In Brief:
- Changes to a Notice of Funding Opportunity released by HUD would bar applicants from jurisdictions that don’t commit to a range of Trump administration goals.
- Some groups had been notified by their members of Congress that they were going to receive grants before the application was reopened under the new criteria.
- The National Alliance to End Homelessness and other groups filed a lawsuit, and a judge temporarily blocked HUD from awarding grants under the new guidelines.
One day in August, Frank Shea, the executive director of Women’s Development Corporation, an affordable-housing builder based in Providence, R.I., got a call from U.S. Senator Jack Reed’s office. It was a courtesy call alerting the group that they were going to be awarded about $7 million in federal funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for a housing project. The funds were to be used for 14 units of permanently supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness, which the group was planning to build in collaboration with a local domestic violence organization as part of a larger housing project.
The group coordinated with the senator’s office on writing a press release. The announcement was supposed to be made three days later. A few weeks went by with no additional word. Then on a Friday afternoon in early September, HUD suddenly reissued a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the program. And it had a new list of eligibility criteria: Eligible projects, according to the NOFO, “must be located in a jurisdiction that cooperates with Federal immigration enforcement,” and which “prohibits public camping or loitering and enforces such prohibition,” among other criteria.
“It was after 4 o'clock on a Friday, with a due date of the following Friday,” Shea says. “We can’t tell the city of Providence what to do or the state of Rhode Island what to do, so we can’t really certify to this.”
In fact, according to a lawsuit filed this month by Women’s Development Corporation and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Rhode Island is one of 36 states where applicants would likely be disqualified from receiving grants under the new eligibility terms. Other criteria apply directly to the applicants, including that they will not operate safe injection sites or allow illegal drug use, and “will not deny the sex binary in humans or promote the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit say the application criteria are neither relevant to the program nor legal, and that the reissued NOFO is an effort “to advance the President’s ideological vision.” They won the first round of the legal fight when a judge temporarily blocked HUD from awarding funds under the new application, and suspended the program’s expiration date. But the fate of the funds is still up in the air.
The program in question, called Continuum of Care Builds (CoC Builds), funds permanently supportive housing “for individuals and families experiencing homelessness where one member of the household has a disability.” It’s a relatively small subset of federal funding for continuums of care, which are local and regional networks of housing and homeless services providers. It isn’t unusual for NOFOs to be reissued when presidential administrations turn over, says Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. The CoC Builds NOFO was initially released under the Biden administration, then reissued under the Trump administration in May with fairly similar criteria. But it is unusual for housing-related grants to be contingent on factors like cooperation with immigration enforcement. And it’s especially unusual for grants to be offered on a seemingly first-come, first-served basis for applicants who self-certify their own eligibility based on a list of criteria, like the NOFO issued in September, Oliva says.
“This is the first time that we’ve seen this in homelessness money,” she says. “We’re also not completely surprised, if you look at the totality of policy recommendations that have come out of this administration since Jan. 20.”
The Trump administration has been clear about its intent to align all federal programs and spending with its ideological goals. Trump signed an early executive order, for example, committing the federal government to “using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.” A few weeks later, HUD Secretary Scott Turner announced he was blocking enforcement of a rule providing equal access based on gender identities.
“Here at this agency we are carrying out the mission laid out by our President Trump on Jan. 20, when he signed an executive order to restore biological truth to the federal government,” Turner said at the time. “It’s time to get rid of all the far-left gender ideology and get government out of the way of what the Lord established from the beginning when he created man in his own image, male and female.”
The administration, while it has approved expansions of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, has also proposed cuts to other housing assistance programs. In its spring budget proposal the administration proposed cutting all funding for continuums of care. It’s also signaled other changes to federal spending. The U.S. Department of Transportation announced an intention earlier this year to prioritize grants to communities with higher-than-average marriage and birth rates. Congress has also rescinded some funding dedicated for local transportation projects in accord with the administration’s efforts to dismantle equity-focused programs.
In their lawsuit, the National Alliance to End Homelessness and Women’s Development Corporation argue that HUD needs to promulgate new rules if it wants to issue NOFOs like the one for the CoC Builds program. While a judge has blocked HUD from awarding CoC Builds grants under the new criteria, it’s not likely it could force the department to issue grants to any specific applicants. So some projects are in limbo. Women’s Development Corporation, for example, won’t build the 14 units geared toward domestic violence survivors without the money it was anticipating from the grant.
Sojourner House, the women’s shelter in Rhode Island that was expecting to partner with the group, declined to comment on the lawsuit. HUD also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Developers and advocates, meanwhile, worry that more federal funding, which underpins much of the support for people experiencing homelessness in the U.S., will be made contingent on factors outside their control.
“Everybody’s just kind of holding their breath and seeing what happens next in a difficult time,” Shea says.
