San Diego County’s network of homelessness service providers will receive about $15.1 million in federal Housing and Urban Development grants to keep existing programs going for the coming year, the department announced Wednesday.
The 52 local programs being renewed in this year’s first round of federal homelessness funding include permanent and transitional housing for homeless people, as well as services like job training, mental health counseling and substance abuse treatment. We detailed the programs that receive money from this funding stream in this post.
HUD has not yet announced any new or bonus funding for projects applied for by the Continuum of Care, the network of service providers. Those grants go to individual agencies and government programs.
The largest grant among the funding announced Wednesday is $1.68 million for the Solutions Consortium Project, a collaborative program led by St. Vincent de Paul Village that integrates more than a dozen agencies’ services for assisting homeless people.
The second-highest grant amount is about $1 million to the San Diego Housing Commission to help pay rent for homeless people moving into housing, generally targeted toward vulnerable or chronically homeless people.
The grants come out of the federal funding program that typically shortchanges San Diego, providing a relatively low funding level compared with other major cities across the country. San Diego ranked third in homeless populations in major U.S. cities last year, but was eligible to apply for less funding than 17 other big metro areas.
The numbers released Wednesday don’t allow us to further flesh out that ranking, because the not-yet-announced new and bonus funding counts toward how San Diego fares in comparison with other cities.
Here’s the breakdown of San Diego’s renewing programs, from HUD. And here’s slightly more detail from the network on the programs for which it was seeking funding.
You can also see funding levels for the other Continuums of Care from across California and across the country. San Diego’s continuum, like many other major cities’, encompasses the whole county.
I’m Kelly Bennett, reporter for Voice of San Diego. You can reach me directly at kelly.bennett@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.325.0531.
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