Services providers for the homeless across the county are panicking after the federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) department announced large funding cuts for permanent supported housing for the homeless yesterday. 

“They’re killing people,” said Darlene Spoor, executive director of the Arcata House Partnership (AHP) in an interview with the Outpost today. “They’re making choices that will kill people.”

The HUD’s Continuum of Care (CoC) program funds housing for over 750,000 people nationwide and has a budget of over $3.5 billion, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. About 87% of the CoC funding goes towards “permanent supported” housing, a type of residency that doesn’t limit how long people who were homeless can stay in funded shelters.

However, HUD said they were now focusing on distributing CoC funding to temporary residencies, like shelters and weather centers, to support “accountability to homelessness programs and [promote] self-sufficiency among vulnerable Americans.” Only 30% of their funding will now go towards permanent supported housing.

Politico estimates that upwards of 170,000 people might lose their homes. In Humboldt, the CoC funds many local programs for housing for the homeless, including the AHP and the Humboldt Area Foundation. 

It’s a change in line with a Trump executive order from July called “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” which blames homelessness on drugs and mental illness and claims that permanent supported housing incentivizes people to be homeless addicts. 

Future CoC funding may not be available until Sep. 30, 2026. 

Spoor is worried that the funding cuts will clog an already stressed temporary housing system for the homeless in Humboldt. AHP alone serves over 900 people, and thousands more depend on CoC funding to stay housed. All of them make less than $19,000 a year (many who depend on Social Security and disability-aid programs earn even less than that) and will likely not be able to afford market-rate housing. 

“It’s vengeful,” Spoor said. “This pulls the rug right out from under them, the safety nets that we in the homeless service world have made are gone. Gone.”

Spoor emphasized that the funding cuts will end up affecting everyone. Landlords who house CoC-funded tenants will lose a lot of income, and the lack of investment will spread. 

“We are all committed to finding ways to get through this, and if the federal government is determined to walk away from our citizens who are the neediest, then we need to speak out,” Spoor said. “We need to talk louder. We need to yell. This is not the way our country takes care of our citizens who need us.”

The Outpost contacted Humboldt County’s Department of Health and Human Services for comment, but the department wasn’t able to provide a comment before the publication of this story. We’ll provide more information on Monday.