Will lawmakers shrug off the homeless?

Take a job loss, stir in a mortgage foreclosure  and multiply by several thousand.  What’s the result? In Minnesota, it’s been an upsurge in homelessness so dramatic that nonprofits committed to aiding the unsheltered can no longer serve everyone in  need. Yet even as 1,000 Minnesotans are being turned away from emergency shelters every night, legislators are on the verge of cutting state programs now in place to help the homeless.

Though final decisions about funding levels are weeks away, some spending recommendations emerging from the Legislature suggest that cuts in core assistance programs for Minnesota’s homeless could be deep.  House spending bills, for instance, call for hacking the allocation for Emergency Shelter by more than half — from the current $1.3 million to $700,000 — and for trimming Transitional Housing funds from $6.2 million to about $5.4 million.

These rollbacks would hobble service programs in the best of times, and in midst of today’s economic calamity could prove disastrous.  They’d shrink shelter and transitional-housing capacity at the very time when demand for such services continues to escalate.

More than a few lawmakers respond to concerns over these cuts with reassurances that money from President Obama’s federal stimulus package will fill any gaps caused by state retrenchment. But stimulus funds won’t come to Minnesota until sometime in the fall. And no matter when the new money arrives, it can’t legally be used to underwrite shelters and transitional housing.  The use of stimulus money is governed by a flurry of rules — a number of which emphasize that the funds should not be used to supplant past state spending on homeless programs.

This message seems to have fallen on deaf ears in the Legislature, many members of which appear resolved to pass homeless-assistance bills with funding that would be inadequate even in the absence of a rise in homelessness.

That prospect is alarming to homeless advocates, many of whom note the danger of ignoring the current crisis. Liz Kuoppala, interim executive director for the Minnesota Coalition for the Homeless, makes the point simply: “If legislators think fighting homelessness is expensive, they should consider the cost of not fighting it. That’s a pricetag Minnesotans should hope never to see.”