The Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration came up aces with its recently released plan to use federal housing funds in a way that actually mitigates homelessness in Louisiana.
Each year, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development doles out grants to states to provide housing. States and local governments have established panels to recommend to HUD proposals from various lead agencies willing to coordinate spending, in Louisiana’s case, historically around $100 million combined annually. Until this year for many years, these defaulted to a nonprofit agency called UNITY of Greater New Orleans and another outside of New Orleans, the Louisiana Balance of State Continuum of Care.
But those agencies followed a flawed worldview of optimal housing policy, and its distributional planes reflected that, where primarily the homeless were to be given permanent housing as a “solution” to homelessness, even as research has shown that approach is less effective than steering policy to make any housing most often transitional, as the large majority of homeless are that way because of behavioral issues they must solve that enable them to exit homelessness. The GOP Pres. Donald Trump Administration last year directed HUD to embrace the latter, a more effective strategy in how it distributed these grants.
