Latest news with #ComprehensivePlantoEndHomelessness
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Calls for accountability, transparency as Pierce County amends homelessness plan
Pierce County has begun the process of amending its Comprehensive Plan to End Homelessness, and it is getting an earful as it does. On April 28, Pierce County Human Services hosted a community listening event at Sprinker Recreation Center. Roughly 75 people attended the event, the broad majority of which were representing local homeless outreach programs and service providers. While folks from all corners of the county expressed commitment to addressing the homelessness crisis, many raised concerns about a lack of transparency and accountability within the county's response. The Pierce County Council adopted the Comprehensive Plan to End Homelessness (CPEH) in March 2022 to serve as the official Homeless Housing Plan. The current CPEH consists of goals designed to achieve 'functional zero' – a state where any person starting a new episode of homelessness has immediate access to shelter and permanent housing intervention. At the beginning of the listening event, Devon Isakson, social services supervisor for Pierce County's homeless team, told attendees the county had the choice to either adopt an entirely new plan or amend the existing one — they chose the latter. State law mandates that the county must update its CPEH by the end of this year. During the event, attendees were asked to work together to discuss the county's goals to improve its homelessness-response system and to decide on how to prioritize its plans. The seven goals, already decided by Human Services, were: Create a unified homeless system which promotes equity, accountability and transparency. Prevent homeless episodes whenever possible. Prioritize assistance based on the greatest barriers to housing stability and greatest risk of harm, and ensure interventions are effective for all populations. Ensure adjacent systems address needs of people experiencing homelessness or at risk of homelessness. Meet immediate needs of people experiencing homelessness. Seek to house everyone in a stable setting that meets their needs and expand the permanent housing system. Those goals were a part of the CPEH passed in 2022, with the addition of a new goal: 'Strengthen the homeless service provider workforce.' Human Services spokesperson Kari Moore told The News Tribune the new goal is now required by the state. The Washington State Department of Commerce dictates the housing and homelessness plan guidelines for local governments. Pierce County's homeless response system is almost entirely dependent on nonprofit organizations that competitively apply for funding from the county. Many of those organizations rely on grant funding to operate on a year-to-year basis. In the past year, service providers and officials have raised concerns about the lack of transparency in the process through which the county selects organizations to award funding, internal politics which create a perceived unfairness in that process, and delays in how that funding is distributed. 'We need to empower service providers,' Jessica Pair, co-founder of Family Promise of Pierce County, said during the listening event. After spending nearly an hour discussing the goals and how to prioritize them, participants shared what they had discussed with county officials. Many people expressed the need for different elements to be prioritized within the county's homelessness-response system. One group struggled to prioritize a collection of objectives, identifying all of them as equally urgent. Among the priorities shared by several attendees was the need for accountability in how the county spends its funding and tracks its progress. Some street-outreach specialists said the county needs to be sure that contracted service providers are meeting the expectations and actually making progress towards the goals and objectives outlined by the county. 'Its pretty embarrassing when we are out in the field and homeless people are asking where the $17 million [in affordable housing investments] went,' Trisha Munson, outreach specialist with Common Street, told Human Services officials. Others agreed the county's homelessness response needs to incorporate more feedback from individuals with experience living homeless. 'There is no one size fits all,' one participant said. 'We need to assess what they say they need. We need to talk to the people being served.' Isakson said the April 28 listening session was part of a nearly year-long process of updating the CPEH. There will be additional events through which people can provide feedback, including on July 19 and another on Sept. 18. People can also provide feedback online between April 24 - May 16 at
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Pierce County embarks on regional response to homelessness. Can it make a difference?
Pierce County's Unified Regional Approach (URA) to homelessness officially kicked off, but it is still unclear how the coalition will be led, what goals it will attempt to achieve and how it will operate. On March 7, dozens of elected officials from cities in Pierce County, representatives from local government agencies and some nonprofit service providers gathered for the official URA meeting. The Unified Regional Approach is an attempt to satisfy the first goal identified in Pierce County's Comprehensive Plan to End Homelessness — established by the Pierce County Council four years ago. Attendees included members of the Tacoma City Council, City of Gig Harbor, Lakewood City Council, Puyallup City Council, local fire and police departments, Pierce County Council members and Pierce County Human Services, among others. The URA is intended to bring together government, community and non-profit partners involved with the region's response to the homelessness crisis. The idea is that better coordination and cooperation is needed between jurisdictions and communities fighting the common problem of homelessness. The effort to assemble the first URA meeting has been long and costly. Last year, Pierce County offered $1 million to a consulting firm to help organize and implement the URA. During the March 7 meeting, those consultants facilitated the conversation. Brian Scott is the project director from Uncommon Bridges, the consulting firm chosen by the county. Scott outlined the plan to slowly define the objectives of the URA, the roles each member would have and how it would operate. He said the members of the URA would have to discuss and determine their respective levels of commitment and how decisions about resources would be made. Even questions around how often the URA would meet have yet to be answered. That process alone is expected to take a year. Scott said consultants would speak individually with members of the URA to ask about their thoughts, concerns and expectations for the URA. He said the intention is to collect feedback that members are hesitant to share during meetings. Some of the early feedback the consultants received about the homelessness response system was shared March 7. The themes included unequal burden faced by certain jurisdictions that provide the majority of the homeless services, a need for better data tracking and sharing, and 'cumbersome processes' for procuring and distributing contracts and grant funding. Consultants also identified tensions between jurisdictions due to factors such as smaller communities having fewer resources to contribute, confusion around leadership roles, and regional approaches that could undermine local strategies and priorities. Sarah Solon works for HR&A, a consulting firm partnering with Uncommon Bridges to help implement the URA. Solon presented case studies of other regions that improved their response to homelessness through regional coordination. According to data she presented, Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located, had the sixth largest homeless population in the nation in 2011. Since 2012, the region has been able to reduce its unhoused population by 60%. Solon said it found success by creating a unified system where anyone experiencing homelessness was able to access services and support. She said the system focused heavily on reducing wasted and duplicated efforts. According to her data, the region housed 32,000 people since 2012 and experienced a 90% success rate in housing programs —meaning those individuals did not return to homelessness over two years. She told the attendees some of the key agreements regional coalitions could make include operational coordination, service contract alignments and data-sharing agreements. She also outlined a need for an alignment of financial resources and stronger coordination to request state and federal funding. 'What is happening here is not happening in other communities,' she encouraged. 'We are on the wave of innovation.'
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Pierce County is spending more than ever to fight homelessness. Why is it getting worse?
In 2024, Pierce County budgeted nearly five times the money to address homelessness than it had five years before, yet data shows we are not any closer to solving the crisis. Some leaders in the fight against homelessness say the goal is to reduce it to 'functional zero' but that piecemeal funding systems that erode the sustainability of programs make that difficult to achieve. Threatened funding cuts at the federal level under the Trump administration aren't helping, they say. 'We are beholden to federal and state funders,' former county Human Services director Heather Moss told The News Tribune in November. 'It is a year-to-year risk, and we put a lot of risk on providers. Short-term contracts can be a challenge.' Two service providers told The News Tribune they are skeptical that the system is meant to make significant progress at all. One of them is Jake Nau, the homeless outreach manager at St. Vincent de Paul's Community Resource Center. He works with folks living unhoused every day and is familiar with the many moving parts that make up the region's homelessness response. Nau told The News Tribune there are officials and benefactors of the system that he described as 'protectors of the status quo.' 'There is no incentive to end homelessness,' he said. 'This is a system built to maintain itself.' Meanwhile, the numbers continue to grow. The county conducts an annual survey of those living unhoused, known as the Point-In-Time Count. On a single night in 2024, volunteers counted 2,661 individuals living in shelters, vehicles and outdoors in Pierce County — nearly three times the number of people that were counted three years before. Many in the homeless-service and outreach community say the Point-In-Time Count provides a conservative estimate of the number of those experiencing homelessness. According to Pierce County, 6,335 people were connected to homelessness response system at the time of the 2024 survey. From 2015 to 2023, the county spent more than $172 million dollars on its homelessness response, about $21.5 million per year. In 2024, the county budgeted roughly $75.7 million dollars to fight homelessness. What would it cost annually to make a real dent in the problem? Moss estimated in blog post in November that the county would need an annual investment of $157 million to meet the needs of those experiencing or at risk of homelessness, according to the county's Comprehensive Plan to End Homelessness. That is equal to roughly 70% of the 2024-2025 Pierce County Sheriff's Department's law enforcement budget. When asked how that level of funding would help to make significant progress towards ending the homelessness crisis, Moss said one of the largest efforts would be building and incentivizing more affordable housing — what she called a nationally recognized best practice to mitigate homelessness. At the end of 2024, the county was investing in approximately 1,500 new affordable housing units across Pierce County that are in various stages of development and anticipated those units being livable in the next two years. According to the Housing Action Strategy, that is not enough. The Housing Action Strategy, published by the county in 2022, estimated the region would need to create 2,300 units of affordable housing annually over the next two decades in order to meet the housing demand in the region. According to a consultant's estimation referenced on the Housing Action Strategy, Pierce County needed an additional $624 million to support that objective. Moss also said additional funding would be used to provide more interventions and resources for the chronically homeless population — a demographic of people who have been unhoused or unsheltered for long periods of time, or who have found themselves unhoused more than once. 'Until or unless we get to that level of sustained funding, our system will be insufficient to meet demand,' Moss wrote in her statement. As the current system of funding exists, the county is 'beholden to its funders' when it comes to organizing and sustaining its homelessness response system, said Moss, who was removed from her position by new County Executive Ryan Mello. The News Tribune asked county leaders why there appears to be a lack of political will to adequately address the homelessness crisis. Mello responded that the obstacles to adequately funding the fight against homelessness are not merely political. 'The county is significantly dependent on state and federal funding,' he stated in an email to The News Tribune. 'We are grateful for the state's recent historic investments in affordable housing, as well as initiatives such as the Encampment Resolution Program. But, as a whole, the funds are not adequate to the level of need.' Since the pandemic, federal COVID assistance and American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars have allowed for significant increases in homelessness-mitigation investments. Of the $75.7 million budgeted in 2024 for the homeless-response system, $23 million was from ARPA funds. Those funds will no longer be available for new allocations in 2025. Human Services receives funding through local revenues like document-recording fees and the Maureen Howard sales tax, state revenues like the Department of Commerce's Rights-of-Way Safety Initiative, and federal revenues such as the Emergency Solutions Grant or Continuum of Care (CoC) funding — which are granted through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Mello said counties are significantly constrained by state law in options to generate additional local funding. While on the County Council, Mello advocated for the Maureen Howard Affordable Housing Act. The act created a sales tax which serves as one of few county-generated sources of revenue for affordable housing investments. Much of the revenue stream is compartmentalized and can only be used for specific purposes like emergency shelter, street outreach, eviction prevention and affordable-housing projects. Pierce County Council Chair Jani Hitchen told The News Tribune unsuccessful coordination between parts of the homelessness-response system makes the system less cost-effective. She said the county has not made the necessary investments in the full spectrum of resources needed to mitigate the crisis effectively. Hitchen used the example of the need for increased shelter capacity as well as the need for affordable housing to help reduce the risk of homelessness. 'The money is daunting, but if we could get systems aligned, so anytime someone experiences homelessness, it is brief and not repeated, costs will begin to go down,' Hitchen told The News Tribune. Kari Moore, a spokesperson for Human Services, said there are roughly 18 funding sources for the homelessness-response system, and there are requirements attached to each funding source that mandate 'very deliberate' allocations of the funding. Many of the revenue streams can be made available by Human Services and offered as grants. Service providers can competitively apply for the funding. The grants often extend for a year or two of services. Service-providing organizations that often depend on grant funding to hire staff and continue doing work in the community often have to reapply for the grants. It is never guaranteed that Human Services will continue to receive funding for certain grants, which creates uncertainty for organizations. Family Promise of Pierce County has been operating as an organization fighting homelessness in Pierce County for about a year. In April 2024, the organization was awarded a $1 million grant to establish and operate the county's first-ever shelter hub — a place where any unsheltered person could go to get help. At the beginning of the year Family Promise of Pierce County was a small operation, working out of a portable on the lot of an elementary school in Parkland. Its small team of case managers worked to get families experiencing homelessness back on their feet. Now, with grant funding from Pierce County, the nonprofit is expanding. It has hired over a dozen employees and leased new space in an old school in Parkland to serve as the county's shelter hub. But there is no guarantee it will be able to sustain those operations outside of a few years. It does not know if the grant will expire, be renewed or if another organization will be awarded the funding. 'You are constantly on edge,' Family Promise's CEO, Steve Decker, told The News Tribune when asked about what it is like as a nonprofit relying on grant funding. 'We don't know if next year we will have to lay off employees or not.' He said Pierce County's system does not pay organizations up front. Often, organizations like his operate at a deficit as they do their work, so expense tracking and financial planning are crucial to the sustainability of the operation. Decker told The News Tribune that grant-funded organizations have to be extremely diligent in accounting and documenting every transaction they make in order to be properly reimbursed. His system includes tools for service providers to properly track their cell phone usage, car mileage and other expenses that public agencies require grant-funded organizations to track. Decker said the county can decline to reimburse for transactions its believes were too expensive. 'That is the fear that every nonprofit faces,' he said. Sometimes, organizations wait months to receive the grant funding they were awarded. Decker said Family Promise did not receive any of the grant funding the county said it was awarded in April until months later. It was owed tens of thousands of dollars, according to information shared at at one of its board meetings in October. The delay in funding did not stop the work. Family Promise continued to run the shelter hub, trusting it would receive funding at a later date. In November 2024, Decker told The News Tribune it had begun to receive the grant funding it was promised. Decker said it is 'pretty typical' for non-profits to operate with razor thin margins. When he was hired with Family Promise, he was told it would not be able to give him his pay check for the first several months of his employment. HUD's Continuum of Care (CoC) model, through which a collection of regional stakeholders work collaboratively to administer federal funding and manage a region's homeless response, was introduced in the mid-1990s. Before the CoC, organizations applied for funding through a few homeless-grant programs, and there was little-to-no collaboration among them, according to a report published by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The CoC process was intended to promote regional coordination of funding and efforts. There are more than 400 regional CoC organizations across the country competitively applying for billions in grant funding. Organizations doing the work and providing the services that make up our homelessness response are almost entirely dependent on short-term grants — and the grants do not always last forever. Decker said that prevents his organization from making long-term plans. 'There is no money for sustainability,' he told The News Tribune. When asked what would happen if Pierce County's homelessness funding was significantly reduced, Moss said the department would have to do a full revaluation of the system involving input from community providers, jurisdictions and subject-matter experts to determine funding priorities and potential impacts. 'Sustainability has been a huge part of our strategy, as we've been intentional about the services and projects we've funded,' Moss told The News Tribune. 'Additional funding sources, such as the Maureen Howard Affordable Housing Tax and new dollars from the Youth Homeless Demonstration Program, are helping us diversify revenue sources.' According to Moss, most government funding comes with risks about predictability, but she said having some type of endowment could help ensure funding sustainability. The demand for homeless outreach and services is higher than current funding can support. With limited resources, the county has already made tough decisions about which organizations to award grant funding to and which ones to snub. In 2024, the county decided on how to dole out more than $17.6 million in annual funding for a wide variety of homeless-service providers. The investment is known as the Homeless Housing Program (HHP) and is the county's largest regular funding opportunity for homeless services. According to the county, 56 homeless service applications were filed for funding through the Homeless Housing Program and more than $32 million was requested. St. Vincent de Paul is an organization that does homelessness outreach in Tacoma. The organization's proposed outreach program, which received the second-highest rubric score of any outreach project, was not recommended for any funding — raising questions about the county's process for determining funding awards. Through his experience with the systems he describes as 'dysfunctional,' he has grown cynical - and questions if the bureaucracy the county has created is serious about addressing the crisis at all. In an interview with The News Tribune, Nau said some service providers are reluctant to be publicly critical of the county's systems for fear of retaliation. He said some are worried that to speak up would mean their organizations might not be chosen to receive the funding they need. Several service providers have previously described that dynamic as the 'politics' that impact the homeless-response system. In September 2024, a consultant's review of Pierce County's system for administering and dispersing federal funding found it lacked transparency and a clear decision-making process. The report incorporated feedback from the service-provider community, with some members saying they felt the system was governed in 'siloes without coordination, alignment or collaboration.' The report also included feedback from the community which identified power hoarding, fear of open conflict, lack of transparency, defensiveness and transactional goals and relationships. Nau said there are certain organizations that have been receiving grant funding to be a part of the homelessness-response system for years and are so entrenched in the system that they will not admit when the system is not working, even when it is obvious. 'These are dysfunctional systems we work within,' he said. 'And there is almost nothing we can do.' Tim Fairley is an advocate with Tacoma Outreach who recently joined Pierce County's Continuum of Care board. Fairley told The News Tribune that homelessness is a billion-dollar industry through which some have become very wealthy. The Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) is one example of a nonprofit organization that has grown substantially in a political climate that has heavily incentivized affordable housing. LIHI owns or manages dozens of subsidized, affordable housing projects and tiny home shelters across the Puget Sound, including in Pierce County. According to tax documentation filed by the nonprofit in 2023, LIHI owns more than $410 million worth of assets. In 2023, LIHI reported receiving more than $93 million in contributions and grants. 'The Low Income Housing Institute operates across six counties, directly owns and operates 3,500 units of affordable housing, plus oversees a dozen enhanced shelter programs that have effectively lifted up the most vulnerable in our communities,' Jon Grant, a spokesperson for LIHI, told The News Tribune. During the Pierce County Council's last Select Committee on Homelessness meeting on Dec. 11, Fairley left the council members with a message. 'Homelessness is a billion-dollar business. Once we figure out who is profiting from it, then we can resolve the issue,' he told the committee. 'It is not that we cannot feed the poor. It is just that we cannot satisfy the rich.'
