HUD ANNOUNCES OVER 100,000 FAMILIES & INDIVIDUALS HOUSED THROUGH “HOUSE AMERICA” HOMELESSNESS INITIATIVE

Milestone surpasses goal set by HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge and achieved by organizing leaders from 105 communities across 31 states and territories and the District of Columbia

WASHINGTON - U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Marcia L. Fudge today announced that states, municipalities, and tribes who joined House America have housed more than 100,000 households experiencing homelessness and added over 40,000 affordable housing units into development. HUD organized leaders from 105 communities across 31 states and territories and the District of Columbia to join House America and provided technical assistance to reach these goals. Launched in September 2021 by Secretary Fudge in partnership with the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH), House America is an all-hands-on-deck effort to address the nation’s homelessness crisis.

“Everyone deserves a safe, stable place to call home. Through House America, I’m proud to see that communities have stepped up to get people off the streets and into homes,” said Secretary Fudge. “The Biden-Harris Administration is deploying a Housing First approach, using American Rescue Plan funding and other resources to help individuals find a place to call home. We will continue to work to house America until we end homelessness as we know it.”

House America encouraged communities to deploy an historic level of federal resources to address homelessness. In particular, House America’s 105 communities received a boost of funding through the American Rescue Plan Act to expand permanent housing opportunities - including more than 20,000 Emergency Housing Vouchers and over $1.5 billion HOME-ARP from HUD, as well as over $65 billion in State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds from the U.S. Department of the Treasury — that sparked renewed momentum and greater deployment of available resources, including CARES Act and annual appropriations, to create permanent housing solutions.

Secretary Fudge created the national partnership to engage local, tribal, and state leaders across the country to set and achieve specific goals to rehouse people experiencing homelessness and create more permanent affordable and supportive housing. She challenged state and local leaders to collectively place at least 100,000 households experiencing homelessness into permanent housing and add at least 20,000 new units of deeply affordable and supportive housing into their development pipelines by December 2022.

In the last two years, the Biden-Harris Administration has made unprecedented efforts to end homelessness, which include the White House Housing Supply Action Plan that aims to close the housing supply gap in five years; and the American Rescue Plan Act that President Biden signed to deliver one of the largest investments in ending homelessness in U.S. history.

In addition to addressing homelessness overall, ending Veteran homelessness is a top priority of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the Biden-Harris Administration. In late December, USICH released All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness, which set forth President Biden’s ambitious goal to reduce all homelessness by 25% by 2025. As a part of that effort, the VA, which closely partners with HUD in the fight to end homelessness, announced today that it permanently housed more than 40,000 formerly homeless Veterans in 2022 – exceeding VA’s 2022 goal by 6.3%. In 2022, VA, HUD and USICH announced that actions taken by the Biden-Harris Administration had reduced Veteran homelessness by 11% since 2020—the largest in Veteran homelessness in five years.

Throughout the end of January, Biden-Harris Administration officials are participating in Point-in-Time counts across the country to count sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness to better understand the local needs, measure trends in homelessness, hear from the community and more accurately target funding and resources.

A fact sheet on House America progress is available here.