In a continuing effort to prevent and end homelessness, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has announced a record $2.3 billion available to support thousands of local homeless assistance programs nationwide.
HUD’s Continuum of Care homeless assistance grants support a wide variety of local programs from street outreach and assessment programs to transitional and permanent housing for individuals, including, veterans, youth, families, and persons experiencing long-term or chronic homelessness.
“While housing first is critical and necessary to place our most vulnerable on a path to self-sufficiency, we should be mindful not to define success as a Washington routine to check a box, shelter someone – indefinitely – and ask for more money the next year,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said in a news release. “We want to ensure that awards are granted to programs that prove to be successful in a meaningful way based on an evidence-based performance.”
David Woll Jr., principal deputy assistant secretary of HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development, added that the agency will continue to work closely with local partners to support programs that prove most effective in reducing or ending homelessness in neighborhoods.
Through the Continuum of Care grant competition, HUD is encouraging communities to pursue evidence-based approaches to end veteran, chronic, family, and youth homelessness and to use their data to strategically target their available resources to end homelessness. To help communities reach these goals, there is greater flexibility provided to create a variety of new projects that will allow recipients to serve different populations of individuals and families experiencing homelessness as well as to support increased data collection and analysis.
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