Michelle Massie is an outreach worker in Huntington, West Virginia. She, along with dozens of volunteers in the city, went out on Jan. 27, 2021 to conduct field interviews with people experiencing homelessness. She approached a woman sleeping in a tent to ask her a series of questions about her recent experience living outside. Massie asked, “How many months in the past three years have you been homeless?” The woman paused for a moment and responded: “About seven months?”
HUD requires the point-in-time count for communities to receive funding to combat homelessness. The count has to be done every year during the last 10 days of January, and it gives HUD an idea of how many people are without a home. But some critics say the count is flawed.
“Unfortunately, the way the PIT count is designed, it really falls very far short of that goal,” said Maria Foscarinis, founder and executive director of the National Homelessness Law Center. “In order to address the crisis of homelessness, it’s important to know how large it is, and having a sense of the size of a problem helps in figuring out how to respond to it.”
HUD expects to release that data collected in January in the fall of this year. President Joe Biden has extended an eviction moratorium through the end of March. It’s hard to say how many people have lost housing during the pandemic.
Foscarinis said HUD’s count routinely falls short of that actual number of people experiencing homelessness because of the definition of homelessness it uses for the count. That definition, said Foscarinis, doesn’t include people who have lost their home and are managing to stay with friends or a family member.
“They’re sleeping on somebody’s kitchen floor, friends and relatives, on someone’s couch. And they are not counted at all. And this is a much larger number of people and a group of people who are disproportionately likely to be people of color,” she said.
Traci Strickland, who oversees homeless services in Kanawha County, West Virginia for the Kanawha Valley Collective, said that limiting the count to one day leaves out a lot of people. “The point in time is a one-day snapshot. So if you can’t find a person experiencing homelessness on that day, they don’t get counted,” Strickland said.
While HUD gives communities a 10-day window to conduct the count, volunteers are required to ask interviewees if they slept outside on one specific night in that timeframe.
But, Strickland said, at the very least, the count encourages workers and volunteers to see what people sleeping outside have to experience every night. “I think it gives awareness to service providers and volunteers. When you go out and actually canvass your area looking for people who are sleeping outside,” she said.
According to HUD’s website, funding awards are based on communities collecting “valid and reliable data during the count.” But, when asked to clarify exactly how these numbers impact funding decisions, a representative from HUD declined to comment.
When are we going to see more COVID relief direct payments?
Those stimulus checks, as they’re commonly referred to, are for $1,400, but if you got one last time that doesn’t mean you’ll get one this time. Now there’s a hard cutoff for single people making more than $80,000, or married couples who make over $160,000. From the time the COVID relief bill passes and gets signed into law by President Joe Biden, you’ll probably start seeing the payments show up in bank accounts within a couple weeks. That’s for direct deposit. Paper checks take a little longer.
I’m hearing a lot about interest rates. Is it getting more expensive to borrow money?
Expectations of higher inflation as the economy rebounds have investors demanding higher yields to compensate. In turn, the recent surge in bond yields is pushing up the interest rates consumers pay on mortgages and other loans. Economist Scott Hoyt with Moody’s Analytics said rising rates could dampen demand for housing a little and refinancing a little more. Other kinds of consumer spending are less likely to be affected. Interest on auto loans and credit cards are pegged to shorter-term rates, which haven’t been rising as much.
How will the latest round of pandemic relief from the federal government help women?
More than 2 million women have left the workforce since 2020. Many of them did so initially to care for children. The American Rescue Plan, poised to be passed this week, is offering an expanded child tax credit that could give up to $300 a month per child under the age of 6. It also includes nearly $15 billion to help support child care facilities. Even so, experts say child care is still the primary stumbling block for many women who want and need to get back to work.
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March 17, 2021 at 06:27PM
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How many people have been homeless during the pandemic? - Marketplace
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