By Erica C. Barnett
On Tuesday, right before a court hearing in the lawsuit filed by Washington State and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that it’s pulling the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for homeless investments—the subject of the lawsuit.
HUD filed a “notice of withdrawal” in the Rhode Island federal district court where the case is being heard, and claimed in their filing that the issues the state and NAEH raise in the lawsuit are now “moot.” The judge in the case, District Judge Mary McElroy, said the federal government’s last-minute withdrawal “feels like intentional chaos” during a hearing on Monday.
Local agency and elected leaders and a spokesperson for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority told PubliCola they’re still trying to figure out what the decision means for local agencies that rely on federal funds. HUD’s one-paragraph announcement shed little light on the timeline or potential changes, saying only that “the withdrawal will allow the Department to make appropriate revisions to the NOFO, and the Department intends to do so.”
The NOFO—there’s simply no way of getting around the acronym— is an annual funding process for homelessness programs, administered in the Seattle region by the KCRHA, acting as the region’s Continuum of Care. A mandatory committee, the Continuum of Care Board, considers a consolidated regional application for funds each year and approves it for transmission to HUD.
As we reported last month, HUD’s latest NOFO includes many provisions that could exclude KCRHA and other CoCs in blue states and cities from receiving funds, including provisions that prohibit funding for programs that acknowledge and accommodate trans and nonbinary people, those that help specific racial minorities, and those that allow—or have ever allowed—drug use on site.
Beyond those restrictions, the new NOFO also strictly limits funding for permanent housing of all types, from rapid rehousing vouchers to service-rich permanent supportive housing, to 30 percent of total NOFO funding. In Seattle, where more than 90 percent of HUD funding pays for permanent housing, this new restriction alone could put thousands of housed people back onto streets or into the overtaxed shelter system.
KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said the agency has been planning since last month for the impacts of the delayed NOFO, which was supposed to come out last summer. The November announcement left housing and service providers with just two months to submit new applications under completely different rules by January, with decisions from HUD coming down in May; now, it’s unclear when HUD will release a new version of the NOFO and what kind of restrictions on funding it will include.
According to Edge, some current homeless service contracts were scheduled for renewal in February, March, and April; if the NOFO gets delayed further, pushing back the January deadline for applications, even more contracts may expire without new funding, depriving these housing programs of federal funds.
One step KCRHA is taking to improve its competitiveness for federal funding is a new recruitment push that’s partly aimed at getting elected officials and at least one representative from law enforcement to join its Continuum of Care board. NOFO applications are judged on points; under the NOFO that HUD just pulled, the federal agency planned to allocate extra points for CoCs that have at least three elected officials, and at least one law enforcement official, on the board.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Under its original 2020 charter, the CoC board was composed largely of members of the Lived Experience Coalition, an advocacy group, and is still made up largely of people with direct, sometimes current, experience with homelessness. The board has had its share of controversy over the years, including a meeting that devolved into a shouting match over the nomination of a man who’d been convicted of multiple sexual offenses involving minors as young as 13.
Since that controversy, the agency has tried to add more homeless service providers to the board and bring more conventional professionalism to its work. CoC meetings are generally less structured than typical government meetings, and often spin out into conversations about topics that are tangential to the official agenda; last week, for instance, a CoC meeting about the new NOFO included a digressive debate about whether a “dog catcher,” which is not an elected position, would have particular insights about homelessness that would make them a valuable elected addition to the board.
Later in that meeting, multiple board members appeared to be learning about the changes to federal funding requirements for the first time, asking a staffer questions about how the overall NOFO process works and what the potential impact of the changes will be.