Lydia Barger, director of housing initiatives at the Human Services Coalition and coordinator of the Tompkins County Continuum of Care, told the Ithaca Urban Renewal AgencyNeighborhood Investment Committee on Jan. 1 that recent changes to a federal HUD funding notice could materially affect local homelessness programs.

Barger said HUD shifted the funding competition to a new two-year NOFO and — in the 2025 iteration — dramatically cut the portion of funds placed in a locally-protected "tier 1" from historical levels to about 30 percent, leaving the remainder subject to a national competitive process. She said the new NOFO also capped the share of projects allowed to be permanent supportive housing at 30 percent, a change that would force many Tompkins County supportive-housing projects to compete for renewal funding.

"That tier 1 was set at 30 percent," Barger said, describing the change in her presentation. "Instead of 90 percent of your projects being safe, only 30 percent of your projects are safe and everything else goes into that tier 2, which is much higher competition." She warned that the cap on permanent supportive housing would be especially damaging locally: Tompkins County has about 187 permanent supportive housing beds, and national analyses projected the loss of roughly 60 of those beds if the NOFO took effect.

Why it matters: permanent supportive housing serves people who are chronically homeless and often have disabilities. Barger said many of those projects house people who are stabilized in long-term housing; if projects close, residents could reenter homelessness.

Barger told the committee that after HUD released the new NOFO the National Alliance to End Homelessness and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, joined by 21 state attorneys general, sued to block the new rules. The District Court of Rhode Island issued a temporary injunction pausing the 2025 NOFO while litigation proceeds, and Barger said local continuums paused their ranking-and-review competitions pending the court's final decision.

"There was a temporary injunction of the NOFO," Barger said. "We opened that competition... and then the district court of Rhode Island enjoined the NOFO, and we paused our competition." She cautioned that a legal win may only be temporary and that similar policy changes could return in later funding cycles.

Committee members asked how the proposed changes would affect program models. Barger said continuum-funded programs typically practice a housing-first approach, providing supportive services alongside housing and allowing people to "come as you are." She said the 2025 NOFO language appeared to favor treatment-first models that would require individuals to have completed substance-use treatment before entering housing, a shift that she said would exclude many participants served by existing programs.

On local data, Barger presented system-performance measures showing recent improvements in Tompkins County: a downward trend in emergency-shelter entries and point-in-time counts and a 16 percent decrease in average length of homelessness since 2023, which she linked to growth in permanent supportive housing capacity.

Barger also highlighted demographic and disability data: roughly 35 percent of people entering emergency shelter self-reported a mental-health disorder and about 22 percent self-reported a substance-use disorder; she said developmental disabilities are underreported. She emphasized concerns that narrower federal disability definitions or exclusions (for example, excluding substance-use disorder as a disability) would disproportionately affect people with disabilities.

What happens next: staff said the committee will monitor the litigation and the 2026 federal rulemaking cycle. Barger urged local planners to continue building capacity and data systems so the community can respond if the NOFO priorities shift again.

At the end of her presentation, committee members thanked Barger for the briefing and asked staff to share her slides and additional materials with the committee.