Ohio received $39.9 million in new federal homelessness grants in the trailing 90 days, down from $324.6 million in the same window a year earlier, an 88% collapse that has nothing to do with decisions made in Columbus. The money stopped flowing because Washington froze the pipeline, and it has not restarted even after a federal court ordered it to.
The mechanism behind the drop is specific. HUD Secretary Scott Turner rescinded the FY2024-2025 Continuum of Care Notice of Funding Opportunity on November 13, 2025, weeks before awards were expected to disburse, and replaced it with a new competition that would have redirected money from permanent supportive housing toward temporary shelter. Turner has publicly called the CoC program "a slush fund for nonprofits." Eleven jurisdictions filed suit. A federal court in Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order in December 2025. On June 29, 2026, the court ruled the new NOFO unlawful. As of late July 2026, COHHIO, Ohio's lead Continuum of Care advocacy organization, reported that FY2025 grant agreements were still moving slowly, many expired grants had no signed agreement, and application materials for the FY2026 competition were still unavailable.
That gap, between a court ruling and a government that has not acted on it, is where Ohio's homelessness network currently lives.
Source: NationGraph.
The scale of Ohio's exposure is not incidental. Roughly 72% of the state's permanent housing funding for homeless individuals flows through the CoC program, making Ohio among the most CoC-dependent states in the country. COHHIO estimates the state is at risk of losing $64.6 million in CoC resources. According to a Community Solutions analysis, between 7,400 and 7,500 Ohioans with disabilities could be forced back into homelessness if the funding gap is not resolved. Nationally, the National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates 97,000 people in CoC-funded permanent housing are at risk.
The numbers inside Ohio's current window illustrate just how thin the flow has become. The largest single award in the 90-day period is a $31.2 million Continuum of Care grant to Strategies to End Homelessness Inc. in Cincinnati, one of the very few CoC grants to clear the backlog anywhere in the country. The rest of the window is dominated by small Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher renewals: $977,000 to the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority, $856,000 to Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority. Compare that to what arrived in the same window a year ago: Columbus MHA drew $55.9 million, Cuyahoga $46.5 million, Cincinnati Housing Authority $39 million, quarterly disbursement tranches that kept the system running and that have simply not repeated.
This is not an Ohio-specific contraction. Every neighboring state shows the same cliff in the same 90-day window: Pennsylvania fell from $383 million to $20 million, Michigan from $219 million to $8 million, Indiana from $102 million to $2.5 million. Nationally, homelessness grant starts dropped from $11.6 billion to $394 million year over year in this window, a 97% decline. As Shelterforce reported in February, HUD staff cuts and grant processing delays were already straining service providers before the legal fight over the NOFO reached its peak. The uniformity of the collapse across state lines confirms this is a program-level freeze, not a reflection of any state's political choices.
Ohio does have an active homelessness grant portfolio of roughly $287 million across HUD, HHS, DOL, and DOJ, money already obligated and keeping services running. But obligated funds do not renew themselves. The agencies and nonprofits drawing on that portfolio are operating on commitments that cannot be extended without new award agreements, and those agreements are the ones sitting unsigned.
Rep. Emilia Sykes (OH-13) sent a formal letter to Secretary Turner in November 2025 pressing HUD to protect funding for Summit and Stark Counties specifically. Congress, in FY2026 appropriations, required HUD to renew expiring CoC grants on a defined schedule and increased Homeless Assistance Grants to $4.4 billion, a legislative signal that the freeze was not sanctioned by the Hill. Neither the statutory requirement nor the court ruling has produced signed grant agreements at the pace the state's network needs.
The next signal to watch is whether HUD begins executing FY2025 award agreements before the summer ends, and whether the FY2026 NOFO application materials, still unavailable as of July 28, are released in time for organizations to compete before more expired grants lapse entirely. For the 7,500 Ohioans with disabilities whose permanent housing depends on CoC funding, the answer to that question is not abstract.
