Chicago to Receive $72.72M in Federal Funding for Homeless Programs

The Chicago Continuum of Care (CoC) has received $72.72 million in federal funding for 140 programs intended to prevent or end homelessness, as part of $2.2 billion in grants announced by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on January 14. Last year, the Chicago CoC received $68 million for 167 programs.

HUD CoC grants serve more than one million people annually through emergency shelter, transitional and permanent housing programs. The federal department challenges state and local planning organizations known as “continuums of care” to support their highest performing, most effective programs.

For the past decade, All Chicago Making Homelessness History has been the Chicago CoC’s collaborative applicant for the federal grants. This year’s recipients include Breakthrough, Catholic Charities, Featherfist, Heartland Health Outreach, HOW Inc., Interfaith Housing, Low Income Housing Trust Fund, Mercy Housing, Sarah’s Circle, Thresholds, Trilogy and more.

The All Chicago website listed 16,437 beds in 291 homeless projects at 77 agencies. This information from the Housing Inventory Count and the Point-in-Time (PIT) count of people on the streets Jan. 24, 2019, was submitted to HUD.

Two out of 3 beds (66 percent) among the 291 homeless projects were in permanent supportive housing, with the remainder in emergency shelters (19 percent) and transitional housing (15 percent). Just over half (52 percent) of Chicago homeless beds were available to adults without children, 43 percent went to households with children and 5 percent to unaccompanied youth under age 24.

The upcoming HUD grants will fund roughly 6,593 local programs on the front lines of homelessness. Most of the United States experienced a decrease in homelessness last year, according to HUD officials, “but significant increases in unsheltered and chronic homelessness on the West Coast, particularly California and Oregon, offset those nationwide decreases, causing an overall increase in homelessness of 2.7 percent.”

HUD’s 2019 annual homelessness assessment to Congress showed that 567,715 persons were homeless across the nation, according to the Jan. 24, 2019 Housing Inventory and PIT counts. The number was up 2.7 percent from 2018 but down 11 percent since 2010.

HUD officials said also that the number of families with children experiencing homelessness declined 5 percent from 2018 and 32 percent since 2010. Veteran homelessness also decreased 2.1 percent since the previous year and 50 percent since 2010.

-Suzanne Hanney, from online sources