Homelessness Law Blog

In Connecticut, the number of homeless students has risen 35 percent since the recession began, often forcing children from location to location with great frequency. But because of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act’s education provisions, students such as homeless 13-year-old Alvarez Tutein can remain at the same school through their housing upheaval. Alvarez receives transportation from Bristol to his school in New Britain, and that academic stability gives him a rare constant in an otherwise volatile world.

The loss of a home can leave children without stable forces in their lives. But education should never be in flux.  “Mobile” students – those with two or more school changes in the previous year – perform significantly worse in reading and math, are 77 percent more likely to act out, and are 50 percent less likely to graduate high school. Worse still, an inadequate education has a snowball effect: those who fail to graduate high school are more than twice as likely to slip into poverty in a single year, live 9.2 years fewer on average, and earn $1 million less over their lifetimes than college graduates.

The McKinney-Vento Act includes provisions designed to protect homeless children’s rights to a stable education. The act requires school districts to take specific actions to make school attendance possible, including:

• Providing transportation to the school where a child was originally enrolled
• If parents decide to place a child in a new school, ensuring that the child is enrolled immediately – even if documentation has not yet been received
• Ensuring that school records are promptly transferred

But as homeless children often need help enrolling and participating in school, and districts often need to be reminded of their McKinney-Vento obligations, the Law Center is re-releasing “Education of Homeless Children & Youth: The Guide to Their Rights.” This updated booklet – intended for parents and students, school personnel and social workers, and any and all advocates – clearly lays out homeless students’ McKinney-Vento rights and the steps necessary to fulfill them.

As the number of homeless children continues to rise – the most recent data available from the National Center for Homeless Education show a 41 percent increase in the number of homeless children enrolled in school over the previous two years – now is the time to step up our efforts to protect their rights. Students like Alvarez deserve our full support.

- Alex Knobel, Development & Communications Intern

Photo credit: Guillermo Ossa

As national LGBT Pride Month draws to a close, advocates for gay and lesbian individuals have unprecedented cause for hope and celebration.  In 2011 alone, a remarkable succession of legal and legislative victories has already promised to reshape the civil rights landscape for this population, in matters ranging from employment to parenting to immigration.  From the Obama administration’s disavowal of the Defense of Marriage Act and suspension of same-sex spousal deportation proceedings to the passage of historic legislation granting lesbian and gay couples the freedom to marry in New York State, LGBT rights continue to advance at a rate once unimaginable.

Depsite these victories, however, discrimination against LGBT individuals can hardly be dismissed as the remnant of a less enlightened era.  Perhaps nowhere is this reality more entrenched than in the experiences of gay and lesbian youth, particularly with respect to housing and economic support.  According to the National Network of Runaway and Youth services, anywhere between 20 and 40 percent of homeless youth are gay.  Not only are LGBT youth more likely than their heterosexual peers to enter the child welfare system, they are also far more likely to age out of foster care without finding an adoptive family.

Like their heterosexual peers, homeless LGBT youth regularly encounter barriers to free and appropriate education.  Not only must these students contend with harassment and discrimination due to their sexual orientation or gender identity, they also experience heightened obstacles to stable education once they leave their parents’ homes. Despite the existence of federal laws to protect their right to public education, homeless youth are routinely stymied by residency requirements, guardianship requirements, lack of transportation, and access to health and other records.  Such added factors as frequent school transfers, lack of quiet, safe places to study, and hunger can further hamper academic achievement.

As a result, gay and transgender homeless youth, and homeless youth on the whole, drop out of school at staggering rates, with one 2008 New York study finding a full half of respondents to be high school dropouts. Similarly, a service provider for gay and transgender homeless youth in Detroit reports that over 60 percent of its clientele has dropped out of school due to bullying or discrimination.

As LGBT pride parades assemble and disband throughout the country, it’s easy to overlook the challenges faced by homeless youth amid the celebrations of their elders. While the federal government has begun to take account of these struggles, issuing an agency memo on the crisis facing gay teens in the child welfare system and introducing the Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act to strengthen family support for state wards, local school personnel remain an essential conduit to safety and stability.  Armed with an understanding of the law and appropriate resources, they can make the difference between pride and prejudice for LGBT youth.

- Rachel Natelson, Staff Attorney

Photo Credit: MKtp

The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty is pleased to serve as a conference partner for the 2011 National Conference on Ending Homelessness. The following guest post comes to us from Catherine An, communications and media relations specialist at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

It’s just three weeks until the Alliance’s National Conference on Ending Homelessness and we hope to see you all there!

While homelessness is always a relevant and salient issue, we know that this is an especially important time. The persistent recession is leading to increased risk of homelessness, as we outlined in our State of Homelessness in America report earlier this year. Findings from other leading national voices – including Priced Out from the Technical Assistance Collaborative, Out of Reach from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and information on state budget cuts from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities – indicate that homelessness is on the rise. There is much work to be done in order to make real progress towards ending homelessness.

And the work starts with us!

This year at the conference, we’ll be offering our usual wealth of workshops covering topics from prevention to rapid re-housing to re-entry to domestic violence. There are a number of new and emerging conversations about ending homelessness and ways in which communities can be more innovative and resourceful while facing budget cuts.

For the first time, we’ll be hosting our Awards Ceremony in conjunction with the conference. At the Awards Ceremony, we honor the men, women, and organizations that work so hard to end homelessness. This year, we are excited to honor some luminaries in the field:

• The Los Angeles Business Leaders Task Force on Homelessness, who spearheaded the creation of Home for Good and LA’s plan to end chronic and veteran homelessness,
• Representatives Judy Biggert and Alcee Hastings, members of the Congressional Caucus on Homelessness,
• and The Road Home, a service organization in Salt Lake City, UT.

Find out more about the awards on the event website.

Every year, we look forward to the hundreds of people who converge in Washington, D.C. to discuss new innovations, strategies, practices, and policies to achieve our common goal: to end homelessness in the United States.  See you there!

My first day at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty was 5 years ago last Sunday. At that point, in the middle of 2006, our housing market was being celebrated as a boom, making huge profits for some, though we know that even in those supposed times of plenty, millions of people experienced homelessness each year, and as real estate prices increased, gentrification was forcing more and more people out of their homes. 

But because the market was apparently making so many people winners, it was tough to make the case for those who were the victims of the market that the government needed to play a role in rebalancing the market or correcting for its failures. And at that point, the Bush Administration firmly denied that housing could be conceived of as a right, and was actively flaunting any notion that human rights standards should bind our behavior. 

5 years later, we’re in a very different place. On the negative side, our housing boom went bust, forcing millions more families and individuals to struggle with their housing costs, suffer through poor conditions, and at worst, sending them onto the streets. On the positive side, President Obama has committed his administration to ending – not just coping with – homelessness, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has stated that human rights norms have a role in shaping our housing policy, and the State Department has brought us back into the international fold by affirming housing and other economic and social rights as rights. 

While the reality for people on the ground remains grim, these are more than rhetorical changes. And they didn’t happen by accident. There has been a growing movement for the human right to housing over these past 5 years, and I believe that these initial changes are just the beginning for a new kind of housing policy, one that recognizes housing as a basic human right.  

This Tuesday and Wednesday, we held our 6^th National Forum on the Human Right to Housing, which was itself evidence of this change. 5 years ago, we would have been hard pressed to get a State Department official to talk about housing as a human right, let alone a domestic agency official. But this year, most of our panels had representatives from HUD, Justice, Veterans Affairs, and other domestic agencies, all of whom increasingly understand their roles not just as executors of policy, but as implementers of our human rights obligations. The more than 150 participants at the Forum from all across the country drew from a wide range of lawyers, advocates, and directly affected victims of the housing crisis, all ready to work together to promote housing as a human right. C-SPAN covered our closing plenary, moderated by author and journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, in which 3 formerly homeless individuals shared their stories and explained why they believe calling housing a human right is essential. And the Forum concluded with a briefing at the Capitol on a human rights analysis of the Federal Plan to End Homelessness, attended by dozens of Congressional staffers and interns, as well as other advocates. 

In the next 5 years, I’ve got big dreams for implementing the human right to housing here in the U.S. Of course many of those dreams may not be realized, but if you had told me 5 years ago that we would have come this far already, I wouldn’t have believed it. So here’s hoping for the best, and looking forward to 5 more years of progress! 

-Eric Tars, Human Rights Program Director/Children & Youth Attorney

On June 1, three members of Orlando Food Not Bombs were arrested for sharing food with hungry people in a park in downtown Orlando.  Such news is almost incomprehensible.  People arrested for helping out people in need. Unfortunately, as shocking as this news is, it is not unfamiliar. Cities around the country have used laws to target and move homeless people out of downtown areas for decades.

But, now our cities have stooped even lower, so that we can’t even allow members of our communities to help out one another. What kind of a message does this send to our community members?  What about our children?  Do we want them to grow up learning that serving those in need is not only not worthwhile, but something to be punished?

The ordinance that these three people violated is one that requires groups sharing food with 25 or more people in certain downtown parks to obtain a permit to do so. And groups are only allowed two  such permits per covered park per year. Given that certain central locations and regularly scheduled meals at those locations tend to reach the most people (due to visibility and predictability), these restrictions make it more likely that people in need will not be able to access safe, nutritious food.

The ordinance has been tested in court and the 11^th Circuit recently issued an opinion upholding the law – although the district court overturned the law.  Clearly, the City of Orlando is taking its cue from the court to recommence enforcement of the law, but to what end?

The penalties for violating this ordinance are 60 days in jail, a $500 fine, or both. In a time when budgets are strapped and human services are being cut, city resources should be going to helping homeless people move beyond homelessness, instead of incarcerating those who want to help.  Jail costs are extraordinarily high, especially in comparison to the cost of housing and shelter.  It does not make any fiscal or practical sense to use police, jail, and court resources to address this issue.

Putting aside the fiscal aspects of enforcement of this ordinance, it is clear our communities need to do some soul searching. We need to do better than this.  We need to show future generations that it is poverty, hunger, and homelessness that should not be tolerated, not the acts of compassion to address them.

For more information about the criminalization of homelessness, check out the report card we released today on housing rights in the United States.

-Tulin Ozdeger, Civil Rights Program Director

Photo credit: Ed Yourdon