How to Spend $1.5 Billion

With $1.5 billion in stimulus homeless prevention dollars on its way to cities and regions around the country, government leaders and homeless advocates are strategizing the best uses for these funds. Cities are taking different approaches, flexing their creative muscles, implementing new service models, or funding pilot programs. Regardless of the paths communities take, the end destination is clear: finding the most cost-effective approach to preventing and ending homelessness.

In Grand Rapids, experience has taught homeless advocates that just an ounce of prevention can go a long way. Rapidly rehousing homeless families, or helping them avoid homelessness all together, prevents lengthy and pricey shelter stays. So how will Grand Rapids spend their stimulus money? By taking an approach to ending homelessness that has been proven successful:

Coalition Coordinator Janay Brower said the standard model of helping the homeless is to wait until a crisis, find a shelter and, from there, allow social services to help further.

But she said only 42 percent of people leaving a shelter, even after a 30-day stay, move into permanent housing. Most go to friends, family or other temporary places.

That can be destabilizing to children, who make up more than a third of the homeless population, Brower said. It's also hurts those trying to get their feet on the ground.

A better approach -- more effective and more humane -- is to focus on permanent housing from the start, she said.

Cleveland, on the other hand, is getting creative. Advocates and government leaders are dreaming up the best ways to spend their estimated $10-12 million share of the stimulus, including emergency funds for people hit hard by joblessness, mobilizing lawyers to help people retain their homes, and rehousing homeless people in Cleveland's vast stock of empty homes.

According to Cleveland.com, everyone seems to have an idea for spending the stimulus money:

The city could use the money to offer a few months of rent and moving costs to tenants who are displaced when their landlord fails to pay the mortgage, a growing problem across Cleveland, Chris Warren, Cleveland chief of regional development said. "The tenant very often is current on their rent. They're not deadbeats," Warren said.

He also suggested having an emergency pot of money to be shared with people who can't pay their rent or house note due to an economic crisis such as job loss. Some local programs already provide similar assistance, but not nearly enough, Warren said.

Mayor Frank Jackson hopes to earmark some of the stimulus money to expand a project that already has moved more than 300 homeless people into vacant housing and provided them with services to teach self-sufficiency, said Natoya Walker, Cleveland's deputy chief of operations.

Brian Davis, executive director of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, said he would like to see Cleveland imitate successful programs elsewhere that seek out people before they lose their homes, at places like social-services offices and soup kitchens, to offer help.

The next few months will see administrators scramble to develop plans for spending the stimulus money in the coming funds as service workers attempt to curb the rising tide of homelessness. You can bet we'll be tracking the impact of this money and the means by which it's spent every step of the way.

[Photo from Cleveland.com: "Armetta McGlothen arrived a week ago with her 8-month-old son at the Salvation Army's Harbor Light complex in Cleveland. With this shelter and several others filled to capacity on most nights, the timing couldn't be better for Cleveland to receive an expected $10 million in stimulus money to help prevent homelessness in 2009, officials say."]