In the 1980s, homelessness weighed heavy on the heart of the American public, and the feds responded with sweeping support programs, ironically signed into law by a reluctant Ronald Reagan. The Stewart B. Mckinney Homelessness Assistance Act, later renamed the Mckinney-Vento Homelessness Assistance Act, was instituted in 1987. The act created fifteen programs aimed at offering vital services, such as housing, health care, job training and education, to the homeless. The vast majority of these services have undoubtedly provided much-needed aid and relief to many underprivileged people. However, there is an uneconomical gremlin lurking in the belly of this legislation, contributing to the forfeiture of billions of taxpayer dollars each year.
Buried in Title 42, chapter 119, section 11411 of the U.S. Code, under the seemingly benign heading “Use of unutilized and underutilized public buildings and real property to assist the homeless” is a requirement that vacant, unused federal buildings be funneled through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) before they can be sold to the public. Each quarter, all landholding agencies within the federal government are required to send a complete list of unutilized buildings, including descriptions of whether or not the properties could be made available for the homeless, to the Secretary of HUD. The secretary then reviews this list to determine which, if any, of the surplus structures are “suitable for use to assist the homeless” (a standard undefined by the law).
This sounds like a brilliant idea, doesn’t it? Four times a year the philanthropic feds clean out their proverbial closet, shedding empty, excess buildings while creating shelters and support centers for hordes of homeless Americans. It’s a beautiful notion in theory, but it has proven to be inexcusably inefficient in practice.
In 1989, 15 of every 10,000 Americans were homeless, an alarmingly high statistic for the time. By 2014, that number had risen to 18.3, and once-historical highs came to be treated as tolerable norms. Clearly, the Mckinney-Vento Act has fallen short of its aim to reduce the staggering numbers of street sleepers in this country. Granted, there are many factors that influence rates of homelessness, and we can safely assume that the act as whole has had at least some positive effect on this issue. Even so, I would argue that the costs of Article V, specifically, have far outstripped any of its benefits.
Since Article V’s inception in 1987, $3 billion dollars worth of surplus property has been sold by the federal government. At least two-thirds of those properties were determined to be unavailable or unsuitable for the homeless and were thus sold to other government entities or private parties at market value. The remaining one-third were sold to state or local government agencies, at a discounted rate, as “public benefit conveyances.” Though there is no readily available statistic for how many of these public benefit conveyances were dedicated to assisting the homeless, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP) reports that 500 total buildings have been devoted to this end over the life of Article V. That may sound like a significant number, until you take into account the fact that the federal government is sitting on an estimated 77,000 underutilized or vacant buildings. The cost of managing and maintaining these rapidly dilapidating properties is in the neighborhood of $1.7 billion per year.
You might be asking why there is such a gargantuan backlog of unused, unsellable structures in this country and why we continue to waste exorbitant amounts of taxpayer dollars to hold on to them. The short answer is because Article V requires all old, excess fed buildings be offered to and assessed by HUD before they can be sold to the public or otherwise relinquished. Once the Secretary of HUD evaluates a surplus property, the agency publishes a description of it on the Federal Register identifying whether or not it is suitable for use to assist the homeless. If a building is found unsuitable for this purpose, it can eventually be priced to sell on a laughably outdated and poorly managed federal website. If, however, it is found to have the potential to suit the needs of the homeless, it sits on the Federal Register until someone or some organization affiliated with assisting the homeless calls to inquire about it. As you can imagine, the inquiry process is plastered in red tape, and the circumstances surrounding most of the buildings are highly unusual.
For instance, of the mere 31 vacant buildings that were evaluated in August 2015 and found to be suitable for assisting the homeless, 25 of them were described as “off-site only,” meaning that the purchasers of these properties would be obligated to pay for the physical buildings to be relocated to an entirely new site. That is a ridiculous requirement, and the cost of meeting it would, in most cases, far exceed the value of the building itself. Additionally, many of the available buildings have been abandoned for decades and are in states of extreme disrepair. How does our government expect non-profit organizations serving the penniless to be able to afford to buy a building, move the building and then basically rebuild it? And even if they could afford to do so, why wouldn’t they just buy a building on the open market that’s already good to go?
According to the NLCHP, the 500 buildings conveyed under Article V of the Mckinney-Vento Act aid two million people per year, but most of that aid comes in the temporary and indirect form of food donations. The buildings themselves only provide shelter for about 30,000-35,000 homeless people annually. I’m not saying these numbers are insignificant, but I am saying we have the ability to do a lot more for a lot less.
While we should strive to preserve the altruistic spirit of the Article V law, we must amend its application. No longer should tens of thousands of vacant federal buildings be suspended in real-estate limbo for decades, waiting to be assessed and sold by some sunlight-deprived, pencil-pushing bureaucrat. Instead, all unused federal buildings should be surrendered to the local communities in which they are situated. Small counsels of locally elected representatives could be tasked with awarding the buildings in their area to municipal agencies or non-profit organizations. Swathes of unloved, unoccupied fed buildings could be transformed into new schools, fire and police stations, low-income housing, homeless shelters and the like. Buildings that aren’t suitable for or unneeded to serve the public good could be immediately listed and sold on the open market, with all profits going directly to the local government. Not only would this approach be a boon to local communities and economies, it would also relieve the feds of an unnecessary annual bill of nearly $2 billion. Hopefully Congress gets hip to this issue in a hurry, because the sobering truth is that America can’t sustain such wastefulness for much longer.