WHITE HOUSE AND USICH LAUNCH ALL INSIDE INITIATIVE TO TACKLE UNSHELTERED HOMELESSNESS
Washington – RealEstateRama – The White House and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) will launch ALL INside, a first-of-its kind initiative to address unsheltered homelessness across the country. ALL INside is a key part of All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, which set a bold goal to reduce homelessness 25% by 2025 and ultimately build a country where every person has a safe and affordable home.
(Watch the event live on YouTube at 2 p.m. ET.)
USICH and our 19 federal member agencies will partner with state and local governments for up to two years to strengthen and accelerate local efforts to help people move off the streets and into homes where they can recover from the trauma of homelessness and rebuild their lives. ALL INside will focus on reducing unsheltered homelessness in six communities: Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Phoenix Metro, Seattle, and the state of California.
Ambassador Susan Rice, the White House director of domestic policy; Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary Denis McDonough, the chair of USICH; and USICH Executive Director Jeff Olivet will launch ALL INside during a public event in Washington, D.C., with local leaders, including: California Secretary Lourdes Castro Ramirez; Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass; Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego; Mesa Mayor John Giles; Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell; King County Executive Dow Constantine; Dallas Mayor Pro Tem Carolyn King; and Chicago Deputy Mayor Jennifer Johnson.
“President Biden firmly believes that everyone deserves a safe, decent, and affordable place to live, and from Day One, the Biden-Harris administration has taken unprecedented actions to lower housing costs, increase housing stability, and address homelessness. We know we cannot meaningfully address our nation’s homelessness problem without a distinct focus on unsheltered homelessness,” said Ambassador Rice. “That’s why my team at the Domestic Policy Council, along with the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness and 19 federal agencies that comprise it, are proud to partner with state and local leaders in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Phoenix Metro, Seattle, and the state of California to launch the ALL INside Initiative. These communities are taking meaningful action to address unsheltered homelessness, and this first of its kind partnership with our Administration will help strengthen and accelerate local efforts in these sites, and communities across America, to ensure every unsheltered person has accesses to the housing they need.”
“Last year alone, VA worked with communities to help more than 40,000 veterans out of homelessness and into the safe, stable homes that they deserve,” said VA Secretary McDonough. “We know that it’s possible to end homelessness because we are making real progress every day, and the ALL INside Initiative will help us deliver for even more veterans and non-veterans across America.”
“Homelessness was a crisis before the pandemic, and it continues to be a crisis now that the pandemic has begun to recede. It is unacceptable that people in America are living without housing, or even shelter, and that they are suffering and dying from hunger, treatable illness, severe weather, and violence,” said USICH Director Olivet. “The ALL INside Initiative treats homelessness with the urgency of the public health crisis that it is. This initiative will bring the power of collaboration and creativity as the federal government works with local leaders to address the tragedy of unsheltered homelessness.”
Homelessness is a deadly crisis caused by the failure of systems that should be preventing people from losing homes in the first place. To that end, the Biden-Harris administration will:
- Embed a dedicated federal official in each ALL INside community to accelerate locally-driven strategies and enact system-level changes to reduce unsheltered homelessness;
- Deploy dedicated teams across the federal government to identify opportunities for regulatory relief and flexibilities, navigate federal funding streams, and facilitate a peer learning network across the ALL INside communities; and
- Convene philanthropy, the private sector, and other communities to identify more opportunities for support and collaboration.
In addition, the administration will launch new efforts to address major barriers to housing, health care, and other support for people experiencing unsheltered homelessness. They include:
- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will provide technical assistance to help communities leverage federal programs like Medicaid to cover and provide housing-related supportive services and behavioral health care.
- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration (SSA), and HHS will collaborate to address barriers that people may encounter when obtaining various forms of government-issued identification and other critical documents.
- The SSA will work with the communities and the federal ALL INside team to leverage data-sharing and regulatory flexibilities that can help facilitate access to support services like housing vouchers or Medicaid.
- The U.S. Department of Labor will connect the communities with local workforce boards and Job Corps sites to fully leverage local and state government employment opportunities for unsheltered youth.
- The Federal Emergency Management Agency will provide technical assistance to the communities to facilitate greater operational coordination in response to disasters, which often increase homelessness.
- HUD will help communities troubleshoot barriers to connecting people to rental assistance or housing programs, as well as assist communities to use regulatory flexibilities to speed up the processes enabling residents to move into properties and transition into permanent housing.
Additional USICH members—including AmeriCorps, the General Services Administration, and the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Justice, Transportation, and Treasury—have also made commitments to support the ALL INside communities.
Although unprecedented federal support helped prevent a surge in overall homelessness during the pandemic, unsheltered homelessness rose—and, for the first time ever, more of the individuals experiencing homelessness are living and sleeping in tents, transit stations, and other unsheltered locations than in shelters or transitional housing.
Today’s announcement builds on historic support from the Biden-Harris administration to help states and cities battle homelessness. Earlier this year, HUD released a first-of-its-kind $486 million package of grants and vouchers to help 62 communities address unsheltered homelessness. Several of the ALL INside communities received these resources: $60 million to Chicago, $22 million to Dallas, $60 million to Los Angeles, and $36 million to other communities across the state of California. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP)—which represents the largest single-year investment in ending homelessness in U.S. history—helped prevent a surge in homelessness during a global pandemic that had sparked an economic crisis. Through the Treasury Department’s State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund, for instance, the six ALL INside communities have invested more than $2.5 billion in projects focused on reducing and preventing homelessness. The ARP also provided $5 billion for 70,000 emergency housing vouchers—the first HUD voucher specifically for people experiencing homelessness beyond veterans. The ARP also delivered more than $21 billion in emergency rental assistance, creating a national eviction prevention infrastructure that has helped 8 million struggling households make rent and pay utilities, and kept eviction filings below pre-pandemic levels in the year and a half after the end of the national eviction moratorium. Through the House America Initiative, HUD and USICH worked with more than 100 communities to make the most of the American Rescue Plan; and in just over a year, they helped more than 100,000 people experiencing homelessness move into permanent homes.
The president’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget proposes unprecedent investments to not only urgently address homelessness but also prevent homelessness, including through additional housing vouchers and emergency rental assistance; increasing the supply of affordable housing; and establishing a guarantee of rental assistance for extremely low-income veterans and youth aging out of foster care—two groups disproportionately at risk of and experiencing homelessness.
