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2023-03-16
Kids Count;
Every child deserves a quality education and the opportunity that comes with it. Compared to other states, however, Michigan does not ensure that kids—especially those in families with low incomes—grow up under conditions that support their success.Housing in particular is critical to children's achievement, but families with Housing Choice Vouchers (HCVs) and other non-wage sources of income often have a hard time finding landlords who will rent to them. Several Michigan communities protect renters from this type of discrimination. A similar state-level law would give all families with vouchers more options for safe housing in healthy, opportunity-rich neighborhoods. The resulting education benefits would promote bright futures for kids, a strong workforce and economic prosperity for the whole state.
2023-08-10
California HealthCare Foundation;
California's Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, is undergoing an ambitious transformation known as CalAIM (California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal). A key focus of this transformation is removing barriers to care for populations who struggle to access services, including people experiencing homelessness. A critical goal of CalAIM is a more person-centered approach to publicly funded health care.This paper, from the Corporation for Supportive Housing, rests on a foundation of extensive research and examines the successes, challenges, and opportunities in providing person-centered care to people experiencing homelessness. In Part 1, the authors describe in detail how homelessness undermines a person's health. When people live outdoors or without reliable shelter, existing health issues are made worse, and people develop new ones. Californians experiencing homelessness die in large numbers from causes directly related to their lack of housing.The primary driver of homelessness is a lack of affordable housing. Part 2 describes opportunities in CalAIM, in the Providing Access and Transforming Health (PATH) initiative, and in the Home and Community-Based Services Spending Plan to fund housing support services that connect people to housing and help keep people stably housed. This section also includes explanations of CalAIM's Enhanced Care Management benefit and Community Supports, seven of which specifically focus on people experiencing homelessness.Despite the promise of CalAIM and related programs, CalAIM's impact has been limited to date. Part 3 describes the challenges providers and managed care plans face in implementing CalAIM and the provision of housing support services. Health care and social service providers offering services under CalAIM must navigate differing reimbursement rates — which may not be enough — and differing requirements set by each managed care plan, even among plans operating in the same county. Managed care plans may not know how best to identify and reach people experiencing homelessness, and to connect people to housing and housing support services. Meanwhile, people who are unhoused must still find and access the care and services they need by navigating complex systems of care and fragmented provider networks.
2023-02-15
New America;
Climate change will force millions of Americans from their homes in the coming decades. Where will these climate migrants go? Will they be able to afford safe and adequate housing in their new community? And what will happen to those who stay behind?This report presents a framework for understanding how climate change affects housing security throughout the United States. Through this analysis, we explore climate impacts on the housing security of three distinct populations:Those who move, or individuals and households that are displaced by climate disasters or voluntarily move from areas at-risk of climate impacts;Those who stay, or individuals and households that remain in areas at-risk of climate disasters, either by choice or necessity; andThose who receive, or the communities that will receive an influx of new residents due to climate-related migration.
2023-06-29
Brookings Institution;
American households live amid a transportation conundrum. From a technological perspective, no developed country makes greater use of private vehicles and their incredible ability to cover long distances in relatively little time. The problem is that all those vehicles come at a real cost to society: growing environmental damage, unsafe roads, higher household transportation spending, and rising costs to maintain all the infrastructure. Even as electric vehicles promise to reduce the climate impacts of driving, this latest innovation still fails to address car dependency's other persistent costs to society.Building for proximity could offer a more holistic solution. Helping people live closer to the centers of economic activity—from downtown hubs to local Main Streets—should reduce the distances people need to travel for many of their essential trips. Shorter trip distances, in turn, make walking, bicycling, and transit more attractive and can improve quality of life. And as more people travel by foot instead of a private vehicle, officials can feel empowered to build complete streets that include lower speed limits, protected bike lanes, and other amenities.
2023-07-13
Hub for Urban Initiatives;
Women experiencing homelessness as individuals—those who are not accompanied by or seeking services with a partner, children, or other dependents—are a growing population in Los Angeles County and nationally. In Los Angeles County, these women make up 68 percent of all women experiencing homelessness and 20 percent of all individuals experiencing homelessness. Prior research has highlighted the challenges and negative outcomes that women experiencing homelessness face. In recognition of the growing population of women experiencing homelessness and their needs, the City and County of Los Angeles passed resolutions naming women a unique subpopulation of people experiencing homelessness, and the County Homelessness Initiative, in partnership with the Downtown Women's Center (DWC), engaged the Urban Institute and the Hub for Urban Initiatives to conduct the first countywide women's needs assessment to answer key questions around demographics, experiences, and needs and preferences related to housing, shelter, and services for women experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County.
2023-06-06
Legal Constructs Lab at Cornell University;
For more than a century, local governments throughout the United States have used zoning to shape future growth. Through rules that regulate what sorts of housing can be built where, localities may either allow for new development or restrict construction to maintain the status quo. Using a first-of-its-kind database of zoning laws across an entire state, we provide evidence that strict zoning regulations limiting construction to single-family homes are associated with inadequate access to affordable housing and with the segregation of people by income, race, and ethnicity.We leverage the Connecticut Zoning Atlas, a unique dataset of zoning texts tied to geospatial files that allow for georeferenced comparisons between the zoning laws adopted by 180 localities. We overlay the geographies of zoning districts on spatially differentiated demographic and economic indicators at the neighborhood level. Analyzing and comparing this information allows us to provide a comprehensive view of the relationships between zoning laws, property values, and residents' demographic and economic characteristics.Our research focuses on a state with stark disparities in residential land uses: only 2 percent of Connecticut's land is zoned to allow the by-right construction of multifamily buildings with three or more units per parcel, while 91 percent of its land allows only the construction of single-family housing by right. Our analysis reveals that suburbs and towns have the most restrictive zoning rules by several measures, while the largest cities more readily permit multifamily construction. We show that the residents of neighborhoods with mostly single-family zoning, on average, have significantly higher household incomes and are much more likely to be white, much less likely to be Black or Hispanic, more likely to have a bachelor's degree, and much more likely to own their homes than residents of neighborhoods where zoning allows for multifamily building construction. These findings paint a picture of a state where localities' zoning either divides or reinforces the division of residents by income, race, ethnicity, and education levels. We also apply a segregation index to explore the associations between zoning rules and neighborhood- and locality-level segregation. After controlling for other characteristics, we find that higher concentrations of high-income and white residents are associated with lower number-of-unit zoning policies. We also find that higher concentrations of low-income, Black, Hispanic, and other residents of color are associated with zoning allowing the construction of two or more housing units per parcel and higher shares of renter-occupied housing.Together, these findings bring new insight into the relationship between zoning policy and residents' geographic distribution. Our results clearly point to the links between zoning laws, rental housing availability, and inequitable distributions of populations within and across jurisdictions. Policymakers considering how to improve access to opportunity while reducing income or racial segregation should evaluate the potential for altering local zoning codes to allow greater diversity of housing construction and tenure types in more places.
2023-04-20
New America;
Eviction has become one of the most visible manifestations of America's housing crisis, with millions of families facing eviction each year. An abundance of evidence has detailed how eviction is more than a one-time event, but a destructive and traumatic process with lasting and negative consequences.Preventing unnecessary eviction requires better understanding of eviction—including its causes, consequences, and how families navigate the eviction process in the United States. In this report, we explore the primary data source on evictions—the court records generated from eviction lawsuits—and shed light on what information eviction court records can, and just as importantly, cannot tell us about eviction in the United States.
2023-06-30
Food Research & Action Center (FRAC);
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 10.2% (or 13.5 million) of households were food insecure at some point during 2021. These households were uncertain of having or were unable to acquire enough food for all members of the household due to financial hardship or lack of food resources. Families experiencing homelessness often face additional barriers to accessing food due to high mobility or lack of transportation. Homeless liaisons play an important role in ensuring that students have access to free school meals and referrals are made to provide the family access to food resources in the community.
2023-07-11
Safety and Justice Challenge;
Reducing jail populations – and the collateral consequences of criminal legal system involvement – requires jurisdictions to critically examine why and how people are entering the system to begin with. Much of the research around jail reform focuses on the pretrial population; however, with rising numbers o individuals under probation supervision and jail commonly being used to detain those awaiting a hearing on a probation violation, reform efforts to understand how violations contribute to the overall jail population are essential. To learn more about the impact probation revocations have on jails and to advance promising strategies to address them, CUNY ISLG funded the Urban Institute through the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to conduct a mixed-methods study on how people on probation end up in jail incarceration and the impact of a program aimed at improving these outcomes with transitional housing support through the Adult Probation Department (APD) in Pima County, Arizona. Using administrative data from the Pima County Jail and APD, case record reviews, and interviews with APD leadership, probation officers, judges, community-based housing providers, and people on probation, this study aimed to decipher the system-level trends in jail incarceration for probation violations and the key pathways to jail incarceration for those individuals currently on probation. It also sought to understand the impact of the transitional housing support program on short and long-term outcomes for people on probation receiving funding from APD for transitional housing.
2023-01-24
National Alliance to End Homelessness;
After more than two years of health, economic, and social impacts from COVID-19 that amplified existing inequalities, the 2022 Point-in-Time Count numbers revealed a steep rise in homelessness among Latinos in the United States.This brief analyzes data from the 2022 PIT Count, examines the factors leading to an increase in Latino homelessness, and looks towards policy solutions at the federal and local levels. It also notes program changes that local Continuums of Care (CoCs) and service providers can consider to better serve this unique population.
2023-02-01
Urban Institute;
The DC Eviction Prevention Co-Leaders Group believes that cross-sector collaboration among legal services providers, housing counselors, District government agencies, the DC Superior Court, philanthropic organizations, tenant organizers, housing providers, tenants, advocates, and community-based organizations is crucial to preventing eviction, displacement, and homelessness. The overall goal of the Co-Leaders Group is to establish a cross-sector collaborative approach to prevent eviction and displacement of tenants in DC with low incomes and stabilize their housing for the future.DC's eviction moratorium expired in September 2021, after the DC Council implemented legislation phasing out tenant protections instituted during the pandemic, and eviction filings have steadily increased from the beginning of 2022. With fewer eviction protections and the end of STAY DC assistance—combined with high inflation, increased rent prices, stagnant wages, and the ongoing pandemic—eviction filings, judgments, writs, and scheduled evictions will likely continue to increase.Yet the evidence of the harmful effects of evictions on tenants is clear. Housing instability caused and made worse by evictions increases the risk of homelessness and hurts the health, education, and well-being of families with children. Increased homelessness from evictions leads to higher costs to the District for emergency shelter; medical services, particularly the use of emergency departments; and other social services. Evictions are also highly inequitable: decades of policies that restricted the jobs to which Black people had access, stripped families of their wealth, and prevented them from obtaining home loans have led to stark inequities in income and housing along racial lines. Black people in DC are more likely to be renters, face an eviction filing, and ultimately be physically evicted from their homes.Although tenants have more rights in DC than tenants in most other jurisdictions in the United States, there remains an inherent power imbalance in the landlord-tenant relationship. This is particularly true in DC's high-cost rental market, where safe, affordable housing is scarce for tenants with low incomes or those who are legally undocumented and fear retaliation. Landlords typically have legal representation in court and can better navigate the complex eviction process, which can be difficult for tenants to understand. Furthermore, eviction and the threat of eviction lead to immense trauma for tenants and their families, likely negatively affecting their mental and physical health.The goal of the Co-Leaders Group is to prevent avoidable evictions.
2023-01-24
Urban Institute;
The United States' long-standing racial homeownership gap needs to be reckoned with. In the past two years, increasing attention has been aimed at removing barriers that keep Black households from buying homes and sustaining homeownership. One of these efforts, the Black Homeownership Collaborative, set an ambitious goal to increase the number of Black homeowners by 3 million by 2030. This brief offers a dashboard to guide stakeholders working to close the racial homeownership gap by increasing the number of Black homeowners. We analyze the latest data to understand whether progress was made in 2020 and 2021 and where more work is needed.