In a continuing effort to prevent and end homelessness, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today is making a record $2.3 billion available to support thousands of local homeless assistance programs nationwide. Read HUD’s Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA).
HUD’s Continuum of Care homeless assistance grants support a wide variety of local programs from street outreach and assessment programs to transitional and permanent housing for individuals, including, veterans, youth, families, and persons experiencing long-term or chronic homelessness.
“While Housing First is critical and necessary to place our most vulnerable on a path to self-sufficiency, we should be mindful not to define success as a Washington routine to check a box, shelter someone – indefinitely – and ask for more money the next year,” said HUD Secretary Ben Carson. “We want to ensure that awards are granted to programs that prove to be successful in a meaningful way based on an evidence-based performance.”
“Today we announce another historic investment to house and serve our most vulnerable neighbors living in our shelters and, too frequently, on our streets,” said David C. Woll, Jr., HUD Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of Community Planning and Development. “HUD will continue to work closely with our local partners to support those programs that are proving most effective in reducing and even ending homelessness in their neighborhoods.”
Through the Continuum of Care grant competition, HUD is encouraging communities to pursue evidence-based approaches to end veteran, chronic, family, and youth homelessness and to use their data to strategically target their available resources to end homelessness. To help communities reach these goals, there is greater flexibility provided to create a variety of new projects that will allow recipients to serve different populations of individuals and families experiencing homelessness as well as to support increased data collection and analysis.
HUD requires prospective grantees to submit applications electronically at https://esnaps.hud.gov/. Any changes to HUD-published funding notices will published in the Federal Register and will be made available on HUD’s website. The deadline for Fiscal Year 2019 Continuum of Care grant applications is September 30, 2019 by 8:00 PM ET.
