At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at ASU committed to examining the public policy and public health impact of COVID-19 on the nation’s estimated 600,000 homeless people – an extremely vulnerable group whose threatened well-being had significant and previously unreported implications for general public health. Reporters filed 140 public records requests to more than 40 counties identified in a Howard Center analysis as having homeless populations most vulnerable to a COVID outbreak. The responses provided an inside look at how local governments were trying (or not) to meet the needs of their homeless populations amid the pandemic.
The team also found that HUD, which oversees homeless programs, had not required its national network of providers to gather infection or death data on homeless COVID victims, and strapped public health departments were largely not tracking COVID homeless cases either. Nonetheless, the Trump administration’s homelessness czar told Congress in July there had been just 130 homeless deaths nationally. The students sought to truth-squad that claim and found that, in just six localities with large homeless populations, at least 153 homeless deaths had occurred over the same time period. Surveying the few places that were trying to keep count, by early August the reporters had tallied at least 206 homeless deaths.
The series also revealed that despite Congress allocating $4 billion for emergency homeless programs as part of the CARES Act in March, funding delays and confusing spending restrictions had hampered efforts to protect homeless people as the pandemic worsened, leaving many on the streets, crowded in shelters and disconnected from services. Fewer than half of the eligible 362 counties, states, cities and territories had accessed all of their federal funding by the start of December, according to an analysis of government data by the Howard Center, and 37 communities hadn’t tapped any of their homeless aid. Reporters created a searchable database of CARES Act aid payouts that allowed readers to check if and when homeless aid due to their own community had been paid out. Internal HUD documents obtained by the Howard Center and interviews with homelessness experts and providers also revealed behind-the-scenes power struggles in Washington over whether prerequisites, like sobriety and work obligations, should be determinants of housing assistance.
A major finding of the follow-the-money part of the investigation was that HUD’s methodology for calculating homeless aid for decades has had nothing to do with actual homelessness. Reporters learned that the traditional formula HUD used to calculate local and regional homeless aid did not take into account the number of homeless people living in a given area. Because the CARES Act included an unprecedented amount of homeless aid, Congress mandated that HUD come up with a new formula targeted to an area’s actual homelessness in disbursing the $4 billion. The one-time CARES Act formula resulted in millions more going to places with larger homeless populations, such as California, New York City and Washington state. Working on the advice of experts, including from HUD, Howard Center data reporters applied the new formula retroactively around the country and found that if the more-targeted formula had been used over the last decade, areas with high homeless rates would have gotten tens of millions more in aid than they actually did.