Federal funding trends for affordable housing over the past 25 years directly correlate to the emergence of a new and massive episode of homelessness in the early 1980s. Funding for housing programs administered by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), as well as Section 515 rural affordable housing administered by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been cut by $54 billion annually since 1983.

This divestment is the most important factor in explaining why there are so many homeless people on the streets today. Responses to homelessness have failed and will continue to fail until they include a serious and sizable federal recommitment to funding affordable housing.

WRAP's first and ongoing campaign – Without Housing – uses research, public education, and federal legislation advocacy to pressure the federal government to restore funding for affordable housing. In 2006, WRAP published Without Housing: Decades of Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness, and Policy Failures, a thoroughly documented report that continues to be in high demand, with over 25,000 copies downloaded in 2 years. Plans are underway to update the information.

To think of homelessness as a result of individual failure is wrongheaded. Our report documents and analyzes systemic factors that expose this national shame. The fact that millions of families, single adults, and youth with different biographical backgrounds came to simultaneously experience homelessness in 1983 - and that millions continue to suffer on our streets today - requires a reexamination of historical and social structural forces.

No matter how many hundreds of plans that communities are required to write, filling a $54 billion affordable housing loss with $1.4 billion in homeless assistance funding amounts to an exercise in futility.

The federal government is spending money on housing, but not on developing and preserving affordable housing. Its decision to fund Housing First with HUD homeless assistance grants - rather than with HUD housing programs - is a timely illustration of ongoing and long-term policies that have resulted in the dismantling of HUD and USDA affordable housing programs and the rise of mass homelessness. Over the last 30 years, annual tax expenditures for homeowner subsidies have grown from less than $40 billion to over $120 billion per year. Every year since 1981, tax benefits for homeownership have been greater than HUD's entire budget and have dwarfed direct expenditures for programs that benefit low-income renters.

As we show in our Without Housing report, federal funding priorities favor those who are least in need of federal assistance at the expense of those most in need. Despite whatever other factors may come into play in any individual's experience of homelessness - without housing that person will remain homeless.