Designing HUD’s Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Rehousing Program Part 2, An Interview with Ann Marie Oliva

Designing HUD’s Homelessness Prevention & Rapid Rehousing Program Part 2, An Interview with Ann Marie Oliva

In the second part of an interview focused on the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Rehousing Program (HPRP), Ann Marie Oliva, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Special Needs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, shares her assessment of HPRP’s outcomes and impact on policymaking.

The Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Rehousing Program was developed in 2009 in response to foreclosures and homelessness after the nationwide housing crisis.

We had some fairly ambitious goals with HPRP. It was put in place as a mechanism to keep households at risk of becoming homeless due to the economic conditions we were experiencing at the time, and I would say that it largely accomplished that goal. We did not see a spike in homelessness during those years, and that has to be due at least in part to HPRP. I don't think that anybody looking at HPRP and at our homeless numbers during that time could argue that the program did not have a positive impact on the communities where it operated. It prevented or ended homelessness for 1.3 million people during its 3 years of operation and helped stem the tide of homelessness nationwide.

Just a few months after the passage of the Recovery Act – which funded HPRP - the HEARTH Act passed, which was an overhaul of HUD’s programs authorized through McKinney-Vento. This meant that at the same time that we were implementing HPRP, we were overhauling our permanent programs and regulations. So HPRP gave communities an idea of the direction we were thinking about going with the HEARTH Act regulations. HPRP also laid the groundwork for a lot of the systems change work we were trying to undertake as part of the implementation of the HEARTH Act, such as coordinated entry, instituting Homeless Management Information Systems comprehensively across communities, and bringing together partners who hadn't been brought together in the past — all of which were going to be requirements under the new Continuum of Care program and the reworked Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG) program. Our communities could use HPRP dollars to both create the foundation for ongoing prevention and rapid rehousing programs and work towards the systems change that we wanted under the HEARTH Act programs, which I think are very important outcomes of HPRP. Also, we were able to learn and understand more about how our policies were working by digging into programs at the community level. HPRP helped inform the interim regulations for the ESG program as well as the rapid rehousing and prevention components of the Continuum of Care program.

By the end of HPRP, the grantees had spent about 68 percent of their funds on homelessness prevention, which makes sense given the national economic context. About 77 percent of program participants received homelessness prevention assistance, so the bulk of the $1.5 billion went toward homelessness prevention.

Obviously, the most important outcome of the program would be the number of people that were served and prevented from becoming homeless. But HPRP also gave us an opportunity to really learn about homelessness prevention in a way that we never had the opportunity to do before — how to set up programs and what the barriers would be. In instances where we didn't get things quite right on the front end, we were able to sit back, consider the impact the program was having in communities and the input that the grantees were giving us, and make mid-course corrections to do things better. The lessons learned through HPRP continue to inform much of the work that we're doing now.

We learned quite a bit about how different policies play out at the local and national levels, and which of those policies we wanted to continue.

For example, we implemented a "but for" test for homelessness prevention, a topic that came up quite a bit in the prevention study. Basically, we said that this is a homelessness prevention program, not an eviction prevention program — we wanted to target assistance to households that really needed it to prevent entry into the homeless services system. The language in the notice said that the assistance was for households who "but for" this assistance would become homeless. That is a really tough concept to operationalize at the local level. At the same time, we said that it was important to make sure that the households being served would be able to maintain their housing in the long run. A lot of communities thought that those two requirements conflicted with each other and had a hard time figuring out how to enact both the "but for" test and the sustainability criteria. This is one area of the program where we did make some mid-course corrections in our messaging. A related issue concerned how much assistance communities were providing. We allowed up to 18 months of assistance in HPRP. Most communities were providing much less assistance than that because the demand for their services was huge, and they wanted to serve as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. But if you are really targeting the hardest to serve — the people who would become homeless without this assistance — you need to do more than that. You have to calibrate the amount of assistance and the intensity of the assistance that you're providing to them. We saw from early on that these elements were creating confusion at the local level and that the targeting we wanted was not being realized. Those lessons have informed our policies, especially for the ESG program.

I think communities learned a lot about how to do things quickly and in a coordinated way that includes the input of community stakeholders who might not have been at the table before. That is one lasting impact of HPRP that we're going to continue to see and expect going forward. I think communities also learned a lot about managing a prevention program, which most had never done before, and how they could scale their programs in different ways and target different households to truly be a homelessness prevention program rather than an eviction prevention program.

The most important lesson we took away from HPRP is that, when given the resources and some flexibility from Congress, we can really make a difference nationally. We learned that we could have a national impact on the number of people experiencing homelessness in a way that I don't think we realized going in.

We also realized that prevention is really hard. Real homelessness prevention is like trying to prove a negative: How do you know that a household that presents to you for assistance is going to be homeless but for the assistance you provide? We struggled, and continued to struggle, with that question. When given the opportunity to do either rapid rehousing or homelessness prevention, we at HUD tend to push people toward rapid rehousing because we still haven't quite refined what homelessness prevention should look like. What indicators should you look for and what tests should you be doing at the local level to understand which households would actually become homeless but for this assistance? We need more research on that.

At the time the Recovery Act was signed in 2009, we definitely wanted communities to target people who were already homeless with rapid re-housing because we knew we needed more information on the homelessness prevention side. We knew going in that it was going to be tough for communities to actually prevent homelessness, but at the same time were aware how tough it would be to handle an influx of people who are presenting for help because they are scared that they are going to lose their housing. Communities had to balance all those local factors.

Homelessness prevention is important and is going to continue to be important as communities get better at targeting their resources and administering the right kind of interventions. I think all of us would like to prevent homelessness on a much larger scale than we currently do. But until we reach the point at which we are actually ending homelessness — and are able to maintain a steady state of serving people quickly when they have a housing crisis — we will always want to serve people in the most difficult circumstances first. That would be the target group for rapid rehousing: those who are homeless and living in emergency shelters or on the streets. So your question gets at our policy, but the answer depends on what the research says and what resources we have.

Again, I wouldn't say it's actually a shift; I would say that it’s very much tied to the things that I just mentioned — research and resources. The research itself is going to help us understand more about how to do homelessness prevention well, but when given $10 in resources, I will — and the department will, given what we know — choose to serve the family that's already in a shelter or living on the street before funding homelessness prevention. But as these systems grow more mature, as communities do more comprehensive coordinated entry within their local continuums of care, and as we get better at targeting our resources, I expect that we will see an increase in well-run and targeted homelessness prevention services.

I don't know that my perspective has changed but I think it’s been more informed by the amount of homelessness prevention we did in HPRP, which was highlighted in the study we’re talking about today. A few other folks have done local evaluations that have helped inform their prevention programs. I think prevention can be and should be an important part of any homeless services system, but right now it’s really about balancing a variety of demands at the local level.

I think that we need to know a bit more. The study itself suggests different types of future research that would be important and helpful to us as policymakers as we go forward. It would also be helpful for practitioners on the ground to share their best practices so that other communities can know what does or does not work in particular circumstances. Our hope is that we will have additional research and best practices on which to base our policy.

Thank you for asking me these questions.