Homelessness Policy: Federal Laws, Veteran and Youth Rights

Federal homelessness policy in the United States rests on one main statute, the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, and a set of grant programs run through HUD that fund shelters, rapid re-housing, and permanent supportive housing in nearly every community. Layered on top are specific rights for veterans, homeless children, and domestic violence survivors, plus accessibility rules for shelters. Two recent changes have reshaped the field: the Supreme Court’s June 2024 decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which gave cities broad authority to enforce anti-camping ordinances, and HUD’s 2025 announcement that it is moving federal funding away from the Housing First model.

Who Counts as Homeless Under Federal Law

The federal definition controls eligibility for every federally funded homelessness program. Under 42 U.S.C. § 11302, a person is homeless if they lack a fixed, regular, and adequate place to sleep at night.¹ That covers the situations most people picture — sleeping in a car, a park, an abandoned building, or a bus station — and it also reaches people staying in emergency shelters, transitional housing, or hotels paid for by government programs or charities.

The definition extends to people who will lose their housing within 14 days, shown by an eviction order or a credible landlord statement, and who have no backup plan and no resources to find another place. Unaccompanied youth and families with children who have been unstable for extended periods and face barriers like chronic health conditions, substance use disorders, or histories of domestic violence also qualify.¹ HUD, the Department of Education, the VA, and other agencies all work from this single statutory baseline.

The McKinney-Vento Act

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, codified starting at 42 U.S.C. § 11301, is the primary federal statute in this area. Enacted in 1987, it authorizes federal grants for emergency shelter, transitional housing, and supportive services designed to move people into permanent residences.² It gives HUD its authority to run the Continuum of Care program and establishes the educational protections for homeless children that school districts rely on every day.

The statute also created the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates 19 federal agencies, including HUD, the VA, the Department of Education, and HHS.² Its statutory job is to build a national strategic plan to end homelessness and keep federal agencies from working at cross-purposes.

How Federal Homelessness Money Reaches Communities

Almost all federal homelessness dollars flow through HUD’s Continuum of Care (CoC) program. In fiscal year 2025, Congress appropriated roughly $3.5 billion for CoC grants and $290 million for Emergency Solutions Grants.³ HUD’s FY 2026 budget request proposed consolidating CoC funding into Emergency Solutions Grants at roughly $4 billion, which would change how the money is structured going forward.

To receive the funds, a community must form a local planning body covering a defined geographic area, and that body has specific federal obligations.

Point-in-Time Counts

Every CoC must count sheltered homeless individuals on a single night each January. The unsheltered count — people sleeping in cars, parks, and other places not meant for habitation — is required every other year, in odd-numbered years, though HUD awards extra points in the grant competition to communities that do it annually.⁴ The count directly influences how much funding a community receives in the next cycle.

HMIS and Coordinated Entry

Each CoC must designate a single Homeless Management Information System for its area to track who receives services and what outcomes they achieve.⁵ The system must reach at least 80 percent bed coverage and 80 percent service volume coverage. Recipients and subrecipients must participate, with an exception for domestic violence providers, who may use a separate comparable system to protect survivor safety.

Communities must also run a coordinated entry system, a standardized intake and assessment process that routes people to services based on the severity of their need rather than the order they walk in the door.⁵ The goal is to prioritize the most vulnerable individuals for limited permanent housing slots.

Financial Match

CoC grant recipients must match at least 25 percent of their federal award with funds or in-kind contributions from other sources. Leasing funds are exempt from that requirement.⁵ Detailed financial audits track spending on permanent supportive housing and rapid re-housing.

The 2025 Shift Away From Housing First

For roughly a decade, HUD prioritized an approach called Housing First: provide permanent housing to people without requiring sobriety, employment, or treatment as a condition of entry, then offer supportive services on a voluntary basis. Federal grant applications scored higher when projects used low-barrier admission policies, and the model became dominant in CoC-funded programs nationwide.

In 2025, HUD Secretary Scott Turner announced that the department would move away from Housing First, characterizing it as a model that “encourages dependence on endless government handouts while neglecting to address the root causes of homelessness, including illicit drugs and mental illness.”⁶ The FY 2025 CoC competition announced $3.9 billion under a new framework that redirects resources toward transitional housing and supportive services and requires 70 percent of projects to be competitively awarded rather than automatically renewed. Providers that built their service model around Housing First now face a funding environment that may reward different approaches.

What Cities Can Do About Public Camping After Grants Pass

For six years, the Ninth Circuit’s 2018 decision in Martin v. City of Boise set the rule in the western states: cities could not enforce anti-camping ordinances against homeless individuals when no shelter beds were available, because doing so punished people for an involuntary act in violation of the Eighth Amendment.⁷ Municipalities had to document shelter bed availability before citing people or clearing encampments.

The Supreme Court wiped that framework out in June 2024. In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, a 6–3 majority held that enforcing generally applicable public-camping laws does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.⁸ Writing for the majority, Justice Gorsuch reasoned that the Eighth Amendment concerns the kind of punishment a government can impose after conviction, not whether a government can criminalize particular behavior in the first place. Anti-camping ordinances, the Court found, target actions — sleeping, camping, storing belongings in public spaces — not a person’s status as homeless.

Cities no longer face a constitutional barrier to enforcing anti-camping and anti-sleeping ordinances, regardless of whether shelter space is available. The Court declined to make federal judges the arbiters of homelessness policy, stating that the Eighth Amendment “does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities from the American people.”⁸ States and cities are free to choose their own approach.

Encampment clearances still raise questions about personal property. Federal guidance from the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness has recommended visible public notice before any closure and time for outreach teams to engage residents. The guidance flagged that closures conducted without offering housing or shelter options lead to the loss of identification and essential belongings, items many programs require for enrollment. Some state and local laws impose specific notice periods and require cities to store seized property for a set number of days, but there is no uniform federal statute. After Grants Pass, the constitutional arguments for blocking property seizures during sweeps have weakened, and local ordinances and state law are the primary protections that remain.

Rights for Veterans

Veterans have access to two targeted federal programs that go beyond what’s available to the general population, both run through a HUD-VA partnership.

HUD-VASH

The HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program pairs a Housing Choice Voucher (the federal rental subsidy commonly known as Section 8) with case management and clinical services from the VA.⁹ The voucher covers rent in the private market while the VA provides ongoing support for mental health, substance use, and other needs.

Eligibility turns partly on discharge status. Under 38 U.S.C. § 2002, veterans with an honorable, general, other-than-honorable, or bad conduct discharge from a special court-martial can qualify. Veterans with a dishonorable discharge or a bad conduct discharge from a general court-martial are excluded.¹⁰ The bar is narrower than many veterans assume.

Supportive Services for Veteran Families

The SSVF program provides rapid re-housing and homelessness prevention grants to low-income veteran families. Where HUD-VASH focuses on long-term rental subsidies, SSVF offers shorter-term financial assistance and case management, whether that means helping someone who just lost their apartment get into a new lease or covering a few months of rent to prevent an eviction from becoming full homelessness.¹¹

Rights for Homeless Children and Youth

McKinney-Vento contains some of the strongest individual-level protections in federal homelessness law, and most of them apply to children.

School Stability and Enrollment

Under 42 U.S.C. § 11432, homeless students have the right to stay in their school of origin for the duration of their homelessness, even if the family moves across district lines. The statute creates a presumption that staying in the same school is in the child’s best interest.¹² The district must provide or arrange transportation to the school of origin at the parent’s or guardian’s request.

Schools must immediately enroll homeless children even when they cannot produce the records enrollment normally requires, including academic transcripts, immunization records, proof of residency, or birth certificates.¹² Missed application deadlines during homelessness cannot be held against the child. Every district must designate a local liaison to coordinate these services.

Financial Aid for Unaccompanied Homeless Youth

Unaccompanied homeless youth face a specific FAFSA problem: the form normally requires parental income information, and these students often have no contact with their parents. Federal law lets unaccompanied homeless youth qualify as independent students and file the FAFSA on their own income.¹³

To get that status, the student needs verification from an authorized source: a McKinney-Vento school liaison, a shelter director, a TRIO program director, or a financial aid administrator at another institution who previously documented the student’s situation. If none of those is available, the financial aid office at the student’s college can make the determination based on a documented interview. Once one of these authorities verifies the status, the school cannot demand additional proof unless it has conflicting information.¹³ The financial aid administrator’s decision on this point is final and cannot be appealed to the Department of Education.

Housing Protections for Domestic Violence Survivors

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) includes housing protections for survivors in or applying for federally assisted housing. A survivor cannot be denied housing or evicted solely because they are a victim of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, or stalking.¹⁴

When a survivor needs to leave their current unit for safety, they can request an emergency transfer. Survivors holding Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers must be allowed to move and keep their rental assistance. A survivor can self-certify the abuse using HUD Form 5382, and the housing provider cannot demand additional proof unless it has conflicting information.¹⁴ Survivors can also request lease bifurcation, which removes the abuser from the lease while allowing the survivor and any other household members to remain. Retaliation against anyone exercising these rights is prohibited. The protections apply regardless of the survivor’s relationship to the perpetrator and regardless of when the violence occurred.

Accessibility Standards for Federally Funded Shelters

Federally funded shelters must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Shelters are classified as social service center establishments, and the applicable rules come from the 2010 Standards for Accessible Design.¹⁵ Requirements scale with facility size:

In sleeping areas with more than 25 beds, at least 5 percent of beds must have clear floor space meeting accessibility standards for wheelchair users.
Shelters with more than 50 beds that provide shared bathing facilities must include at least one roll-in shower with a seat. Where separate facilities exist for men and women, each must have at least one accessible shower.
Parking, entrances, walkways, restrooms, dining areas, and emergency notification systems must all be evaluated for barriers.

Beyond physical access, shelters and other housing programs receiving federal funds must provide reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities under the Fair Housing Act. That can mean adjusting communication methods, modifying rules (such as allowing a service or assistance animal despite a no-pets policy), or altering a unit or common area to make it usable. The Department of Justice publishes an emergency shelter checklist operators can use to evaluate facilities.¹⁶ For older buildings converted into shelters, the standard is not full reconstruction but removal of barriers where readily achievable, or the use of temporary accessibility measures that can be deployed when needed.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 11302 – General Definition of Homeless Individual
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 U.S. Code 11301 – Findings and Purpose
3
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. FY 2026 Congressional Justification
4
HUD Exchange. Point-in-Time Count and Housing Inventory Count
5
eCFR. 24 CFR Part 578 – Continuum of Care Program
6
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD Secretary Scott Turner Leads Monumental Reforms
7
Justia. Martin v. City of Boise, No. 15-35845 (9th Cir. 2018)
8
Justia. City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, 603 U.S. ___ (2024)
9
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 38 USC 2002 – Definitions
11
Department of Veterans Affairs. Supportive Services for Veteran Families
12
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 11432 – Grants for State and Local Activities for the Education of Homeless Children and Youths
13
Federal Student Aid. Unaccompanied Homeless Youth Determinations
14
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Violence Against Women Act (VAWA)
15
U.S. Access Board. ADA Accessibility Standards
16
U.S. Department of Justice. ADA Best Practices Tool Kit – The ADA and Emergency Shelters