Blacks make up 40 percent of homeless population nationwide
3rd February 2020 · 0 Comments
By Meghan Holmes
Contributing Writer
The results of a federal survey released last month show that African Americans represent 40 percent of people experiencing homelessness and 52 percent of homeless families, despite being only 13 percent of the nation’s population.
The data, given to Congress yearly, comes from a one-night survey done each January to estimate the country’s homeless population called a Point-in-Time count, as well as Housing Inventory counts and information from local housing organizations. The total number of people experiencing homelessness across the United States is 576,715 (a 2.7% increase from 2018), with 225,735 identifying as Black.
“This report reflects deep and persistent racial inequities among the people who experience homelessness,” the National Alliance to End Homelessness said in a statement in response to the survey. “Homelessness did not go up in 2019 because we don’t know how to solve it, we do. We must do much more to get people back into housing faster.”
The data also showed increases in the nation’s unsheltered homeless population, meaning people who typically sleep in a car, a tent, or on the sidewalk. Overall, this population rose by 8.7 percent, with a 15 percent increase in unsheltered women and a 43 percent increase in unsheltered people who identify as transgender.
There were also some bright spots in the data, including a five percent decrease in unsheltered homeless families, a four percent decrease in homeless youth under 18, and a 2.1 percent decrease in homeless veterans. Overall homelessness also declined in 29 states as well as the District of Columbia, while it increased in 21 states.
White people are underrepresented among the homeless, making up 48 percent of the homeless population and 76 percent of the nation’s overall populace. Both Latinx and African Americans are overrepresented, with experts listing housing and workplace discrimination as two causes, as well as large populations of people of color in the Northeast and on the West Coast in cities with high costs of living. At the state level, New York has the highest rate of Black homelessness.
In Louisiana, homelessness has dramatically decreased since 2010, by 76.4 percent. In January 2019, the homeless population was 2,941, down 3.9 percent from the previous year. Sixty-seven percent of the population was sheltered, with 525 being people in families with children and 360 being veterans. Fifty-six percent of the state’s homeless are Black.
New Orleans has experienced even larger declines in homelessness over the last decade, the result of a coordinated, multi-agency effort that began shortly after Hurricane Katrina, when the city’s homeless population soared to more than 11,000 people. By 2011, the number of homeless New Orleanians was 6,500, then the highest rate of homelessness in the United States. The city rolled out a ten-year plan to end homelessness that same year, and has seen an 85 percent decrease in its homeless population since.
Advocacy groups, most prominently UNITY of Greater New Orleans and its partner agencies, worked with the city to implement a Housing First approach, through which people are housed without preconditions and barriers to entry like sobriety, treatment or service participation requirements. They also engaged directly with the city’s most vulnerable communities, dramatically reducing the population of homeless people with disabilities and reducing the city’s population of homeless veterans to functional zero in 2015, and maintaining that for the last four years.
“One of the important things we do is a harm reduction approach where we go out and meet the homeless where they are,” said Dr. Jennifer Avegno, director of the Department of Health for the city of New Orleans. “So we partner with organizations and take weekly trips to encampments where we clean up, get rid of the trash, and do things from a public health standpoint like give vaccinations, to keep everyone as safe as possible. We also opened a low barrier shelter in 2018 to house people no questions asked.”
In their report analyzing New Orleans’ 2019 Point-in-Time data, advocates from UNITY stress that, “after eleven years of significant decreases, progress is at a virtual standstill, with homelessness down less than one percent between 2018 and 2019.”
In 2018, there were 1,188 homeless New Orleanians and in 2019 that number decreased to 1,179. Of that 1,179, 289 were women and 721 identified as Black or African American.
UNITY attributes the lack of recent progress to an acute shortage in affordable housing across the city. “The affordable housing shortage in New Orleans has escalated in recent years, with rents rising 20-25% between 2012-2016. New Orleans is at a strong risk for an increase in homelessness unless countermeasures are taken,” the organization stated in its 2019 report.
Dr. Avegno agrees with UNITY’s findings.
“A lot of cities are being plagued by an affordable housing crisis, including New Orleans. Many people can’t afford a first and last month’s rent as well as a security deposit, or don’t have transportation to housing they can afford,” Dr. Avegno said. “So, a big part of this solution is an increase in affordable housing, while also expanding our ability to take people into low barrier shelters. The effort has to be multi-faceted, but, especially compared to other cities around the country, our problems are scalable, and they aren’t too big to address. We welcome new partnerships and folks that want to work with us on this.”
This article originally published in the February 3, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
