Press Room

Miki Delemos stops by apartments on West Grand Avenue almost every day to check on her “family.” She doesn’t have to — she doesn’t get paid to - but she wants to see how her former homeless friends are doing. As a case manager for The Other Place, a non-profit homeless advocate group, Delemos is doing the grunt work of a Montgomery county-wide initiative to end chronic homelessness.

Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan is bringing his entire leadership team to New Orleans on Thursday to steep them in the city's post-Katrina rebuilding efforts and devise ways to speed it up and "move the place where we are in our work on the Gulf Coast from recovery to revitalization."

Mercy Housing Lakefront, along with Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, County Executive Scott Walker, Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority Director Antonio Riley and other Milwaukee officials, celebrated the groundbreaking of the Johnston Center, a new permanent supportive housing property that will be home to 91 people who are formerly homeless and have special needs.

Most homeless people in America are too poor to buy their own health coverage, but many also don't qualify for Medicaid, the government-run health program for the poor. Medicaid is mainly for people who have children or a disability, and most homeless people are childless adults. So, like 63-year-old Walter Brooks of Baltimore, they make do without insurance coverage.

The stock market may be ticking upward but local economies are set for a struggle as state budget gridlocks are halting payments to basic human services and causing thousands of homeless shelters, food pantries and senior centers to cut staff, reduce services or shut their doors.

The homeless are having more trouble getting help because of state budget cuts, and federal stimulus funding in September will fill only part of the gap, service providers for the homeless say.

The Metropolitan Homelessness Commission is calling on businesses, faith-based groups, government and nonprofits to raise $71.7 million over the next five years to end chronic homelessness in Nashville.

Project Hope – a groundbreaking program that could change the way Charlotte deals with homelessness – is expected to be unveiled tonight as part of a Charlotte City Council vote to back the project with nearly $2 million in federal stimulus money.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a whopping 15% of 2,400 Public Housing Authorities nationwide, are currently experiencing funding shortfalls in the Section 8 Housing Voucher Program!

Across the city, nonprofit groups that provide social services to New Yorkers are reeling, trying to fulfill their core missions as demand for those services rises and their ability to provide them shrinks. With government, foundation and individual grants down by as much as 50 percent — not to mention withering endowments or investments lost to Bernard L. Madoff — agencies are trimming and delaying programs and cutting staff, in essence contributing to the very problems they exist to fix.