The National Housing Trust Fund (NHTF) is an ongoing, permanent, dedicated and sufficient sources of revenue to build, rehabilitate and preserve 1.5 million units of housing for the lowest income families over the next 10 years is almost ready for action. The goal is to secure $15 billion per year for ten years (for a total of $150 billion) to capitalize the NHTF. This will be a major new source of capital to finance the development of permanent affordable and supportive housing as part of our efforts to end homelessness.
HUD will make the distribution formula available by July 30, 2009, at which point jurisdictions will know how much to expect from the $1 billion.
Our friends at the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) were the leaders of this campaign. The following information is from their most recent update.
While the statute creating the NHTF on July 30, 2008 also designated an initial dedicated source of funding for the NHTF to come from a very small portion of the unpaid principle balance of new business purchases made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those two institutions have since hit on financial hard times.
President Obama’s proposed budget for FY2010 included a one-time $1 billion to capitalize the NHTF. It is important to keep in mind that the Administration is not seeking a HUD appropriation for this $1 billion, and the NHTF campaign will stand by its firm commitment to ensure the NHTF does not compete with other HUD programs for funding.
Because the Administration proposed the $1 billion to be mandatory, once approved by Congressional authorizing committees (anticipated to take place before Congress recesses in November or December) it would be available automatically – without going through the appropriations process.
Barney Frank, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee has identified a new source of funds that is within the purview of his committee that can be used for this purpose. He has introduced H.R. 3068, the “TARP for Main Street Act of 2009″ which would direct $1 billion to the NHTF.
TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) was created in October 2008 as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act to make billions of federal dollars available to bail out struggling financial institutions. Some of those transactions are now producing dividends to the federal treasury. Chairman Frank is proposing that $1 billion of the dividends paid by financial institutions assisted by TARP be used as initial capitalization for the NHTF.
In addition to the NHTF, the “TARP for Main Street Act” provides an additional $1.5 billion from TARP dividends for the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), $2 billion in TARP funds to the Emergency Homeowner Relief Fund at HUD, and $2 billion in TARP funds for a program that the HUD Secretary is directed to develop to prevent the loss of multi-family housing that is in default or foreclosure. A hearing on the bill is expected on July 9.
The purpose of this study was to better understand the connection between homelessness and the recent uptick in foreclosures.
Methodology for this study involved surveying 178 organizations across the country that provide services to homeless or very low income individuals and households, including shelter providers, transitional housing providers, food assistance organizations, legal aid, etc. The study concluded that roughly 10 percent of the 2008 homeless population had been directly impacted by foreclosure.
Interestingly, of those surveyed, shelter providers and transitional housing providers reported a lower proportion of individuals homeless due to foreclosure than other types of service providers. This may be because other agencies, such as food assistance providers or legal aid, serve those who are very low income or on the brink of homelessness. To that end, when housing and shelter agencies are isolated from other types of service providers, the portion of those homeless due to foreclosure decreases to 5 percent.
This study, however, is not the only data available to provide perspective on homelessness due to foreclosure. The National Alliance to End Homelessness generally looks to quantitative data collected by Continuum of Care organizations that submit Point-in-Time counts and HMIS data to HUD for trends and information about homelessness. Some communities collect data beyond what is required by HUD to better understand the forces that cause a person to lose their home. Two such communities, San Francisco and Indianapolis, included “foreclosure”, on their January, 2009 reasons for homelessness survey.
Conclusions about homelessness that are rooted in community-level data collection provide the most accurate information about the primary causes of homelessness. Since collecting this data is not federally-mandated, the format for gauging the root causes of homelessness is not standardized. However, the results of these community-level surveys are valuable for navigating the gap between the results of the Foreclosure to Homelessness survey and community-level data collected during the most recent homeless census.
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