He said he was afraid the children would be taken away from them. I asked him if anyone had told him that. Not exactly, but he was worried.

“We’re not bad parents,” he said. “We’re just down on our luck.”

He said it twice during our conversation. And I could see it was true from the way he was cuddling the baby.

I think of him now because the Family Resources Center has started reporting all homeless families with no place to stay to the Child and Family Services Agency, the District’s child welfare program.

This means that the parents can be charged with child neglect — and their children put into foster care — just because the District won’t provide them with shelter or other housing.

As the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless notes, they shouldn’t be. District law specifically states that “deprivation due to the lack of financial means … is not considered neglect.”

But that doesn’t mean homeless children won’t be taken from their parents.

As Professor Matthew Fraidin has written, we simply don’t know what goes on in the courtroom when parents are charged with neglect.

Judges are free to ignore the legal exemption for lack of financial means. And they may when they understand that the children have no safe place to stay — or decide that’s due to parental irresponsibility.

What we do know, from a recent report by the Citizens Review Panel, is that CFSA has taken many children from their parents without getting a court order first. And, in more than half the cases, the precipitous removals were not justified.

Also know, from CFSA’s own report, that “inadequate housing” was the primary reason it placed 35 children in foster care in 2010.

Are we to understand that parents with sufficient financial means deliberately chose unsafe housing — or no housing at all?

Rhetorical question. What the placements tell us is that homeless parents have good reason to fear that the powers-that-be will take their children away.

They certainly don’t have adequate housing, and CFSA has no resources of its own to provide it.

At the very least, families the Center reports are likely to be subject to intimidating investigations. Children may be interrogated. Imagine how frightening — even if nothing comes of it.

More likely, however, parents won’t ask for shelter when they’ve no place to stay if they’re told, as they are, that the Center will report their situation to the child welfare authorities.

This is already happening. Many Legal Clinic clients with nowhere to stay have left the Center for fear they’d lose their children, according to testimony by staff attorney Amber Harding.

Another client tells us that she stopped asking for shelter after Center staff repeatedly warned her that they’d have her kids removed if she couldn’t provide them with a safe place to sleep. “I won’t be calling again,” she says.

What the [expletive deleted] is the Department of Human Services doing?

Director David Berns, I’m told, claims that the department is just trying to do a better job of ensuring compliance with mandatory reporting requirements.

I don’t altogether buy this. Under District law, poverty and its immediate consequences, e.g. homelessness, don’t constitute abuse or neglect. So what’s to report?

“Safety risks,” Berns says. But there’s no mandate for reporting these unless they’re risks posed by abuse or neglect.

So we’ve got either an excess of zeal or a covert strategy for controlling the waiting list of homeless families the department can’t help — 308 of them, at last count.

I’d like to believe the former. But what I believe doesn’t matter.

What matters is that DHS doesn’t have the funds to protect all the families who’ve got no safe place to stay and instead is exposing children to all the risks that foster care entails.

Photo by Jackal of all trades.

Under Mayor Gray’s proposed budget, more than 6,100 families in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program will lose a fifth of their meager cash benefits come October — this on top of the same sized-cut imposed last April.

The figure I led off with is what a family of three would be left with. Additional benefits cuts would follow until the family got nothing at all.

More than 11,000 children under thirteen would be plunged into even deeper poverty. Some of them, as the Children’s Law Center warns, would be put into foster care simply because their parents couldn’t afford adequate housing.

The families who’ll suffer are those who’ve spent 60 months or more in the program — not necessarily consecutive.

In many cases, the affected parents haven’t gotten the services they need to overcome severe work barriers, e.g., mental and physical health problems, domestic violence trauma, minimal or no marketable job skills.

Some were expected to engage in what passed for work preparation activities — sessions on workplace behavior, writing a resume, interviewing, etc.

Then, as one participant said, “[t]hey have you on the computer all day,” searching the online listings and pressured to take the first job offered.

Many have cycled back into the program because they didn’t have the skills for the jobs they’d found — or hadn’t gotten the help they needed to overcome other barriers. Others, I suppose, returned when they lost their jobs due to the recession.

Not all the parents whose benefits will be cut were required to engage in work activities for their whole term in the program. Some were excused for awhile because their barriers made work activities wholly unrealistic. But the time off is being counted toward their 60-month maximum anyway.

What’s happening here is that part of the Department of Human Services’ TANF redesign is barreling ahead — the part that gives parents a stronger incentive to engage in required work preparation and work search activities.

Nothing like facing a penniless future to get one moving — unless, of course, one’s too ill, disabled or occupied with other responsibilities,e.g., caring for a severely disabled child, to move on the work front, even knowing the hardships awaiting.

The administration could exempt up to 20% of such “hardship cases” from the 60-month limit and still use federal funds for a share of their cash benefits. But it’s chosen not to.

The other part of the TANF reform — in-depth individual assessments to identify their individual strengths and needs — is lagging behind. Thus also appropriate agreements on what they should do to fulfill their responsibilities for striving toward self-sufficiency.

As of late February, DHS had completed only 12% of the assessments needed for families at immediate risk of cash benefit loss.

At the reported rate of 150 assessments a week, it won’t get through them all until months after the next 20% cut kicks in.

It might if the rate applied only to parents subject to the phase-out rather than to all parents who show up when they’re told to. Some at immediate risk haven’t heard, don’t understand or perhaps figure it’s futile because they’re going to lose their benefit anyway.

Councilmembers Jim Graham and Michael Brown have introduced a billthat would temporarily stave off the benefits cuts and mandate reasonable time-limit exemptions, such as many states provide.

Advocates have suggested ways the bill could be strengthened, including a longer reprieve period. But it’s a whole lot better than what’s coming down the pike.

Why didn’t Mayor Gray fold a version into his proposed budget? Surely he knows that TANF families will lose benefits because the program failed them.

For the same reason he put the benefits phase-out into last year’s proposed budget. Savings to help close the budget gap. This year he expects to save more than $5.6 million.

Well, the DC Council could do what the Mayor wouldn’t. The Human Services Committee took a step in this direction last week with a vote (4-1) in favor of the Graham-Brown bill

Now comes the need to find funds to substitute for the Mayor’s proposed savings — and to get at least three more Councilmembers on board.

Maybe we should launch a TANF Challenge along the lines of the popular Food Stamp Challenges.

Who knows what might happen if our elected representatives had to try living on $275 for a month?

Photo credit: US Department of Agriculture

They had no place to stay and no money for food. And the Family Resources Center — the District’s central intake for homeless families — couldn’t help them.

The mother told me that they’d been advised to find some place to stay — as if they’d have asked for shelter if they had one.

They’d returned to the Center in hopes of a gift card so they could buy some food, but it had run out of cards. I was told the cards were donated by corporations like Safeway and Giant, and the chains hadn’t come through of late.

The family could, however, get a Metro fare card. I asked the father what they’d do with it. He said he guessed they’d go back to their former neighborhood and see if someone would take them in. Not likely, he seemed to think.

So here’s a family that’s destitute. A little kid and an unborn child at high risk of long-term health and developmental damages due to hunger.

Perhaps for the toddler also psychological damage if he understands what it means that they’re spending nights in bus stations or hospital waiting rooms — even, as seems likely, if he picks up on the fear and stress his parents are feeling.

Who knows how many more stories like this there are — and how many more there’ll be in months to come?

All because the District government couldn’t find enough money to fund its homeless program in light of projected needs.

A 46% increase in family homelessness since 2008. A report indicating extraordinary vulnerability to increased homelessness.

And a budget for this fiscal year that provides not a penny more for homeless services — actually $3 million less than what the Department of Human Services was spending.

So DHS has again stopped providing shelter for newly homeless families. Official end of the winter season means they’ll be on their own — perhaps till the next freezing-cold day.

And now Mayor Gray has proposed a budget that would effectively cut homeless services by $7 million. These are “lost,” i.e., spent, federal funds that he could have replaced with local dollars.

No doubt the budget must address many priorities. But I fail to see how letting homeless families fend for themselves squares with budget development principles that include “protect the District’s most vulnerable residents.”

Also fail to see why all tax and fee increases must be off the table if the alternative is cuts that undermine other principles.

The Mayor tells us that to “seize our future,” we must “improve the quality of life for all.”

My quality of life wouldn’t be impaired by paying, say, a sales tax on services that aren’t covered now — or for that matter, income taxes at a higher rate.

It is impaired by helpless worrying about the literally help-less family I met. Their quality of life goes without saying.

Photo credit: Foomandoonian

Turns out that the income gap between the richest and poorest 20% of households is the third largest among U.S. cities — this based on data from the 2010 American Community Survey.

The average income for the richest fifth was 29 times greater than for the poorest fifth. Look only at the top 5% and the mutiple rises to 52.2% — $473,343, as compared to $9,062.

I know that conservatives generally don’t view income inequality as a problem. What matters, they say, is income mobility, i.e., the opportunity to move up the income scale.

But, to my mind, such enormous gaps should concern us — and for various reasons.

Some research indicates that severe income inequality is, in and of itself, bad for society.

Researchers at the University of York, for example, have found that people in countries with high income inequality — the U.S. among them — fare worse on a host of indicators, e.g., physical and mental health, violence and drug abuse, mutual trust and community cohesion.

The findings are controversial. Other explanations have been offered for what are, after all, only statistical correlations. Yet we surely see something like them at the local level.

The two cities Mayor Gray is rightly concerned about depress many measures of community well-being. And they’re fraught with cross-class hostilities — some more overt than others.

We also know — or surely should — that wealthy people have disproportionate political clout and, of course, use it to protect their own interests. The bigger the income gap, the more these interests are likely to diverge from those of people at the bottom of the income scale.

We need only look at the fate of some very reasonable tax reform proposals to see how this plays out — and to the detriment of residents who depend on our safety net programs.

But the biggest deal here is the very low average income for the bottom fifth of D.C. households — under 50% of the federal poverty line for a family of three. About $4,800 less than the yearly rent on a modest efficiency unit.

The rising tide that’s supposed to lift all boats hasn’t done much for these households. Since 1979, their inflation-adjusted wages have grown just 14%, while those for the high earners have grown 44%.

This reflects a nationwide trend. The Economic Policy Institute reports that the inflation-adjusted income for the top fifth of families grew 49% during about the same period as DCFPI carved out. For the bottom fifth, income actually shrank by 7.9%.

The problem, many analysts say, is that the top fifth — and even more the notorious top 1% — have been gaining ground at the expense of everyone else.

Explanations abound. Solutions also. President Obama is again campaigning on some. We’ll soon see a related, bigger bundle in Senator Tom Harkin’s Rebuild America Act.

DCFPI instead focuses on a handful of local policies and programs that could lift the incomes of our bottom fifth. With two limited exceptions, they’re already on the books. What’s not is sufficient funding.

Given the resources, the initiatives would:

• Help residents prepare for living-wage jobs.
• Address housing concerns, i.e., remedy the budget cuts to the District’s main affordable housing programs.
• Make work pay better for a subset of current and future D.C. workers.

I’ll return to these in a separate post. Will say here only that DCFPI’s recommendations are — I assume deliberately — very modest.

But they could make a big difference for many of those very poor residents in the bottom fifth. A big difference for our divided community too.

Photo credit: Alex Barth

Big headline is that homelessness decreased between 2009 and 2011 — not only the overall rate, but the rates for people in families, veterans and the chronically homeless, i.e., individuals with disabilities, including mental illness and/or substance abuse disorders, who’ve been homeless for a long time or recurrently.

As I noted last year, NAEH relies, for want of an alternative, on the point-in-time counts conducted by communities that receive homelessness grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Its raw figures, therefore, understate the extent of homelessness. Gross changes, however, probably mean something, since the PIT flaws are relatively constant from year to year.

The greater limit in the headlined news is that the nationwide trends mask wide variations among states.

Figures for the District of Columbia are a good case in point. All but one buck the nationwide trends NAEH reports. This is moderately good news in one case. Bad in the rest.

Overall homelessness. In 2011, as compared to 2009, the overall nationwide homeless rate decreased 1.1%. But in the District, it increased 5.11%. Nearly half the states also experienced increases.

Homelessness among people in families. Homelessness in this population, i.e., adults and children who were together when counted, decreased 3.39% nationwide. In the District, it increased 17.8%. There were also increases in 20 states.

Chronic homelessness. The chronic homelessness rate decreased 3.39% nationwide. In the District, it increased 8.84%. Rates also went up in 18 states.

Veterans homelessness. By far and away the biggest progress here — undoubtedly due to the big push at the federal level. Nationwide, the veterans homelessness rate decreased 10.73%. Rates also decreased in 35 states.

Here the District follows the national trend, with a drop of 19.78%. But no state wound up in 2011 with nearly as high a percentage of homeless veterans in its population.

Unsheltered homelessness. Nationwide, the unsheltered homelessness rate, i.e., the percent of homeless people found on the streets or “in other places not meant for human habitation,” rose 1.64%.

But it was 4.98% lower in the District. Rates were also lower in 22 states. As with the District, however, the percentages generally reflect very small numerical changes.

So what do we make of all of this?

For NAEH, the big message is that the temporary Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program created by the Recovery Act worked.

Though nationwide homelessness rates didn’t decline much, they would surely have risen, it says, without the funds communities got for a variety of short-shot types of assistance, e.g., payment of overdue rent or a utilities bill, funds for a security deposit and/or first month’s rent.

So now that communities have exhausted their HPRP funds — or soon will — Congress should put more money into the regular homelessness grants program.

No argument from me about that.

But the state of homelessness in the District — and elsewhere — suggests that funds targeted to people who’ve lost their housing or soon will won’t be enough to end homelessness in our lifetime.

The NAEH report, in fact, indicates as much in two very interesting chapters on risk factors for future homelessness.

Too interesting to cram into this post. So I’ll leave them for another.

But without giving the plot away, I’ll say here that the risk factors point to the need for a range of investments, including funds for lots more affordable housing.

Photo credit: SamPac

Nothing’s happened with the bill, so far as I can tell, since the hearing in June.

But something has happened to address the main focus of the hearing — unaccompanied homeless youth.

The DC Alliance of Youth Advocates has released the results of a survey it conducted with partners — many partners — last March.

It’s the first-ever survey of youth homelessness in the District — and one of the first of its kind anywhere in the U.S.

So now we know more than we did before, which was virtually nothing. I wish I could say we know more than we do.

But, as the report forthrightly acknowledges, the survey had significant limits — some inherent in the enterprise itself and some due to the project design.

As a result, we’ve got lots of information about the literally homeless and “unstably housed” youth who answered the survey questions in a way that allowed researchers to analyze their responses.

No way, however, of knowing to what extent we can generalize to the larger population that met DCAYA’s definition of “unaccompanied homeless youth.”

The definition is broader than the term might suggest.

And, to my mind, somewhat problematic because it embraces two populations that are likely to be homeless for different reasons and to need quite different types of services. DCAYA sometimes reports on them separately. Often not.

On the other hand, new regulations from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development expand the definition of “unaccompanied youth” to include young adults under the age of 25.

Since these regulations will govern the District’s applications for grants under the HEARTH (Homeless Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing) Act, it makes some sense to adopt the same upper age limit for the survey.

In any event, young people qualified as homeless and unaccompanied if they were under 18 and “living apart from their parents or guardians” or between the ages of 18 and 24 and both “economically and/or emotionally detached from their families” and without “an adequate or fixed residence.”

All told, 330 youth surveyed met this definition. Though an additional 160 didn’t, more than half of them said they didn’t have stable housing two weeks and three months prior to the survey.

DCAYA did some calculations to estimate the number of local youth who were homeless at some point during the course of the year. At least 1,600, based on its survey results. But this estimate is very conservative, it says.

Using estimates gathered by the Congressional Research Service, the number would increase dramatically — on the low end, to just over 3,000 and on the high end to just under 6,000.

So we clearly need more and better data than we’ve got. But we’ve got enough to know that we’ve got a highly vulnerable population that needs an array of services we’re not providing — or not providing enough of.

Detailed analyses of the survey results indicate priorities. A few examples:

• Nearly half the homeless youth surveyed had spent the night before on the streets or “couch surfing” at the home of a friend of family member — mostly the latter.
• Only 48.9% of those under 18 were in school — or, it seems, a program that would prepare them for the GED exams.
• More than 81% of the whole group were unemployed — anextraordinarily high rate for D.C. youth, even in these bad economic times.
• A full 90% of the youth were black — maybe a function of the survey design, but suspiciously similar to the percents in our child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

DCAYA calls for more stable, long-term housing as “the primary component to moving youth forward.”

I’d have welcomed more such forthright, policy-relevant conclusions and actionable policy recommendations.

What DCAYA calls “policy recommendations” are actually discourses on a few general theme — hard to summarize, as indeed is the report as a whole.

DCAYA is understandably queasy about generalizing from its limited — and perhaps not representative — survey sample.

But it’s also, I think, made such results as it has harder to digest than they ought to be — at least, if it aims to reach “all those who want to see D.C. youth achieve more stable and productive lives,” as its press release indicates.

Still well worth a read and a fine basis for the further studies it recommends. Also a unique source of hard data for advocates and service providers who want to make a case for this or that.

You can get the gist in the executive summary, which helpfully bold-faces key findings and implications.

Photo credit: Tulane Publications

Should this set off alarm bells? Probably, though the people who need to hear them don’t seem to be listening to alarms already sounded.

First, a look at how NAEH got to its ratings. The methodology is a little complex. But it helps us understand why many District residents are at high risk of literal homelessness. So bear with me here.

NAEH first identified states that had an elevated level of vulnerability. Two factors got states into this category — a higher rate of homelessness than the national average and multiple risk factors for an increase.

I wrote about these risk factors when NAEH first published them. Ominous nationwide — and specifically for the District.

• A huge increase in the number of people living doubled up with friends or relatives.
• A very high percentage of poor households paying more than half their income for rent.
• A drop in the real value of the income of the District’s working poor.
• And, of course, a large increase in the number of jobless residents looking for work.

These factors, combined with the homelessness rate, got the District into the elevated vulnerability group, along with eight states.

Then NAEH added two new factors — cuts in public sector employment and/or in public cash assistance, e.g., benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

Why only public sector job losses? Maybe because total job loss figures were hard to come by. More likely because NAEH wants to deliver a message to state-level policymakers, who’ve got control over only the public sector payroll.

In any event, only cuts in both categories boosted states into the highest vulnerability group.

No one who’s followed the District’s budget-balancing exercises should be surprised to find it there.

As the DC Fiscal Policy Institute reports, the District’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget wipes out 205 full-time equivalent vacancies. These come on top of nearly 400 positions eliminated in Fiscal Year 2011 and somewhere around 1,300 positions cut in Fiscal Year 2010.

How much these cuts potentially impact the District’s homelessness rate is unclear — at least, to me. Not so the cuts in TANF benefits.

Last December, the DC Council agreed to a 20% cut in TANF benefits for families who’d been in the program for more than five years.

This cut went into effect in April, leaving nearly 7,000 families with even less than the meager cash assistance they’d been trying to get along on.

Meanwhile, as I suspected he would, Mayor Gray reverted to his plan to make additional 20% cuts until the families were left with nothing. The Council decided to delay further cuts until next fiscal year. But they’ll still go forward.

At this point, a temporarily-reprieved family of three is eligible for a maximum of $342 a month. Need I say this falls far short of rental costs in the District?

Which brings me to a risk factor NAEH didn’t include in its rating scheme — significant cuts in funding for the District’s main affordable housing programs.

True, the Council has said it will restore them if revenues are sufficiently higher than the forecast used for the budget.

But the numbers crunched by Bob Pohlman at the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development indicate that not one dollar will go back into the affordable housing programs unless a future revenue forecast comes in more than $3.2 million higher than the latest.

Many, many millions more needed just to get us back to the under-funded levels we’ve had.

So, sad to say, the District has earned its homelessness vulnerability rating. Now, what will our policymakers do when vulnerability turns into a real-world increase in homelessness?

Photo credit: Julie Rybarczyk