Homelessness

During a 25-year period beginning in 1960, the United States lost about 1 million rooms housing single individuals--about half of the nation's total supply. Single persons now make up the bulk of America's homeless. In 1987, Congress created the Section 8 Moderate Rehabilitation Program for Single Room Occupancy Dwellings for Homeless Individuals. This report looks at whether the program is meeting its goals of creating adequate housing and delivering support services to the single homeless for as long as needed. GAO also discusses (1) how the Department of Housing and Urban Development oversees projects in development and reviews their financial feasibility and (2) regulations requiring the use of tenant waiting lists developed by local public housing agencies.

GAO found that: (1) as of September 30, 1991, the SRO projects that were operating generally met program goals of providing decent housing for single homeless individuals, supportive services, and unrestricted residency; (2) HUD has not maximized SRO program benefits because it has not ensured the timely opening of projects, and its financial reviews have not ensured that projects are soundly financed; (3) PHA that run SRO projects are required to develop and maintain waiting lists of applicants, but half of the projects did not use PHA lists, while some projects that used PHA lists reported problems with them; (4) HUD has not acted to either enforce or relax the PHA waiting list requirement; and (5) HUD has begun to correct SRO project monitoring problems, in particular by transferring program management responsibility to its Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs, which now manages all HUD homeless programs.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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