Words the Agencies Use

Point-in-time count

Often shortened to PIT

A census of one night. Every region that takes federal homeless-assistance money has to count the people who are homeless on a single night and report the result to the federal housing department. Volunteers walk assigned areas, and shelters report who slept there. It reaches people in four situations: emergency shelter, transitional housing, a place not meant for sleeping, and a hotel or motel room paid for by a government program or a charity. It does not reach families staying with other people.

24 CFR 578.7(c)(2) requires the count at least every other year, and sets what must be recorded as sheltered and as unsheltered. It leaves the rest to HUD, whose annual notice is what fixes the count on a night in the last ten days of January.

Continuum of Care

Often shortened to CoC. We usually call it a region.

The regional body that plans homeless services and applies for federal money on behalf of everyone in its area. There are about 385 of them in the country and twelve in North Carolina. Buncombe County is its own, the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care. The Continuum runs the point-in-time count, keeps the local data system, and files one application covering all the projects in its area.

Established by 24 CFR part 578.

Balance of State

The Continuum of Care that covers everywhere in a state not already covered by a local one. North Carolina's takes in 79 of the state's 100 counties, including most of the mountains outside Buncombe. The name reads like a common phrase and is a proper name.

Annual Homelessness Assessment Report

Often shortened to AHAR

The federal housing department's yearly report to Congress on homelessness. Part 1 carries the point-in-time count results. It has usually been published about eleven months after the January it describes.

Housing Inventory Count

The companion to the point-in-time count. Instead of counting people, it counts beds: how many emergency shelter, transitional housing and permanent housing beds a region has, and how many are set aside for particular groups such as families or veterans.

Homeless Management Information System

Often shortened to HMIS

The shared database local homeless-services agencies use to record who they served. Most federal reporting is built from it.

EDFacts

The federal education department's collection of data reported by states, including the number of students each school district identified as homeless. It is the only source that gives those figures district by district.

McKinney-Vento Act

The federal law that gives homeless children the right to stay in one school. Its education provisions use a wider definition of homelessness than the housing department does, and the statute's own term for the children it covers is "homeless children and youths." A child is covered if they lack a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence. The definition then names the situations it includes, among them sharing the housing of other people because of loss of housing or economic hardship, and living in a motel for lack of anywhere adequate to go. Schools identify these students across the whole school year.

Definition at 42 U.S.C. 11434a(2); the rights are at 42 U.S.C. 11432.

Doubled up

The statute's phrase is "sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason." The reason is part of the test, not a detail. A child living with grandparents because that is the family's arrangement is not covered. A child living with grandparents because the family lost its apartment is. Districts decide case by case, and the question they have to answer is whether the arrangement is a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence.

About three in four students schools identify as homeless are in this situation. The point-in-time count does not include any of them, which is the main reason the two counts differ so much.

42 U.S.C. 11434a(2)(B)(i). The case-by-case instruction is the Department of Education's, in its data guidance for this collection.

Unsheltered

Sleeping in a place not meant for sleeping. Outside, in a car, in a tent, or in a building nobody lives in.

Emergency shelter

Short-term shelter, usually night to night or for a set number of days. The federal housing department's definition of homelessness covers anyone in a supervised shelter providing temporary living arrangements, and it says in the same breath that this includes hotels and motels paid for by charities or by government programs for low-income people. That is why a disaster voucher program can move a region's count sharply.

24 CFR 578.3, definition of "homeless," paragraph (1)(ii).

Transitional housing

Housing offered for a limited period as a step toward permanent housing. Every participant signs a lease or occupancy agreement of at least one month, and that agreement has to end within 24 months and cannot be extended.

24 CFR 578.3.

Chronically homeless

A federal category, not a description. It means a person with a disability who has been living in an emergency shelter, a safe haven, or a place not meant for human habitation, either continuously for at least 12 months or on at least four separate occasions in the last three years that add up to 12 months. Time spent doubled up or in transitional housing does not count toward it. Some programs are reserved for people who meet it.

24 CFR 578.3.

Unaccompanied youth

A homeless child or youth not in the physical custody of a parent or guardian. In school reporting they are part of the identified-student total, not an addition to it.

42 U.S.C. 11434a(6).

School of origin

The school a child attended before losing housing. Under McKinney-Vento a district has to keep the child there when that is in the child's best interest, and has to provide transportation to it when a parent asks.

Housing First

An approach that offers permanent housing without first requiring sobriety, treatment or program compliance, on the reasoning that housing is what makes the rest possible. Services are offered rather than required. Federal policy has moved back and forth on it.

Permanent supportive housing

Often shortened to PSH

Permanent housing with support services attached and no time limit. Usually aimed at people with disabilities who have been homeless a long time.

Rapid re-housing

Short-term rental help plus housing search assistance, meant to move a household out of shelter quickly. Distinct from permanent supportive housing, which does not end.

Public housing

Rental housing owned and operated by a local housing authority. What a household pays is called the total tenant payment, and it is not simply 30 percent of income. It is the highest of three amounts: 30 percent of monthly adjusted income, 10 percent of monthly income, or the household's welfare rent where that applies. Adjusted income is income after deductions, so it is lower than what a household earns. In Asheville the authority is the Housing Authority of the City of Asheville.

24 CFR 5.628, which governs public housing and vouchers alike.

Housing Choice Voucher

Still widely called Section 8

A subsidy a household takes to a private landlord. The household pays its total tenant payment, calculated the same way as in public housing, and the voucher covers the rest up to a local limit set by Fair Market Rent. A landlord is not required to accept one in North Carolina.

24 CFR 5.628 for the payment; 24 CFR part 982 for the program.

Community Development Block Grant

Often shortened to CDBG. CDBG-DR is the disaster-recovery version.

A flexible federal grant to cities and counties for housing and community development. Its formula also decides most of how federal homeless-assistance money is divided between regions: preliminary pro rata need goes two percent to the insular areas, then 75 percent of what remains by the CDBG formula, then the rest by the same formula. That is why a region's point-in-time count is not what sets its share.

24 CFR 578.17(a)(3).

Emergency Solutions Grants

Federal money for five things, each its own component in the regulation: street outreach, emergency shelter, homelessness prevention, rapid re-housing, and the local data system. Separate from the Continuum of Care grants that fund longer-term housing.

24 CFR 576.101 through 576.107.

Low-Income Housing Tax Credit

Often shortened to LIHTC, said "lie-tech"

The main way affordable apartments get built in this country. Developers receive tax credits and in exchange the rents are restricted. A unit is rent-restricted when its gross rent does not exceed 30 percent of the income limit assigned to that unit, and the project has to meet one of three tests, the common ones being at least a fifth of units at 50 percent of area median income or at least two fifths at 60 percent. Because the cap follows the income limit rather than the tenant's own income, this produces housing affordable to people earning a share of the area median, which is usually well above what someone leaving homelessness can pay.

26 U.S.C. 42(g)(1) for the tests, 42(g)(2)(A) for the rent restriction.

Notice of Funding Opportunity

Often shortened to NOFO

The document that opens a federal grant competition and sets out how applications will be scored. The homeless-assistance one awards points for things like reducing a region's counted homelessness.

Coordinated Entry

The single front door a region is required to run, so that someone seeking help is assessed once and referred to whatever is available, rather than applying separately to every agency. The regulation calls it a centralized or coordinated assessment system, and requires a separate written policy for people fleeing domestic violence.

24 CFR 578.7(a)(8).

SNAP

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Still called food stamps.

The federal food-assistance program. Benefits load monthly onto a card and can be spent on groceries. It is federally funded and state administered, so the rules are national and the office you deal with is a county one.

EBT

Electronic Benefit Transfer

The card SNAP benefits are loaded onto, and the system behind it.

Food and Nutrition Service

Often shortened to FNS. North Carolina calls SNAP itself Food and Nutrition Services.

The agency inside the U.S. Department of Agriculture that runs SNAP nationally. The similar state name is a genuine trap: in North Carolina, FNS usually means the benefit, not the federal agency.

ABAWD

Able-Bodied Adult Without Dependents

A SNAP category, not a medical judgment. An adult in it can receive benefits for no more than three countable months in any three-year period, and may be eligible for up to three additional months in some circumstances. A month is countable only if the person was not exempt, not covered by a waiver, and not meeting the work requirement, so months spent working or exempt do not use up the three.

7 CFR 273.24(b).

Categorical eligibility

A rule that lets a household count as eligible for SNAP because it already receives, or is authorized to receive, benefits from another assistance program, without the usual income and asset tests being applied separately. Which programs confer it is set by rule, and a state may ask the federal agency to rule on one that is not already listed.

7 CFR 273.2(j).

Food insecurity

A measured condition, not a synonym for hunger. It means a household lacked consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life at some point in the year. It is measured by survey, so it covers people who never used a food pantry and never applied for SNAP.

Area median income

Often shortened to AMI

The midpoint income for a metropolitan area, set each year by the federal housing department and adjusted for household size. Affordable housing is usually described as a percentage of it, as in "60 percent of AMI." Because the figure covers the whole metro area, it can sit well above what local service-sector work pays.

Fair Market Rent

Often shortened to FMR

The federal housing department's yearly estimate of what a modest local apartment rents for, including utilities. It sets the ceiling for voucher subsidies, so when it lags the real market, voucher holders cannot find a unit.

Housing wage

What someone would have to earn per hour, working full time, to afford a local apartment at Fair Market Rent without spending more than 30 percent of income on it. Published each year by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

Cost-burdened

Spending more than 30 percent of household income on housing. Severely cost-burdened means more than 50 percent.

Federal poverty level

An income threshold set nationally each year and used to decide eligibility for many programs. It does not vary by local housing cost, which is why a household can be above it and still unable to make rent here.

Single-room occupancy

Often shortened to SRO

A single rented room, usually with shared bathroom and kitchen. For most of the twentieth century it was the cheapest housing in American cities. Most of it is gone.

Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care

The Continuum of Care covering Buncombe County, coded NC-501 in federal data. It runs the county's point-in-time count and publishes the local results.

North Carolina Homeless Education Program

Often shortened to NCHEP

The state office that supports school districts in identifying and serving homeless students, run out of UNC Greensboro for the state education department. It holds the district-level counts and publishes a statewide total.

Housing Authority of the City of Asheville

Often shortened to HACA

The public agency that owns and runs Asheville's public housing and administers its Housing Choice Vouchers.

Code Purple

The local cold-weather protocol. When temperatures are forecast to fall to a set threshold, shelters expand capacity and admission rules relax for the night.