Housing Native Americans in Today’s Self-Determination Environment

Housing Native Americans in Today’s Self-Determination Environment

Rachelle Levitt, Director of PD&R's Research Utilization Division.

The recently published, Spring 2015 edition of Evidence Matters explores the evolution of tribal housing planning and development as well as the evidence-based research and data collection that has been undertaken to aid in planning for housing development in Native American communities. It has been acknowledged that Native American tribes face unique and complex challenges to housing and community development in their communities. Causes can be traced to underlying economic issues, difficult and remote geography, limited credit markets, poor infrastructure, and unique legal obstacles that each contribute to severe housing needs for many Native American households. In addressing these challenges, federal policies have evolved to enable greater self-determination for Native American communities to build housing that meets their distinctive needs and cultural relevancy. As noted in Evidence Matters, the United States is employing a self-determination framework to fulfill its legal trust obligation to promote the welfare of Native Americans in Indian Country.

Historically federal housing assistance to tribes was provided through top-down management, which was distrusted and considered overly bureaucratic; in addition, it did not empower tribal leaders to focus on building strong local communities. The Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act (NAHASDA) of 1996 granted tribes the authority to determine their own housing plans, including the types of programs, the populations served, and the methods of delivery. NAHASDA replaced nine HUD programs with the Indian Housing Block Grant Program (IHBG), the largest program under the new act. Funding for the block grant is based on a formula, which is negotiated with tribal leaders, including the size of the low-income population; housing quality; and the number of households that are cost burdened (spending more than 30% of their income on housing costs) or severely cost burdened (spending more than 50% of their income on housing costs), in overcrowded units, and lack plumbing or kitchen facilities. Negotiated rule-making continues today. Evidence Matters recently spoke with Rodger Boyd, deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Native American Programs, and reports "[a]ccording to Boyd, the noncompetitive formula levels the playing field and ensures that every eligible tribe receives funding on an annual basis."

Since IHBG’s inception, $11.4 billion has been invested to support a range of affordable housing and community development activities in tribal communities. Over the life of the program through 2014, IHBG recipients have built or acquired nearly 37,000 affordable housing units and substantially rehabilitated almost 72,000 units. In addition, IHBG recipients currently maintain more than 46,000 “HUD units” that were funded before NAHASDA was enacted.

Carol Gore, executive director of the Cook Inlet Housing Authority in Alaska, focused on this topic, states that NAHASDA is “unequivocally the reason for their success,” citing the program’s flexibility and its vastly less bureaucratic nature compared with previous initiatives. The Cook Inlet Housing Authority (CIHA) Mountain View Village, Alaska was the 2014 winner of the HUD Secretary’s Opportunity and Empowerment Award, illustrating the depth of innovation NAHASDA enables. For this scattered site redevelopment project, CIHA collaborated with the Mountain View Council to align the two organization's redevelopment preferences and offer citizens an active role in the planning process. Their goals included decreased absentee landlordism, increased homeownership, and demolition of blighted, deteriorated, or vacant structures.

To aid tribes to develop and implement local solutions to these help meet their challenges, local tribes have ambitious goals to improve the collection and accuracy of their population statistics. These efforts have included ongoing use of American Community Survey data to improve the accuracy of census counts. In addition, in partnership with the Office of Native American Programs, PD&R will be releasing “An Assessment of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian Housing Needs” in 2016, which is expected to be the most complete housing survey since its last release in 1996. While this study will substantially inform policy making, individual tribal data collection will continue to be necessary as this is a study based on a sampling methodology and not on actual counts. To provide such vital data, tribes have partnered with researchers to produce studies that more accurately count homeless populations, for example, a significant problem for Native American tribes. Evidence Matters concludes its Research Spotlight noting that expanded and more accurate data will inform better policy and better outcomes. Better local planning, new housing developments, and a greater understanding of tribal needs are the result of improved data collection.

As Assistant Secretary Katherine O’Regan notes in her message in the Spring 2015 issue of Evidence Matters, “tribes have been empowered to implement locally driven housing strategies through the benefits of the policy of self-determination” founded in the tenets of NAHASDA.