Overall, about 636,000 Americans were living on the streets or in shelters last year. (HT: Kay Steiger)

However, a new report from the National Alliance to End Homelessness reveals that the Recovery Act was vital in keeping Americans off the street. An estimated $1.5 billion of Recovery Act funds were directed towards “rental assistance and programs steering recently evicted people toward new housing.” According to Alliance President Nan Roman, those funds were instrumental in keeping the number of homeless down “even as the U.S. economy saw its worst downturn since the 1930s”:

The Homelessness Research Institute, the educational arm of Roman’s organization, put the number of Americans living on the streets or in shelters at just over 636,000 in 2011. That’s down about 6,000 from the group’s 2009 estimate. The figure is based on reports and street counts from state and local agencies that receive federal housing funds.

Roman said the stimulus money, coupled with pre-recession federal programs aimed at veterans and the chronically ill, have kept that figure down even as the U.S. economy saw its worst downturn since the 1930s. But that money is drying up now that the Obama administration, Congress and the states are grappling with budget issues fueled by the recession.

In fact, the Homelessness Prevention Rapid Re-housing Program (HPRP) program alone, which was directly funded by the Recovery Act, helped 94 percent of the program’s participants who were homeless or a step away from homelessness find permanent housing. The Recovery Act also kept 6 million Americans out of poverty and created at least 3.3 million jobs.

But ARRA funds are running out and, as the report notes, the number of Americans facing the prospect of homelessness is continuing to rise. More than 4 million homes were foreclosed upon since 2007 and the New York Federal Reserve estimates that 3.6 million more will be lost to foreclosure in the next two years. If Republicans continue to slash these housing programs, thousands of vulnerable Americans will face the exact situation the Recovery Act helped successfully prevent.

Youth homeless was one of the main focuses last week as the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) held their final meeting for the year. The USICH was briefed on the work being done by the Interagency Group on Youth, a collation of representatives from a variety of government agencies including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor, Justice, and the White House Domestic Policy Council. The group presented findings from its series of meetings with federal and state experts from the education, child welfare, housing, and juvenile justice sectors.

The Interagency Group on Youth acknowledged that certain sub-populations of youth — LGBT youth and youth exiting child welfare or the juvenile justice system — are at much higher risk for homelessness and pledged to collaboratively work together and “with service providers currently serving this vulnerable population to ensure that we have a better understanding of the size of the problem, the needs of different sub-groups, that successful strategies are implemented and progress is made.”

Indeed, a recent report by the National Center on Family Homelessness estimated that 1.6 million children lived on the street, in homeless shelters, with other families or in motels last year and that youth homelessness has risen 38 percent during the economic recession. Considering that an estimated 20 to 40 percent of homeless youth population is LGBT, this commitment by the USICH to work collaboratively across government and with the non-profit sector to help these sub-populations is definitely welcomed — particularly in the wake of a survey conducted by the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates (DCAYA) of close to 500 homelessness youth that resulted in 6 percent (or 19 people) of the respondents identifying as LGBT. (DCAYA believes this was due to the low number of participating sites that provide specific services to LGBT youth.)

Much work needs to be done to address the issues of youth homelessness, particularly LGBT youth homeless in this country. More programs need to provide specific services to the LGBT community, train staffs who may encounter LGBT youth, and collect more data about this population. Nevertheless, USICH acknowledgment that LGBT youth are a population at high risk for homelessness and commitment to addressing the issue is a major step in the right direction. Hopefully in 2012, the Interagency Group on Youth will bring some specific plans to the USICH that will help thousands of LGBT youth to no longer call the streets home.

Photo Credit: Naples News

In a state that is near the top of the national chart in food insecurity, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) took time this holiday to pass out Thanksgiving dinner to about 1,000 families at a shelter in East Naples. The shelter’s program fed about 7,000 families last week, with roughly 200 volunteers packing and distributing meals.

“I care completely about all these programs,” said Scott while handing out food. However, he possesses a singular way of showing it, as his sweeping budget cuts this year “slashed funding to some veteran and farm surplus programs that helped the homeless.” To justify those cuts, Scott simply explained, “all the programs are very important, but nobody wants their taxes to go up”:

“I care completely about all these programs,” said Scott, whose budget cuts earlier this year slashed funding to some veteran and farm surplus programs that helped the homeless.

“All the programs are very important, but nobody wants their taxes to go up,” Scott explained, noting that businesses also can help spur the economy. “They’ve got to grow. We’ve got to make this a place people can do well.”

One Jacksonville homeless shelter official noted that Scott “zeroed out all homeless funding” — $7 million worth — in his budget proposal. That funding supported programs dedicated to homelessness prevention, housing initiatives, and programs that “re-house” people once they’re on the street. “Not only that, he took out the line items so it can never be funded again,” said the official.

To show how much he cares about the homeless, Scott went further by vetoing $12 million in funding that state legislature had passed to support homeless veterans. There are an estimated 17,000 homeless veterans in Florida — the second highest in the nation. Overall, a record 17.2 million Americans went hungry last year.

The Center for American Progress has put together this list showing the unfortunate facts behind veterans’ homelessness, illustrating the struggle that the men and women of the armed forces face when they return home:

50 percent: Rate at which veterans are more likely than other Americans to become homeless. The Obama administration has set a goal of ending veteran homelessness by 2015.

About 75,000: Number of veterans who are homeless on any given night, according to estimates from the Veterans Administration.

About 20,000: Number of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who were homeless in the past five years according to the Veterans Administration.

5.5 percent: Percentage of homeless vets who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan in the overall homeless population, according to the Veterans Administration.

This Veteran’s Day, spare a though for those vets who served their country and yet still spend the night out on the streets. See here for more numbers illustrating “the challenges that confront our service members and veterans before, during, and after deployments, from combat stress injuries to unemployment.”

LGBT Rally for Homeless Youth from Ali Forney on Vimeo.

One of the things I find really interesting about Louie, and Louis C.K. in general, is the question of how much judging yourself absolutely without mercy earns you the right to judge other people and be up front about your discomfort with other people. I know I would be uncomfortable if a homeless man took off a lot of his clothes in a subway station and prepared to rinse himself from a bottle of spring water, and I know I would be struck by the juxtaposition of a very gifted violinist playing in the space between me and that homeless man, but I’m not sure how comfortable I am watching Louis put that discomfort on display.

Societal rules tend to dictate that when we witness behavior that makes us uncomfortable, but that doesn’t threaten us, and that we’re powerless to change, whether because someone is mentally ill, or because it’s inappropriate because we aren’t their parents, is generally to sit tight. If you’re caught judging, you’re an asshole, a racist, potentially classist, or whatever the relevant -ism is. And you can’t really solve any of the things that make you uncomfortable, which is precisely why Louis’ fantasy of becoming a subway Sir Walter Raleigh and cleaning up the mysterious brown liquid on the seat is so compelling and so impossible. Cleaning it up wouldn’t win him the admiration of middle-aged African-American women and the desire of sexy young blonde ladies. It would make everyone else uncomfortable because it would force them to acknowledge it was there in the first place.

And this episode feels both artistically interesting to me as a critic and uncomfortable to me as an invested viewer because Louis’ affections for Pamela, who I don’t think much of, make me feel less good about Louis. Pamela may be some people’s ideal of a tough-talking, honest female friend, but I always feel awful and awkward when she’s on screen, mostly because of how terrible she is to Louis, whether she’s cooking an omelette for a guy who is occupying an apartment Louis’ thinking about buying, or calling her son a “little bitch” because he’s scared of amusement park rides. “Why did you want to come here? Did you want to take me here because it’s Frenchy and cool-looking?” she asks him, in a scene that feels like decency and friendship malpractice to me. “You picked it out because you thought I would think you would cool, which you’re not. You’re very, very uncool, Louie, and you’re very boring…You think I’m awesome, and I think you’re okay.” And yet, Louis confesses his love to her in a flea market, telling her “You’re fun, and you shit all over me, and you make fun of me, and you’re real. I don’t have enough time in any day to think about you enough…I’m crazy about you, Pamela. I don’t want to be with anybody else.”

And I think maybe this is the genius of Louie, that it convinces us to have an affinity with this guy, and that he’s kind of great despite his bad luck. And then it smacks us, hard, with the insecurities that make a woman like Pamela his ideal, or the passivity that leads him to stick around to spank an obviously damaged parent of a kid in his daughter’s elementary school class. And then it asks you to keep going because this damaged person is our main character, in fact, our only constant character, and there’s no way he can switch jobs and cities, or get beheaded, or move to Los Angeles and disappear. Louie asks us to attach to a character who is one of the closest things we have to an actual person. And while that’s almost always entertaining, it’s not always fun.

- The Human Rights Campaign is launching a bus tour, but some states might not be ready for the marriage equality bandwagon.

- The National Organization for Marriage’s Maggie Gallagher took to the Christian Broadcasting Network to promote NOM’s absurd campaign to overturn New York’s marriage equality, saying, “it’s gonna be a bloody mess.”

- It turns out the lawyer leading the lawsuit against marriages in New York is Rena Lindevaldsen, the same Liberty Councel/University lawyer who defended ex-gay child-abductor Lisa Miller and who instructed her university students to choose “God’s law” over “man’s law.”

- The new poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research suggests that support for LGBT equality is rising faster among conservative constituents than among their elected representatives.

- With the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in motion, law schools are considering ending their ban on military recruiters. (It’s worth pointing out that the military still discriminates against people who are transgender.)

- A group of Philadelphians known as RAGE (Riders Against Gender Exclusion) are protesting the gender identity stickers required on transit passes in southeastern Pennsylvania. The policy creates serious problems for transgender individuals whose legal sex does not match their gender identity and presentation.

- A new study confirms that gay teens in Massachusetts are more likely to be homeless than their heterosexual peers.

- Elisabeth Hasselbeck condemned the protests of same-sex marriage in New York on yesterday’s The View, calling them “uncalled for” and “without taste.” She added, “The only thing that’s killing [heterosexual marriage] is heterosexual marriage.”

- Watch the video of three same-sex couples getting married on stage after last night’s performance of Hair on Broadway:

- Friday evening we got big news about the Department of Justice slamming the Defense of Marriage Act in the case of Karen Golinski, resisting the appeal from the House of Representatives. Chris Geidner and Lisa Keen have excellent breakdowns of the brief worth reading this morning.

- Introducing the senators’ “It Gets Better” video on Friday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) called DOMA “on the wrong side of history. The New York Times also condemned the 1996 law in an editorial over the weekend.

- Over the weekend, Gov. Lincoln Chafee (I) signed into law the civil unions bill for Rhode Island. Marriage equality advocates had called for its veto because of the unprecedented exemptions that allow religious organizations to completely ignore the unions.

- The president continues to be called out for his (lack of) position on marriage equality, most recently by GOP presidential candidate Fred Karger and Equality Matters’ Kerry Eleveld.

- Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) recently came out in support of the transgender equality bill in his home state.

- The New York City Council has restored over $7 million dollars in funding for Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs. It’s estimated that as many as 40 percent of homeless youth are LGBT.

- New Hampshire’s legislative session ended, but a possible repeal of marriage equality is still on the table for next year.

- The Des Moines Register recently profiled two individuals from the ex-gay movement — one who still identifies as ex-gay and one who is a survivor.

- The Church of England has announced it will review its policy on same-sex relationships and might consider letting gay clergy be ordained as bishops.

- Pat Buchanan is still as anti-gay as ever, as Carlos Maza points out.

But a report released yesterday by the Department of Housing and Urban Development proves strategic government investments during an economic downturn have been anything but wasteful. According to the report, the Homelessness Prevention Rapid Re-housing Program (HPRP) — an initiative directly funded by the Recovery Act — helped 94 percent of program participants who were either homeless or on the verge of homelessness find a permanent housing destination:

Of persons exiting an HPRP program and whose destination at exit was known, 94 percent of HPRP program participants exited to a permanent housing situation, which is considered a successful housing outcome. Nearly 93 percent either rented or owned their own housing unit at exit. This is notable considering the very low income of persons assisted at both entry and exit—nearly 30 percent of participants entered with no monthly cash income and more than half entered with $750 a month or less— and the relatively brief term of assistance.

The HPRP was specifically designed for low-income families who have been taken the hardest blows from the recession, and since its implementation in 2009 it has helped a total of 284,000 families escape homelessness. Its relatively low investment costs ($1.3 billion over 3 years – equal to eleven days of Bush tax cuts), coupled with its high success rate led the report to conclude that the program was an overwhelming success, a crucial factor in “mitigating the impact of the economic recession and allowing families to remain housed or regain housing”.

If the Republicans had their way, highly successful government initiatives such as the Homelessness Prevention Rapid Re-housing Program would never have happened. The Recovery Act has also kept a total of 6 million Americans out of poverty and created 3.3 million jobs.

– Jen Kalaidis

Aaron and Tim Collette

One particularly shocking foreclosure story revolves around father and son Tim and Aaron Collette. In 2006, in more prosperous times, Tim Collette purchased a new home in his state of Oregon and was able to pay more than $100,000 in a down payment. But when the recession hit, his construction business suffered and he was soon unable to make mortgage payments through no fault of his own.

His mortgage servicer, Chase, refused to work with him to renegotiate the terms of his mortgage to adapt to the hard economic times. While this was occurring, his son Aaron was serving in Iraq. He is soon scheduled to come home for a brief period of leave, but Chase is taking away his family’s home. In ten days — the family has set up a countdown clock to the actual time — the bank is set to foreclose on house, essentially meaning that Aaron is going to be coming home to a home that doesn’t exist.

This afternoon, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) appeared on the floor of the Senate to relay the tale of the Collette family. He read a letter from Tim Collette and concluded that for this family and “countless others, it didn’t need to be this bad”:

MERKELEY: I’d like to share with you today a story, a story about Tim Collette and his son in my state of Oregon. [...] Mr. Collette says, my biggest problem now is my some comes from the military in August, and my home is being foreclosed on in 18 days. He’s been hit by an I.E.D., people shooting at him, and he just wanted to come home and sleep in his room, in his bed, and be safe for 15 days. And I told him I’d make that happen. I don’t know how yet. [...] And for Tim and countless others, it didn’t need to be this bad.

Watch it:

The Collette family is campaigning for legislation in Oregon that would give homeowners more leverage to negotiate with banks to modify their mortagages. If you want to help this father and his military son, you can go here to sign a petition by Economic Fairness Oregon to demand that Chase work with the family rather than foreclose on their home.

Homelessness is only one of the many symptoms LGBT youth suffer from family rejection. The Family Acceptance Project has been producing groundbreaking research about both the short-term and long-term benefits when families support their LGBT youth. For example, family acceptance can be a determining factor for a young person’s likelihood to attempt suicide or engage in illegal drug use:

While Kerry’s bill would do a lot of important good to fight youth homelessness, it could very well save the lives of LGBT youth.

Kerry’s bill has two co-sponsors, Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Mark Begich (D-AK), and Rep. Shelly Berkley (D-NV) is expected to introduce companion legislation in the House soon.

CARL SICILIANO (Ali Forney Center): I am proud to be part of the gay rights movement. I’m not proud of what we’ve done for our young people. We can do better. … We have to acknowledge we are in an adult-centric movement.

LEW FIDLER (New York City Councilmember): A responsible adult doesn’t leave a child sleeping on a subway grate at night.

KAI WRIGHT (Journalist): The problem is a handful of people in the queer movement who try to build a more positive space are small, underfunded, and not supported.

TOBIAS WOLFF (University of Pennsylvania Law Professor): [Unlike passing marriage equality or repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell,] this is an ongoing issue we’re going to have to continue engaging with.

It is estimated that 20-40 percent of all homeless youth are LGBT even though only 5-10 percent of youth are LGBT. This disproportionately high number is very much due to family conflict and abuse that leaves the youth feeling unsafe or unwelcome in their homes. There is also systemic discrimination and oversight in child welfare systems and homelessness programs. Unsurprisingly, the compounded discrimination leads to severe physical and mental health disparities for these youth.

Currently, there is very little support to address LGBT youth homelessness. New York City’s Ali Forney Center offers 57 beds, but its executive director, Carl Siciliano, is fighting desperately to keep Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) from cutting its funding in the state budget. Shelters in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Detroit offer an additional 10-20 beds each. At best, there are 200 beds available each night nationwide for the hundreds of thousands of LGBT homeless youth, who often find other shelters to be unsafe because of bullying and harassment from other residents.

In 2009, a Pew poll showed that more Americans perceive the LGBT community to be discriminated against than any other group. The progress of issues like marriage equality and nondiscrimination protections may help reverse this trend (thanks to millions of dollars channeled into advocacy campaigns) and minimize the impact of stigma, but in the mean time, LGBT homeless youth continue to struggle to find the support they need to survive.

Melissa Boteach, Manager of the Half in Ten campaign, added one more example to this egregious list today — the House Republican spending plan would prevent 10,000 low-income military veterans from receiving housing assistance:

The House GOP is boasting that their spending bill to fund the government for the remainder of fiscal year 2011 makes the largest cuts to domestic annual spending in history. But you don’t hear them boasting that these cuts will cut unemployed workers off of job training, force low-income veterans into homelessness, result in millions of low-income college students losing some or all of their education aid, or cause tens of thousands of vulnerable seniors to lose access to home-delivered food baskets…Cuts in the GOP bill would cut in half the number of veterans who would receive housing vouchers this year, preventing 10,000 low-income veterans from receiving assistance to avoid homelessness.

This cut would come at a time when 135,000 veterans are already homeless. According to a study from the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs, about 16 percent of the homeless population is composed of veterans:

About 16% of homeless adults in a one-night survey in January 2009 were veterans, though vets make up only 10% of the adult population. More than 75,000 veterans were living on the streets or in a temporary shelter that night. In that year, 136,334 veterans spent at least one night in a homeless shelter — a count that did not include homeless veterans living on the streets. The urgency of the problem is growing as more people return from service in Iraq and Afghanistan. The study found 11,300 younger veterans, 18 to 30, were in shelters at some point during 2009. Virtually all served in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The homeless veterans covered in the study amount to “one of every 168 veterans in the USA and one of every 10 veterans living in poverty.”

Republicans, of course, pledged to protect America’s veterans from these kinds of cuts. In fact, their much-ballyhooed “Pledge to America” promised “common-sense exceptions [from spending cuts] for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) himself endorsed the same exemptions. The Obama administration, meanwhile, called for increasing funding for the voucher program in its 2012 budget.

The further good news is that the initiative doesn’t actually appear to be especially controversial, so the prospects for continuing to build on the past several years worth of success are good. The bad news is that one of the major candidates is promises to cut domestic discretionary spending indiscriminately which really would threaten a lot of the success that Mangano’s been able to achieve with what’s still, at the end of the day, a pretty small amount of money.