Stimulus money targeted to help the homeless

FRESNO, Calif. — The U.S. expects to send $1.5 billion in stimulus money Thursday to hundreds of communities around the country to prevent homelessness, including $1 million for Fresno to dismantle tent cities and move residents into privately owned apartments.

The novel experiment is one of hundreds of projects to be funded under the stimulus law intended to jump-start the economy. It will help people like Lana Meranda and her husband and stepmother, who have been living under a tarp enclosure with their pitbull puppy, Lucky, for 10 months, after a series of job losses and, in her stepmother’s case, cancer.

“We can’t get jobs in this situation,” said Meranda, 54. “We aren’t clean. We don’t have the right clothes.”

Last week, they became one of the first encampment families to move into an apartment the city is leasing from a private landlord.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to send the stimulus money to more than 500 cities, counties and communities for rent relief or other steps to prevent homelessness and assist those without homes. The funds are being distributed under a homelessness prevention program in the stimulus law to help millions of newly or nearly jobless Americans.

The money is being used in different ways:

—A nonprofit in eastern Idaho hopes to apply its stimulus funds toward one-time payments for rent or mortgages to those on the verge of losing their homes.

—Stockton, Calif., plans to buy foreclosed houses and renovate them as affordable housing.

—Franklin County, Pa., will use stimulus money to help families with back rent and utilities, moving costs, short-term storage and credit repair.

—In Reading, Pa., a coalition for the homeless plans to provide short-term rent aid and landlord-tenant mediation to prevent evictions.

What happens when the money runs out remains to be seen.

But the stimulus money will be a shot in the arm for struggling communities, said Peter Dougherty, acting executive director of the U.S. Inter-agency Council on Homelessness, a federal agency that advocates for the prevention and elimination of homelessness.

“It gives them the means to help those who would otherwise have nowhere to turn in the current economy,” Dougherty said.

The stimulus money come as states are slashing services and raising taxes. Robert Reich, secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, said the reduction of services will amount to between $320 billion and $350 billion.

“The states are actively erasing half of the federal stimulus,” he said.

Among stressed cities, Fresno in California’s Central Valley farm belt faces particular challenges. Even before the recession, the city of 430,000 had the highest concentration of poverty in the nation, according to a 2008 study by the Brookings Institution. The unemployment rate was 14.5 percent in May.

Homelessness has been persistent. Last year, a federal judge ordered Fresno to pay more than $2 million to homeless residents who had their property swept up and hauled off by the city without warning.

Fresno is expected to receive $3 million for its homelessness initiatives, with one-third of that amount aimed at relocating people in tent cities.

The city has at least three large encampments of homeless people. The first one to be cleared is reminiscent of the shantytowns of Tijuana or Juarez, Mexico. Some residents live in elaborate plywood shacks with warrens or rooms, kitchens with propane stoves and makeshift patios with charcoal grills.

Using more than $500,000 from the city’s general fund, Fresno has so far moved 56 of about 150 people in one of the camps into housing, said Gregory Barfield, the city’s homeless prevention and policy manager.

The city’s plan to act as tenant to private landlords and then sublease apartments to the homeless relies on at least some residents finding a job or receiving money through public assistance, Barfield said.

“Our goal, admittedly ambitious, is to have the residents pay 30 percent of their income toward housing,” he said.

(This version CORRECTS population of Fresno to 430,000.)