Nashville received a record $9.7 million in Continuum of Care (CoC) funding this year. That’s roughly a 200-percent increase over the past seven years to fight homelessness in Nashville-Davidson County.
During the same time period, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) allocation grew by 55 percent to a record high allocation of $3.16 billion, which was distributed among 385 local CoCs.
According to HUD, the CoC Program is, “designed to promote a community-wide commitment to the goal of ending homelessness; to provide funding for efforts by nonprofit providers, states, Indian Tribes or tribally designated housing entities.” It also should work with “local governments to quickly rehouse homeless individuals, families, persons fleeing domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking, and youth while minimizing the trauma and dislocation caused by homelessness; to promote access to and effective utilization of mainstream programs by homeless individuals and families; and to optimize self-sufficiency among those experiencing homelessness.”
The way I usually like to describe a CoC is as three things:
- A designated geographic area, which in our case is Nashville-Davidson County;
- An organized community effort to build a system that is capable of preventing and ending homelessness for people in a collaborative way; and
- A competitive federal funding stream to support this work.
For years, Nashville’s federal CoC allocation hovered between the $3-$3.5-million mark. Then local leaders started to ask the question how we could increase the federal CoC allocations to Nashville, we realized that we first must fix our systems approach and become more collaborative. That’s when the CoC partners started focusing on improving its Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) to collect client-level data and measure outcomes, changed the HMIS Lead Agency, started implementing coordinated entry utilizing the HMIS database, restructured the CoC governance including adding a strong committee system, and revamped CoC required governance documents.
In addition, the CoC started working closely with HUD technical assistance providers, which in essence are consultants paid for by HUD, to help local CoC’s with the restructuring. This allowed for clarity and closer communication with HUD to understand complex federal requirements.
It is important, however, that CoC leaders understand that HUD wants to see collaborative local efforts that include all possible funding sources (government and private) to build a strong homeless crisis response system.
The latest awards to Nashville-Davidson County break down the following way:
Nashville has not experienced the highest percentage increases among Tennessee cities between Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 and FY2023. Thus, the CoC may want to communicate with Memphis and Chattanooga and compare approaches in systems improvement.
While CoC awards are competitive, HUD usually examines progress within one city. In other words, we compete against ourselves. For example, if HUD finds that homelessness data has improved, that there are more projects funded that focus on HUD priorities (which is permanent supportive housing for people experiencing chronic homelessness households experiencing domestic violence, youth programs, and Veterans), then HUD may be inclined to reward a city with more dollars than the year prior. An increase in the overall federal allocation certainly helps.
Another interesting comparison is between the cities of Nashville and Memphis. In size, the cities are similar. However, in FY2018 Memphis already received $6.7 million in CoC funding compared to Nashville’s $3.6 million. Nashville, then sharply caught up with the restructuring of its CoC and even surpassed Memphis in FY2021. Learning from other cities may be a good strategy to continue Nashville’s trajectory of increasing funding.
And finally, I did a comparison of peer cities, which the Nashville Chamber typically uses due to their similarities in size and economy. I added in parentheses the results of last year’s Point In Time (PIT) count numbers, which are based on a one-night homeless count at the end of January of 2023.
Denver stands out. The reason is that cities like Denver ($32.8 million in CoC funds), Houston ($59.6 million) and Baltimore ($29.3 million) fall into a category of CoCs that, frankly, they were not asleep at the wheel in the 1990s when the federal government started dishing out large grants to cities and began formulating the concept of the Continuum of Care. They went in strong and collaborated closely with HUD. Granted, they also generally had notably larger homelessness numbers than Nashville. Thus, the initial formula that the federal government used to divide up CoC funds were significantly more generous with those cities.
However, there is hope. I spoke with federal officials a few years ago to figure out how Nashville could go about increasing its CoC funds. The response was threefold:
- a) Show that you are continuously improving your collaborative systems approach, find local dollars to replace federal funds, and reallocate funds based on performance and when you could replace the federal funds with other dollars;
- b) Ensure that you have nonprofits who apply for every available bonus funding or special government allocations such as the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Program, which eventually increased Nashville-Davidson County’s CoC funds by $1.9 million; and
- c) Once we feel we have high quality HMIS data and a well-functioning systems approach, we should talk to HUD about revisiting our overall allocation to increase funding to a similar level such as Houston, which currently is the CoC all others are looking to.
The key to success remains in serving people well by making housing accessible, offering individualized and sustainable support services, and implementing a true Housing First effort, which HUD supports.