8 GROUNDCOVER NEWS HOMELESSNESS The state of affordable housing in Washtenaw RACHEL Groundcover contributor Last month I had a chance to attend the 2025 State of Homelessness and Affordable Housing conference at Washtenaw Community College. Hosted during National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, coincided with Washtenaw Housing Alliance's 25th anniversary and the 5th anniversary of the Ann Arbor Affordable Housing millage. The breakfast conference had a three-part focus: food, health and housing. There were guest speakers, panel discussions, a preview of a housing documentary called "The Road Home," and a forecast that was bleak. The H.R.1 bill passed in late July recently froze federal funding to essential survival programs like the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Medicaid. "This bill will cause people to die," said Dr. Jeremy Lapedis of the Washtenaw Health Project. The restructures are expanding work requirements for food aid; shifting hundreds of millions in SNAP administrative costs onto states; halving USDA shipments to food banks like Food Gatherers; requiring Medicaid eligibility renewals twice a year; and continuing to sweep homeless encampments out of sight without addressing their roots. In other words, being poor in the United States is more of a crime than ever before. Dr. Ravi Vadlamudi from Packard Health talked about the challenges of healthcare without housing. Pneumonia and wound care are manageable, but chronic medical problems like diabetes or kidney disease are virtually untreatable under the circumstances of homelessness. Hospitals will not even schedule major procedures for unhoused patients, like colonoscopies. “You can imagine someone in a tent trying to drink a gallon of GoLYTELY.” His takeaway: people can only think about long term goals when they are not in survival mode. “Housing is health,” said Dr. Chiquita Berg, Trinity vice president of community health and well-being. The figures are not healthy. Last year it took an average of 202 days to get into housing, and at least 704 people experienced homelessness in Washtenaw County this year. Alpha House has a waitlist of 120-130 families and the Delonis Center's residential waitlist can be 50-60 people long. Hundreds of families will lose their rental assistance under HUD restructuring and the state housing voucher pause, 12,000 to 18,000 Washtenaw County Panel on health and hunger relief (left to right): County Commissioner Katie Scott, Dr. Ravi Vadlamudi, Markell Miller, Dr. Chiquita Berg and Jeremy Lapedis. residents could lose Marketplace and Medicaid eligibility soon, and food insecurity will be at an all-time high. Statistics and numbers were the framework of the conference, but its emotional heart was people. Dr. Ravi shared his experience doing home care for a terminally ill patient. As her cancer progressed and she lost more and more weight, she was steadfast in wanting to remain in the apartment where she finally had her own bed, kitchen, and the comfort she never knew when she was unhoused. Washtenaw Health Project told us about a woman discharged from the ER with 48 hours of medication she could not afford to refill. WHP fixed a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services error, found out she was eligible for Medicaid right away, and connected her to Community Mental Health treatment so she could go back to work with peace of mind. The brightest forecast at the conference was affordable housing. Jennifer Hall, executive director of the Ann Arbor Housing Commission (AAHC), shared pictures of seven new developments breaking ground in the city and talked about the public-private partnerships that make them possible. Forprofit developers are the biggest creators of affordable homes, which cost the same to build as market-rate housing. In 2020, a City millage passed with 73% support that puts $7 million a year toward low-income housing. AAHC has 2345 housing vouchers for Washtenaw and Monroe counties, 20 properties in Ann Arbor, and 1,071 units underway, offering opportunities for thousands of people who work in Ann Arbor but cannot afford to live there. Eating croissants and fresh fruit with well-dressed office workers, it was not lost on me that everyone in the room represented organizations with overhead costs and salaries higher than the lifetime savings of the people they helped. The caterers refilling the hot trays made a fraction of the income of the city planners there, and the houseshaped stress balls with WHA logos at every seat could have sponsored 200 bus tokens instead. Some of the groups only rely on student interns, barebones staff and unpaid boards to fulfill their mission, but others have executives with six figure compensation. Mutual aid organizations have a term for charities that prop up social inequalities and top-down hierarchies like this: the nonprofit industrial complex. "Dysfunction is part of the plan," says Shihab Jackson, a longtime community volunteer. "It keeps a small army of well-paid administrators gainfully employed in a system they are supposedly tasked to disrupt." If the coalitions working to end homelessness in Washtenaw County truly reached their goals, he points out, their careers would end. Two-time Emmy winning director Kameron Donald offered a more hopeful analysis on the conference stage. "There's no fame in this, no getting see WHA page 10 it DECEMBER 12, 2025
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