omnipresent issue among homeless children and families and one that requires a “universal precautions” approach to individual or systems level interventions.
• Encourage state commissioners of agencies serving homeless families to partner with entities such as the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. This strategy will assist providers in moving towards “trauma-informed” service delivery.

Hunger

• Increase participation in federal nutrition programs (National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, Summer Food Service Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) by creating efficient organizational processes and conducting intensive outreach campaigns.
• Increase access to healthy foods in school and community settings (e.g., support increased fruits and vegetables in school and summer meals, community gardens, and healthy food choices at grocery stores).

Education

• Ensure that school personnel are aware of the ways that trauma impedes learning and develop policies and programs that mitigate this reality for homeless children. State Departments of Education should take leadership in these efforts.
• Strengthen efforts to identify and support students experiencing homelessness.
• Provide training and education to school districts to ensure compliance with the educational provisions of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act.

Planning, Research and Data Collection

• Include representatives from key agencies serving homeless children, youth, and families on all state interagency councils on homelessness.
• Include appropriate strategies to end homelessness for children and families in all state and local ten-year plans to end homelessness.
• Require that all state programs collect data on the housing status of participants.
• Make family homelessness a priority of the state interagency councils on homelessness and other planning efforts related to homelessness and poverty.