A relatively new innovation in social policy has had some real success in heading off homelessness:
It’s been exactly one year and one week since [Contessa] Allen-Starks agreed to take part in the District’s new Rapid Re-Housing Program, which is aimed at getting people like her out of the overcrowded D.C. General family homeless shelter and on a path toward self-sufficiency.
Helping people get from here (DC General) to their own place
Right now, she pays just one-third of her income — the federal government’s definition of affordable housing — toward the monthly rent of $979 for her two-bedroom apartment in Anacostia. But her contribution is only about $300. Rapid Re-Housing pays the rest through a subsidy that’s only supposed to last four months to a year. Once the city stops helping, Allen-Starks will be responsible for all of it. ...
Officials in Washington and across the country are pushing rapid rehousing as the most promising way to help homeless families move out of shelters and motels and become self-sufficient.
First introduced on a wide scale by the Obama administration in 2009 as part of the economic stimulus package, it is generally credited with keeping homeless rates from skyrocketing across the country during the recession.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported that 83 percent of formerly homeless or about-to-be-homeless people who were put into rapid rehousing were still stably housed two years after their subsidies ended. Other agencies report similarly high rates.
Now the program has become part of the District’s effort to lose its “Handout Capital” reputation, as some caseworkers put it. Along with the city’s welfare reform — the District was the last place in the country to cut benefits to those who have received aid for more than five years — rapid rehousing is intended to break what city officials say is a generational culture of dependence. ...
With rapid rehousing, the city could use the $50,000 it costs to feed and house one family at D.C. General and instead help pay short-term rent for two or three families in apartments, he argued. It would free up space at the shelter for newly homeless families. And it would create a sense of urgency to compel people to change their lives.
Since 2009, District studies show that between 60 and 80 percent of about 1,000 homeless families who have tried the Rapid Re-Housing Program have not returned to a shelter. But whether the families are living on their own and still paying rent, city officials can’t say because they don’t track them.(via Governing)
