New Mexico gets $16.5 million to address homelessness

The city of Albuquerque will get the biggest portion of $16.5 million in federal funds for homelessness assistance.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced $3.16 billion in Continuum of Care, or CoC, funding last week, the largest amount that the program has ever awarded. The Continuum of Care program is aimed at ending homelessness.

New Mexico will receive $16.5 million, with the city of Albuquerque getting $3.5 million. The funding will benefit 26 organizations throughout the state.

The grant recipients include groups offering emergency shelters, case management and health care, and groups developing affordable housing.

New Mexico’s congressional delegation applauded the CoC funding.

“I welcome this historic $16 million investment to combat the problem of homelessness for youth in New Mexico,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández said. “This investment from the Biden-Harris administration will help make sure service providers have the tools to combat homelessness and push us closer to ending the housing issues that have plagued our state for far too long.”

“Nationwide and certainly in New Mexico as well, we have not kept up with housing demand that has created elevated prices in both rents and mortgages,” Sen. Martin Heinrich said. “And there are just a lot of people who, from the fundamental math of housing becoming more expensive, have become homeless. And I think we need to take an all of the above approach to both expanding our housing stock and getting the homeless rehoused and into services that can get them into a more stable situation.”

How Albuquerque will use the money

For Albuquerque, CoC funds are among the most consistent of the many different buckets of money the city pulls from to try and support homelessness programs, said Katie Simon, public affairs specialist for the city’s Health Housing and Homelessness Department.

“It’s really important, but what’s interesting is that our $3.5 million from CoC is actually just a small fraction of the money that the city of Albuquerque puts towards housing vouchers. In (fiscal year) ‘24, the city spent just under $25 million on supportive housing, both rapid and permanent, total,” Simon said.

The Continuum of Care funding supports housing for people who are exiting homelessness. The city divides the money between nonprofit agencies that do rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing.

Rapid rehousing is assistance with rent for up to 24 months and is meant to help people who seem likely to become self-sufficient.

Permanent supportive housing has no time limits and is meant to help people with more needs, such as those with disabilities or who are chronically homeless. When families get permanent supportive housing assistance, more than 90% remain housed after two years, according to Simon.

“It’s the housing support, paying someone’s housing costs, paired with the case management that really makes it super-effective,” Simon said.

One of the nonprofits that will get some of the city’s CoC funding is Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless, which should receive $780,000 to support about 78 households, Simon said. Separately, Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless will also receive $163,000 directly from HUD in CoC funds.

“As rents have gone up in Albuquerque, fewer people can be served with the same amount of money,” Simon said. “So having these consistent funding sources is really important for us to be able to make sure that we’re keeping people housed.”

How could Congress help with housing?

Heinrich is sponsoring legislation to help people in the Section 8 program, which provides vouchers for subsidized rent, by allowing the program to also be used for security deposits. After the occupant moves, the returned security deposit would go back into the program to be used again.

“Oftentimes, you can get support through the Section 8 program for rental assistance, but if you can’t pay the deposit, that becomes a very big barrier for folks trying to get back into housing,” Heinrich said.

Expanding the low-income housing tax credit could also help, according to Heinrich.

“I think we need to look at incentives for builders to specifically build low-income housing, because right now, most of the financial incentive is to build for the most profitable units, … it certainly helps, but it doesn’t fix the problem,” Heinrich said. “And we need to be looking at building different kinds of housing stocks that fill the gaps where the most need is.”

A few weeks ago, the Joint Economic Committee held a hearing on housing shortages. Heinrich said that both progressive and conservative witnesses agreed that local zoning reform, such as allowing duplexes to be built in neighborhoods originally zoned for single-family homes or allowing casitas, has expanded housing stock and brought down price pressures.

“Combining additional federal incentives with local reforms is really how we’re going to build our way out of this,” Heinrich said.