The White House’s reversal on Housing First will worsen homelessness — but local governments are fighting back

Every single woman and child who comes through the doors of the Mary Parrish Center is fleeing a violent abuser; most are leaving life-threatening situations. So far, it has managed to move more than 9 out of 10 survivors that pass through its doors into permanent housing. But now this domestic violence shelter may be forced to close its doors or drastically curtail services, due to the White House’s new, unilateral changes to how the federal government will fund housing support. This would push domestic violence survivors into an impossible choice: return to an abuser, most of whom believe could kill them — or become homeless, as temperatures in Nashville drop below freezing.

The shelter is one of the programs Nashville has built in partnership with U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as part of its Continuum of Care (CoC) program, which was set up two decades ago to help local governments to quickly rehouse homeless individuals, families, youth, and persons fleeing domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking. Nationwide, the effects could be catastrophic, with an internal HUD documentation concluding that funding cuts could put 170,000 people at risk of experiencing homelessness.

We won an important victory just before the holidays. On December 19, a federal court blocked HUD from making changes that would have pulled funding away from permanent housing programs. But HUD didn’t give up. Instead, the agency issued a new funding plan in December with many of the same harmful restrictions. On January 14, Nashville and other cities filed new legal papers asking the court to strike down HUD’s revised plan and order the agency to release funding that Congress already approved for 2024. Right now, many programs’ grants are expiring, and some cities have already spent this year’s money while waiting for next year’s funding to arrive. This could mean no money for critical services until late spring — leaving people without shelter during the coldest months of the year.

The changes to this program would pull funding away from programs that support permanent housing with no term limit (what’s known as “Housing First,” a policy started in 2004 under President Bush’s administration), to only funding temporary housing for up to two years. Far from being a “slush fund,” monies spent on permanent housing give people at risk of homelessness the stability they need to land on their feet. It’s not only the compassionate approach, but also the one that actually does help people become self-sufficient — not the punitive approach that the Trump administration is proposing. Much like many of its other policies, it’s actually more costly than the status quo: with shelter beds costing up to twice as much as permanent housing support.

I’ve spent the past five as Nashville’s law director and one thing is abundantly clear:  the people of Nashville, and communities across the country, need government attorneys to keep fighting for them. Now is not the time to back down. Nashville is now among the local governments that have sued the federal government to win back HUD funding. Among plaintiffs in this case alone, $266 million is on the line, and the stakes nationwide are almost $4 billion.

All the ways in which the White House has imposed draconian conditions on federal funding — or withheld it altogether — have been made without approval from Congress, public comment, or a transition plan. Often, these cuts fly in the face of logic, put communities at risk for disaster, and make life less safe and more unaffordable. CoC forms the backbone of the city’s system to house people who would otherwise have no other place to go. I never thought I’d be spending so much of my time representing Nashville in lawsuits — against none other than the federal government — but as I and numerous other government attorneys have found, the stakes are too high to go down without a fight.

Wally Dietz is the law director for the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County.