Without Housing: Decades of Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness, and Policy Failures

Without Housing documents federal funding trends for affordable housing over the past 25 years, particularly funding for housing programs administered by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as well as Section 515 rural affordable housing administered by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). It describes the correlation of these trends to the emergence of a new and massive episode of homelessness in the early 1980s that has continued to the present, and also demonstrates why federal responses to this nationwide crisis have consistently failed. It is focused primarily on what we consider to be one of the most important – if not the most important – factors in explaining why so many people are homeless in the United States today: the cutbacks to and eventual near elimination of the federal government’s commitment to building, maintaining, and subsidizing affordable housing. (Authors)

Publication Date: 
2006