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>> JEFF MICHAEL
You mentioned the Windy Ridge neighborhood, and you wouldn’t have known this but we
actually have a professor here at UNC Charlotte, Janni Sorensen, who has taken her class into
that neighborhood and has done a lot of work with them in terms of helping lift them back
up.
Talk a little bit about that potential partnership between the federal government and universities
in general and where you see particularly in the work that you do at H.U.D. where that
partnership might take us.
>> THE HONORABLE SHAUN DONOVAN
Well, you know, I’ve worked in housing all my career and in fact have worked in a university
I studied housing policy at Harvard and I worked at the Joint Center for Housing Studies
there.
It’s our responsibility in government to make sure we’re putting money into investing
taxpayer dollars into things that work. And, that’s always been important at a time when
the country is facing a serious fiscal crisis.
We have to make sure that we’re investing in things that work and frankly, taking away
investment from things that aren’t working.
And, not only do we have a fiscal deficit, I think we have a real trust deficit in the
public sector and whether we actually can deliver change for families.
And so I think it’s particularly important research universities like this one have an
incredibly important role to play in documenting where things are working and where they aren’t.
And, just a couple of examples I would point to: we made enormous strides on homelessness
in this country. Last year alone, we reduced the number of veterans sleeping on our streets
by almost 20 percent in one year. Most people don’t know that veterans are 50 percent
more likely to be homeless than the average American.
It’s just a tragedy, but we also have figured out, because of our partnerships with research
universities, that not only is it a tragedy for that veteran to be sleeping on the street,
it’s actually more expensive for the taxpayer.
It costs typically 30 or 40,000 dollars a year for an individual to be homeless, because
they use emergency rooms for all of their medical care, they end up sleeping in shelters
or institutionalized, maybe end up in prison for spells.
All of those are public costs that are much more expensive than helping that veteran find
decent, safe housing that they can live in permanently rather than being on the street.
So, it’s an example of where because of the research that’s been done, because of
the partnership of research universities, we’ve been able to demonstrate that making
investments and ending homelessness actually save lives and save money at the same time.
And that’s meant that at a time of real partisanship, we’ve seen a broad bi-partisan
consensus in Congress that we ought to be investing in these programs and in fact, in
a tough time, investments in H.U.D.’s Homeless Programs are actually increasing.
And it’s actually one of the few places in our budget where we’ve seen increased
investments because we’ve been able to demonstrate that progress.