Homeless Shelters

The news media has picked up on HUD’s requirement for integrated shelters.

Feds to Require Shelters to Accommodate Transgender Individuals
Proposed rule lets homeless pick shared sleeping, bathing areas according to the gender with which they identifyWashington Free Beacon
By Elizabeth Harrington
Published November 19, 2015

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is seeking to require shelters to accommodate transgender individuals to use the shared sleeping and bathing areas of their choice.

A proposed regulation would require shelters that receive funding from the Office of Community Planning and Development, which spends $6.5 billion annually, to “provide transgender persons and other persons who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth with access to programs, benefits, services, and accommodations in accordance with their gender identity.”
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“Since the publication of the Equal Access Rule, HUD has conducted further review on the issue of transgender individuals’ access to temporary, emergency shelters and other facilities with physical limitations or configurations that require shared sleeping quarters or bathing facilities, both in terms of individual cases and evidence from broader research,” the agency said.

We have been going out to train the shelter staff and the 211 intake operators on the HUD policy and Connecticut non-discrimination law. So far half of the eight regions have received the training and we had some push-back from shelter operators, most of them seem very accommodating and have had policies in place.