Housing Highlights in the President’s Budget: Using and Investing in Research

Housing Highlights in the President’s Budget: Using and Investing in Research

Katherine O’Regan, Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research.

On February 9, 2016, President Obama submitted his fiscal year 2017 budget proposal to Congress. This final budget is the administration’s last chance to set forth its view of what policy issues the nation should prioritize and how best to tackle them. Addressing poverty and inequality through housing is key among the priorities; using and developing research are keys to “how.”

The president’s budget requests $48.9 billion in discretionary budget authority for HUD, an increase of $1.9 billion over HUD’s 2016 enacted budget, which in turn was $2 billion over funding levels for each of the two previous years. In an important and even bold addition, the president has proposed $11 billion on the mandatory side of the budget over the next 10 years to end homelessness among families with children and to sustain this goal.

Ending Family Homelessness ($11 Billion Over 10 Years)

This proposal is significant both for what it prioritizes for funding and for how it spends those funds. Starting with ‘what,’ the administration established addressing homelessness as a priority right from the start through Opening Doors, the first-ever federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness. This plan was nothing if not ambitious, setting the goals of ending veteran homelessness by 2015, chronic homelessness by 2017, and homelessness among families with children and youth by 2020. On the first, great strides have been made; veteran homelessness declined 36 percent between 2010 and 2015, and, as of this writing, 21 communities and 2 states have virtually ended veteran homelessness. The national goal has not yet been reached but is actually within sight. This remarkable achievement required the dedication of resources from across federal agencies, across all levels of government, and across systems of service providers.

Although family homelessness has declined by 19 percent nationwide since 2010, approximately 160,000 families with children still experienced homelessness last year; reaching the goal of ending homelessness among families requires more resources for the right policies, and that is reflected in the FY 2017 budget request. Given limits on discretionary spending, which includes HUD’s budget, the request for more resources is for mandatory spending. This highlights that the caps on discretionary spending, which leave three-quarters of those who need housing assistance unserved, needs to be addressed.

The budget also specifies how those dollars should be spent. The largest investments are in housing choice vouchers and rapid rehousing, through established and future partnerships between public housing authorities and Continuum of Care systems across the country. The combination of investments is driven by what we have learned over the past six years, in large part through HUD’s research on family homelessness. Rigorous research from HUD’s Family Options Study has shown that vouchers are highly effective at increasing housing stability for families, dramatically decreasing the use of homeless shelters while also improving nonhousing outcomes; vouchers cut child separations in half, decrease reports of domestic violence by more than half, and cost less than either transitional housing or usual care. Rapid rehousing is less expensive than all other options, including usual care. The Family Options Study, along with our improved data for scoping and following the problem, made it possible to lay out the right policies to fund to end family homelessness.

It is worth emphasizing that this proposal to end family homelessness could not have been written six years ago. It requires knowing what works — something that we did not know at the start of this administration but given the investments made in research, we do now. This is a tremendous accomplishment. It is a testament to an administration that has continuously emphasized evidence-based policy, investing not only in what works but also in the research to learn what works-- that is a critical part of ‘how’ to tackle policy problems; it entails not just adopting the policies that have been proven to work but also building the knowledge base so that we can continue to do so.

The president’s fiscal year 2017 budget does this through a set of investments in research in high-priority policy areas. Two research proposals here at the Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) are among these investments and are worth highlighting, as they are about both what we need to learn (priority policy questions) and how to go about research. We have proposed creating two new core research support functions within our research and technology budget, each designed to tap expertise via federal advisory committees and match long-term policy and research commitments.

Learning From the Moving to Work Expansion ($10 Million)
In the fiscal year 2016 Consolidated Appropriations Act, Congress directed HUD to expand the Moving to Work (MTW) program to an additional 100 public housing authorities over the next seven years. MTW essentially provides public housing authorities with a large degree of regulatory flexibility — including the flexibility to alter programs that can make MTW sites the source of program innovations and pilots. HUD has only recently begun rigorously evaluating outcomes from existing MTW sites. To ensure that HUD systematically learns from the mandated expansion, Congress has also directed HUD to establish an MTW research advisory committee tasked with developing specific policies that each new cohort of MTW agencies must adopt, and also directed HUD to rigorously evaluate the results. This mandate creates a long-term research obligation for HUD, and PD&R’s budget needs to reflect that responsibility. The pairing of research support with the expansion provides a real opportunity to learn from the MTW interventions about the most promising policies to improve the delivery of federally assisted housing and life outcomes for the families we serve.

Energy and Housing Innovation ($5 Million)
On December 11, 2015, the United States, along with 195 other nations, committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As part of that landmark commitment, 20 countries, including the United States, pledged to double their governmental clean energy research and development investment over five years. To support this effort, known as Mission Innovation, HUD proposes to invest in research on innovations that encourage builders, property owners, and tenants to reduce the consumption of carbon-based energy. As with the MTW core research, this proposal would include the creation of an advisory group to propose simple, testable approaches to facilitate long-term behavior change in the housing sector. This work would leverage the substantial advances in cost-effective building technologies by using social science behavioral insights to span the last mile — informing and incentivizing technology adoption and behavioral changes to reduce energy waste and carbon emissions.

The final budget of an administration is both a starting point for budget negotiations and a chance to make a clear statement about priorities and direction. The proposed 2017 budget makes clear — perhaps more than any previous budget — the importance of housing assistance as part of the nation’s safety net. It also holds true to the development and use of research and evidence. This is a very good starting point for the next steps in budget and policy debates.