January 29, 2020
Activities: Housing / Shelter, Human Services, Mental Health, Societal Benefit
Geography:
Demographics:
Annual ROI: 0.0%
Image source: Getty Images
While many social programs help address specific problems for focused sets of people, they often fail to integrate with other programs addressing the myriad of problems people face.
In poverty, families often cannot secure affordable housing, they fall behind on rent, move frequently and uproot children during important developmental years in their lives. This insecurity can lead to homelessness, sickness, and long-term mental-health issues for parents and children alike.
So what can be done?
Ana Poblacion, of Children’s HealthWatch indicates that while individual state programs exist to ramp up housing production and provide tax credits and childcare subsidies, families and taxpayers need a more comprehensive strategy.
The organization recently released a report that outlines 3 tactics aimed at achieving long-term success in providing family stability with housing.
Existing policies need to work in concert to help families, the report suggests. When policies aren’t in sync, they can cause unintended consequences for families struggling to stay above water.
One example is that to maintain a childcare subsidy, parents must pay a childcare copayment, which can stress their budgets even with a sliding scale. Many families also experience the “cliff effect,” wherein an individual’s or family’s income goes up and results in the loss of the childcare subsidy — but the rise in wages is eclipsed by the lost benefit.
“Our policies should not be designed to create a trapdoor,” said Renee Boynton-Jarrett, MD, ScD, a BMC pediatrician and founder of the Vital Village Network, who moderated a panel discussion at the event.
The Boston Foundation-hosted Pathways to Stable Homes release event offered multiple-policy solutions for improving housing security and ensuring families have the resources to meet their basic needs.
HealthWatch conducted listening sessions with diverse stakeholders, followed by simulation modeling with a healthcare cost analysis. The resulting report, “Pathways to Stable Homes,” recommends three policies.
1. Expand childcare access. Expand affordable childcare access by eliminating the subsidy wait list, capping copay fees to no more than 7% of family income — the standard recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services — and eliminating the copay altogether for families with incomes below the federal poverty line (FPL).
2. Increase state matching of EITC. Increase the state match for the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to 50% from the current level of 30%. The EITC is an effective way of supplementing the earnings of low-income working families and has been linked to improved infant and maternal health.
3. Create a rental arrears program to prevent eviction. Expand the state’s Residential Assistance for Families in Transition (RAFT) program to include a rental-arrears program to help vulnerable families avoid eviction if they fall on hard times or face emergency expenses.
Estimated outcomes and savings
The report outlines scenarios for two types of families living in four sample Massachusetts counties, which show how the policies could reduce or erase the gap between families’ incomes and their housing and childcare costs while also providing the state a hefty return on investment in avoided healthcare costs.
For a two-parent family of four with income of about $49,000 (or 200% of FPL), the research’s simulation shows that the proposed policies could erase the gap for a family in Worcester County and significantly narrow it in Suffolk County, which includes the high-rent market of Boston.
For the four sample counties together, the state would save an estimated $650,000 annually in avoidable healthcare costs. In the scenario of a single-parent family of three earning 130 percent of FPL, the potential savings amount to at least $1.4 million.
“This is because housing instability increases mothers’ odds of experiencing depressive symptoms, children’s odds of hospitalizations, and children’s and caregivers’ odds of being in fair or poor health,” Poblacion explained.
At the Boston Foundation event, State Representative Marjorie Decker spoke of growing up in poverty and has expressed support for the HealthWatch recommendations.
“We all need people to be fulfilling [families’] potential,” she said. “I think this report really highlights the need for a multi-pronged approach to not only help people survive, but thrive — and it’s doable.”
Read Full Story