As Washtenaw County faces increased housing insecurity in recent years with a surge this past winter, county officials and nonprofits around Ann Arbor are hoping for relief in the form of funding from the American Rescue Plan. The Washtenaw County Office of Community & Economic Development applied for the Home American Rescue Plan Program this past March with hopes of building more permanent affordable and supportive housing around the county by 2030.
HOME-ARP provides about $5 billion nationally in the form of grants to support communities dealing primarily with homelessness. Its grants can be used for the development or restoration of affordable housing, rental assistance, supportive housing services and non-congregate shelters. Affordable housing means tenants only have to pay a certain amount of their paycheck towards housing, usually less than 30%. Supportive housing consists of housing units that come with social services such as addiction services, counseling and youth programming.
Morghan Boydston, human services manager for OCED, oversees grant funding from state and federal programs. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Boydston said her office also works to track housing insecurity trends in Washtenaw County and share this data with the community. This past winter, due to increased rates of homelessness, OCED had to take on the additional temporary role of directing community programs.
“I think one direct impact (OCED has had) is the programming that we’ve seen (this winter) — the winter shelter response and the hoteling of families,” Boydston said. “That typically isn’t the role that the county would play, (but) we’ve had to step in and provide that resource as a response to the increased family homelessness.”
Boydston said many factors are contributing to this increased housing insecurity, including the COVID-19 pandemic, high inflation rates and the fact that rent control is illegal in the state of Michigan. She said ultimately, a lack of resources is the main reason for the crisis facing Washtenaw County.
“Any community can expect – with the resources they’re given – to be able to solve one in four eligible families’ homelessness crisis,” Boydston said. “That means we are only resourced to provide services, or actually attend to the crisis, of 25% of the people who are eligible. At a baseline, that’s where the crisis comes from: not enough resources on any level to attend to the crisis.”
Washtenaw County submitted the HOME-ARP Funding Allocation Plan to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on March 31.The current draft of the plan was informed by conversations with community organizations and analysis of homelessness data within Washtenaw County. It would allocate 77% of the funding toward the development of about 60 new affordable housing units. In an interview with The Daily, Tara Cohen, housing and infrastructure manager for OCED said this was motivated by the lack of affordable housing currently available in the county.
“The sad truth is that we’ve lost at least 990 affordable units since 2015,” Cohen said. “We’ve only gained about 233, and we have about somewhere between 400-500 in the pipeline for over the next three years, but as you can see from those numbers, we’re not even getting back to where we were yet in 2015.”
The county would also allocate 11% of the funding to supportive services for some of these housing units, 5% to non-profit operations in the county and 7% to administrative staff to ensure HOME-ARP program compliance over the life of the funding. Cohen said while drafting the allocation plan, they felt the most impactful way to use this one-time funding would be to focus on one large goal, such as the development of affordable housing, rather than putting small amounts into many different programs in the county.
“We found ourselves going in the direction of putting the majority (of the funding) toward development of affordable rental housing,” Cohen said. “We were trying to not water down the funding such that we were covering all the different possible categories: non-congregate shelter, development, affordable housing, and supportive services and tenant based rental assistance.”
If HUD approves the OCED plan, Cohen said they will return the current allocation plan to the community for additional rounds of comments in order to ensure equitable distribution and maximum impact.
According to Cohen and Boydston, OCED reached out to multiple local organizations for direct comment on their initial application to HUD and their funding plan. Avalon Housing is a community-based non-profit that develops, owns and manages supportive housing in Ann Arbor, Chelsea and Dexter. Wendy Carty-Saxon, director of real estate development at Avalon Housing, said in an email to The Daily she advised OCED to put the majority of their grant funding towards the development of affordable housing to create a long-term solution for the county.
“Given the limited and one-time nature of this funding, using the funds to develop supportive housing enables the initial investment to support the operation of units as supportive housing into the foreseeable future,” Carty-Saxon wrote.
Carty-Saxon also pointed out the discrepancies between Ann Arbor and broader Washtenaw County housing services. Ann Arbor has an Affordable Housing Millage to provide funding for supportive and affordable housing in the city and has also actively studied its existing properties for future designation of affordable housing.
“These combined efforts are providing great opportunities for affordable and supportive housing development within the City of Ann Arbor, and can help lead to the leveraging of other funding sources,” Carty-Saxon wrote. “Funding for supportive housing services outside of the City of Ann Arbor can be more challenging, which is one reason we suggested some County HOME ARP funding be used to fund supportive housing services (similar to the Affordable Millage structure).”
Jennifer Hall, executive director of the Ann Arbor Housing Commission, echoed the importance of permanent housing as a long-term solution to housing insecurity in Ann Arbor in an email to The Daily. Hall said public subsidies are critical to increase affordable housing availability, either on the development side through free or reduced land costs, or on the operations side through reduced taxes, energy efficient utility subsidies and rental vouchers.
“If the private sector were able to build enough housing to meet the current demand in the County, then there would be a better distribution of price points for people of all incomes, but it would still be insufficient to meet the demand for housing for households that have the lowest household incomes,” Hall wrote. “The cost to construct housing and the cost to operate housing … is too high to be financially feasible or sustainable without significant public subsidy.”
Hall said she believes current national housing policies have failed to address housing insecurity. She said while this project alone cannot solve the housing crisis, it is crucial to ensure people have affordable places to live.
“Shelters and eviction prevention funding are needed as a short-term crisis response, but they should not be our long-term solution as a society to our failed housing policies,” Hall said. “It is hard to prioritize limited local funds that are wildly inadequate to address the magnitude of the problem. Regardless, we need to make a commitment, no matter how small, to adding more permanently affordable housing owned by mission-driven organizations to the local housing market.”
Boydston emphasized that homelessness is usually the result of a combination of systemic problems, rather than the fault of any one individual. .
“We need to change the narrative around what makes homelessness a thing,” Boydston said. “I think people blame the individual for having experienced homelessness and don’t give enough credit to all the other things, (such as) lack of quality employment opportunities, lack of wealth building opportunities, lack of education opportunities (and) lack of quality accessible health care and mental health care.”
Jennifer Erb-Downward, a research specialist at Poverty Solutions at the University highlighted the center’s Michigan-focused poverty and well-being map as a resource for learning more about homelessness.
“You can search by county to look at the data on the percent and number of children identified as experiencing homelessness who are enrolled in public school,” Erb-Downward said. “This could give you a sense of how much larger the issue of housing instability is in Washtenaw County than the shelter or PIT count data alone indicate.”
LSA sophomore Liem Swanson, co-president of the Michigan Movement club, told The Daily the organization is working to raise awareness on the University of Michigan campus about homelessness in Ann Arbor and the surrounding areas.
“The club is trying to help find solutions to homelessness in Ann Arbor that are more lasting,” Swanson said. “We’re trying to find ways that we can increase awareness about homelessness for students, to bridge the gap between the student population and everyone else in Ann Arbor.”
Daily Staff Reporters Sirianna Blanck and Emma Swanson can be reached at sirianna@umich.edu and emms@umich.edu.