The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced in late January 2015 that Mobile City and County, together with Baldwin County, would receive close to $3.9 million in federal Continuum of Care grant funding to support local homeless housing and service programs.
The award was part of a larger $1.8 billion round of nationwide funding that HUD distributed to roughly 8,400 homeless housing and service programs across the country. Alabama as a whole received more than $16.8 million, spread across several regional entities that coordinate homeless services. The Mobile City and County/Baldwin County region’s share, just under $3.9 million, was the second-largest allocation among Alabama’s coordinated care areas, trailing only the Birmingham, Jefferson, St. Clair and Shelby County region.
Continuum of Care funding is designed to help local agencies provide permanent supportive housing, rapid rehousing and other services aimed at moving people experiencing homelessness into stable housing. Most of the money awarded to Alabama communities, including the Mobile-Baldwin region, came in the form of renewal grants for programs already operating in the area, rather than brand-new initiatives. Renewal amounts generally stay flat year to year unless a community’s fair market rents increase, in which case HUD may add a modest amount, typically no more than a few thousand dollars, to help cover rising housing costs.
Homeless advocates who work with these grants note that the funding levels an area receives are tied directly to local point-in-time counts, the annual one-night tally of people experiencing homelessness that HUD uses to gauge need and allocate resources. Mobile’s 2015 point-in-time count was scheduled to take place over a morning and overnight period just days after the grant announcement, giving local coalitions a fresh snapshot of homelessness levels heading into the new funding cycle.
The Continuum of Care model relies on a network of nonprofit agencies, local governments and housing authorities working together within a defined geographic area to apply for and administer HUD funds. In the Mobile-Baldwin region, that network includes emergency shelters, transitional housing providers and permanent supportive housing operators that serve everyone from single adults to families with children facing housing instability along the central Gulf Coast.
While the bulk of Alabama’s new project dollars for 2015 went to a rapid rehousing initiative in the Birmingham area, the steady renewal funding flowing into Mobile and Baldwin counties represented a continuation of years of federal investment in the region’s homeless response system. Local officials and service providers have said consistent renewal funding is critical, since a single gap in Continuum of Care dollars can force shelters and housing programs to scale back services for vulnerable residents with few other safety nets.
The announcement offered South Alabama communities a reminder of how federal housing dollars flow through a regional structure that groups Mobile, its surrounding county and neighboring Baldwin County together, pooling resources to address homelessness across the coastal area rather than treating each jurisdiction separately.