Category: Government

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Urban doom loops mean that a new “Grant Wave” is forming

Many nonprofit and local government executives think that federal and foundation grant funding priorities are relatively static, but they’re not—we’ve written about grant waves before, and a massive new grant wave is forming just over the horizon. Unlike sudden funding shifts due to unanticipated disasters such as COVID, or a major hurricane like Katrina, grant waves develop over time as the legislative and executive branches react to emerging challenges. The new and building grant wave is one I’ll call the “Urban Doom Loom Grant Wave.”

The media is filled with Urban Doom Loop stories like “The risk of an urban doom loop for America’s old-line cities: Ailing metropolitan centres need creative solutions from the public and private sectors.” This article gets two major points wrong and one correct:

  • First Wrong Point: It’s not just “old-line” cities that are at risk of economic implosion, as this can happen to any city, old-line or new. By old-line, the author refers to “San Francisco, Chicago, New York.” Urban economic woes, either historic or current, can be demonstrated using various metrics, one of which is simple population increase vs. decrease. Chicago’s population, for example, peaked at 3.6M in the 1950 census, declined to 2.7M in 2020 and is down to 2.6M in 2023. A case can be made that San Francisco, which the tech revolution has transformed in recent decades, is more of a “new-line” city than an old-line city. Still, its population peaked at 874K in 2020 and has dropped 17.7% to 715K in 2023. While this simple change metric ignores underlying factors like the incomes and other socioeconomic indicators of who’s moving in and out, it’s one approximation of local economic health—people tend to move toward job opportunities, affordable housing etc. But the median sale price for a San Francisco housing unit is $1.4 million—hardly a sign of doom, although prices are down about 8.5% in 2023 from 2022.Population obviously isn’t a perfect metric. Seattle and Portland, which appear in daily apocalyptic news stories about crime, are both new-line cities. Leaving aside the “if it bleeds it leads” aspect of news coverage, both seem to be facing significant economic and quality of life challenges, which are reflected in modest population change: Seattle’s population has dropped by 1.7% and Portland’s by 2.8% since the 2020 Census. One reason population growth or decline is a fair measure of urban vitality is that a city’s public and private infrastructure (e.g., roads, transit, office/retail buildings, housing stock, etc.) grows as the population grows. Expanded infrastructure is a “spent cost” and public and private infrastructure must be maintained even if the tax base and lease/rent revenues fall. In the short- to medium run, this inevitably means higher taxes and/or lower services, which are strong feedback loops for the Urban Doom Loop phenomenon. Detroit, for example, has lost 50% of its population since 1960, despite endless attempts by the city, state, feds, Big Three car makers, and more recently Rocket Mortgage to reverse this trend.
  • Second Wrong Point: The article attributes the current Urban Doom Loop to “the lingering effects of the pandemic.” While lockdowns in cities like LA and NYC disrupted city economic life with work-from-home leaving office buildings empty and few retail shoppers, this is not the only cause of the current Urban Dom Loop cycle. For many Midwestern and Eastern industrial cities, there are been several Urban Doom Loop cycles starting around 1950. This began with the shift of manufacturing first to suburbs, later to the South, and eventually developing countries.Returning WWII GIs took advantage of the GI Bill to buy starter homes in burgeoning suburbs aided by the Interstate system that facilitated commuting. Then, the wave of civil disturbances in 1967 and 1968 accelerated the urban-to-suburban migration, along with well-intentioned but misguided federal urban renewal policies. This might have been better termed “urban removal,” with thousands of commercial buildings and housing units bulldozed in the name of “slum and blight clearance.” The replacements were usually high-rise public housing like the infamous Cabrini Green Housing Project in Chicago and soulless windswept office plazas like the Empire State Plaza in Albany (Jane Jacobs prescient 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities is still relevant in understanding the implications of poor urban land planning). The planners either didn’t understand or didn’t care that the original residents would never return to the “decent safe and sanitary housing” (HUD lingo) or want to work in isolated office building “islands.”I grew up in the then Jewish immigrant trending African American Near Northside of Minneapolis, which was “blighted” but was actually a well-functioning urban neighborhood with plenty of inexpensive housing, shops, and a street-car line to downtown 10 minutes away. By 1960, the city had begun buying the properties for wholesale clearance, including our house. While my parents could have bought a house in a better part of the Northside, they bought a modest house further west to a working-class first-tier suburb. In his new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, Jack Cashill analyses this urban-to-suburban migration.
  • Correct Point: The article argues that “failing metropolitan centres need creative solutions from the public and private sectors.” The resurrection of most downtowns and commercial nodes like Times Square in NYC in the 1980s from decades of decline took a combination of public funds in the form of grants and other subsidies and pioneering developers willing to risk capital. Around 1980, a pioneer developer tackled Times Square. The developer used city tax abatements and a HUD Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) to renovate the dilapidated Commodore Hotel into the Grant Hyatt Hotel, just ahead of the 1980s economic boom. Cities can’t facilitate this kind of urban metamorphosis without private developers and developers won’t make risky investments without grants and subsidies. Like or it or not, this is how American cities come back from the dead, although it can take years or decades for this process to unfold.

Many American cities, large and small, are in some stage of the current Urban Doom Loop. This is due to a perfect storm including the COVID pandemic and work-from-home policies/lockdowns and an array of sudden and perhaps not well thought out public policy shifts like ending cash bail, reducing police budgets, allowing homeless encampments on streets and in parks, adopting the new Housing First approach to addressing homelessness instead of the traditional treatment first strategy, the flood of fentanyl and other drugs across the porous southern border, the tolerance of shoplifting and other crimes, and so on. Whatever the reasons one ascribes the current Urban Doom Loop to, it’s real. People, no matter how committed they are to urban living (I love big cities and am a fan of New Urbanism planning concepts), will flee unsafe and dirty streets, while businesses that become unprofitable will close or move, leaving vacancies.

In the face of the above, how will government policymakers and foundations respond? A typical response would be an avalanche of new federal, state, local, and foundation grants, not only for redevelopment and adaptive reuse of vacant office and retail buildings into affordable housing, but also for human services. As downtown economies falter, low-income and working-class residents will need more services at the same time as local tax revenues fall. We are currently in the Post-Covid Grant Wave with lots of funding for EVs, carbon reduction, advanced manufacturing, etc., but this won’t last because grant waves never do. We’ve seen this before and the Urban Doom Loop Grant Wave is approaching. Nimble nonprofits and local governments should be poised to take advantage of the new funding likely to emerge as the 2024 election approaches.

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Interest rates are up and venture capitalists (VCs) are hurting, so companies are suddenly interested in government grants

Unless you’ve been completed sheltered from the larger financial and information ecosystems, you’ll know that interest rates have gone from “zero or near zero” during 2009 – 2021 to “much higher than that” (at the time of this writing, even the federal discount window rate is 4.75%). Consequently, the value of tech companies has been falling, the value of bank stocks has been falling (the market value of those banks’ bonds have dropped dangerously), and accessing capital has gotten dearer for almost everyone—including venture capitalists (VCs) and the limited partners (LPs) they raise money from.* That may seem like a point distant from the world of grants, but it’s not: since at least 2009, various parts of the federal government, most notably the Department of Energy and USDA, have vastly expanded the number of grants available not only for technology research and development (classic R&D), but for companies that are scaling and for manufacturing infrastructure.

Those grants, however, were less attractive than VC money for much of the 2010s, because VC money was so available: zero or near-zero interest rates meant anyone seeking real investment returns couldn’t get them from bank deposits, Treasury Bills (“t-bills”), or similar sources, so VC investing seemed like the best alternative to the stock market, as returns weren’t impressive from most other sectors. VCs took all that money and reinvested it in a huge range of startups—including ones related to solar, batteries, wind power, and more. Federal grants could still be attractive in the low-interest-rate 2010s environment—the linked post is from 2016—since those grants were non-dilutive and could fund some projects much earlier than VCs typically would. So grants had their place, but, at the same time, VCs also move a lot faster than the feds—I’ve seen claims that VCs sometimes make a fund / no-fund decision for early-stage startups within one to two weeks of first contact—and so a lot of companies preferred the VC route over the grant route. For much of the 2010s, too, it was obvious that solar, wind, and batteries were becoming and were going to be a big deal, which has by now become conventional wisdom.**

Things have changed in the funding environment: VCs are now having problems raising new funds, and some of their LPs are said to be balking at existing fund commitments. Tech stock values have dropped, and with them a lot of the angel investor funding that seeded the startup and scaling ecosystems. So the startups that two or three years ago would’ve gone for VC funding are now likely to be looking closer at grant funding. The total amount of grant funding available in some sectors has increased too, thanks to the recently passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Many of us—including me—have forgotten how much interest rates affect the macroeconomic environment, and few of us expected a global pandemic to allow an economic boom to continue, with only a few months of interruption. Supply chain problems persisted throughout the pandemic and arguably to this day, but the overall picture has been surprisingly rosy. We’ll see what happens if interest rates keep rising, we end up in a genuine bank crisis, and/or a recession.

Nonprofits aren’t immune to variations on the phenomena above: they’re probably seeing donations fall, along with the stock market and the larger set of economic jitters in most areas (except, interestingly, housing, which remains expensive: for decades, we’ve not been building enough, which means that there are substantial-real world shortages, and those legally mandated shortages affect everyone). But smart nonprofits have always cultivated both grants and donations; for R & D startups of the sort that might pursue Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) or similar grants, the calculations about grants versus VC money have always been different.

* “LPs” tend to be pension funds, university endowments, ultra-wealthy family offices, etc. These organizations have been reaping a disproportionate share of tech startup gains over the last fifteen years, and tech companies have been going public later than ever due to regulatory restrictions like Sarbanes-Oxley (“SarBox”), thus restricting the ability of average investors to make money in tech funds. A lot of well-intentioned rules and laws have perverse incentives built into them!

** Today, the biggest problem isn’t the raw cost of solar panels, batteries, or wind turbines—the biggest problem has instead become grid interconnect projects. That’s the bottleneck. “Environmental” laws like the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) are holding up projects that are good for the environment! NEPA is a law that really protects the status quo, at the expense of doing things better than the status quo, and that is bad. As is so often the case, the law does the opposite of its name.

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The end of SAMHSA’s “waivered prescriber” MAT requirement: a grant writer’s farewell

You could easily have missed it: in January, SAMHSA ended its waivered-prescriber requirement due to an obscure section of the recently passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (BIL). Those of you who aren’t involved in the minutia of healthcare service provision and medication-assisted treatment (MAT) may read the preceding sentence and think: “What’s that about, and why does it matter?”* Until this year, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) required that doctors and nurse practitioners (NPs) / physicians assistants (PAs) who prescribe buprenorphine—the key medication used to treat persons with what SAMHSA and HRSA like to call “opioid use disorder” (OUD)—get a special DEA waiver. This “waivered prescriber” requirement had the effect of severely limiting the number of doctors and other healthcare providers who could offer MAT. So you’d have situations where a doctor could prescribe potentially addictive opioid painkillers like oxycodone, but not the buprenorphine that is used to treat OUD. Welcome to the upside-down world of American healthcare.

This waivered-prescriber process always seemed baffling, and it turns out that I’m not the only person who wondered about what’s so special about Suboxone and similar drugs: back in 2015, for example, Scott Alexander wrote that any doctor should be able to prescribe it, and he observed that Suboxone, the “(generally safe) treatment for addiction[,] is more highly regulated than the (very dangerous) addictive drugs it is supposed to replace.” MAT works way better than non-medication efforts, although not perfectly.

Dr. Alexander** notes that:

Suboxone treatment isn’t perfect, and relapse is still a big problem, but it’s a heck of a lot better than most rehabs. Suboxone gives people their dose of opiate and mostly removes the biological half of addiction” and that “Some people stay on Suboxone forever and do just fine – it has few side effects and doesn’t interfere with functioning. Other people stay on it until they reach a point in their lives when they feel ready to come off, then taper down slowly under medical supervision, often with good success.

So maybe taking a daily dose of Suboxone isn’t ideal, but it’s a big improvement on OUD. How many people reading this have a daily dose of coffee, tea, Yerba Mate, or some other caffeinated substance? Sure, we can say that tea makes us more productive, but, compared with street and prescribed opioids, doesn’t Suboxone?

Probably the “waivered-prescriber” thing should have ended much sooner—but that’s far from the DEA or FDA’s most egregious blunder in recent times. Studies find that “FDA Deregulation Increases Safety and Innovation and Reduces Prices.” Maybe we should collectively think more seriously as a society about the costs of government paternalism. The supplement industry, while not exactly a shining star of excellence, works okay without the FDA. People who find FDA approval valuable could choose to only buy substances with FDA approval; those who are FDA skeptics could choose not to. Most supplement buyers don’t appear to care about FDA proof.

In the meantime, regarding OUD and MAT, sudden deaths from fentanyl remain high in NYC—and fentanyl is often accidentally or intentionally mixed with non-opioid drugs like cocaine. This could be a legalization or decriminalization argument: black-market items rarely follow Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP).

Oh yeah, and it looks like naltrexone curbs binge drinking, apart from severe alcoholics. Estimates vary but most find that around 10% of Americans have an alcohol problem. There are also indications that semaglutide reduces the appeal of alcohol (here is one clinical trial examining that subject). In the last links post, we mentioned a monoclonal antibody that reduces amphetamine effectiveness. Although none of the anti-addiction medications s mentioned in this post are likely to alone solve concomitant addiction crises, they’re likely to help. We as a society have at least 50 years of experience in trying to resolve addiction crises without extensive medication-assisted treatment, and the results are apparent. The “War on Drugs” hasn’t worked. Talk therapy and 12-Step programs are better than nothing but don’t work all that well on their own. I guess we’re now at the stage where we’re trying MAT more seriously, and soon we’ll be at the stage where we try psychedelic therapy (sample clinical trial, but there are many others). Trying something new when the old isn’t working makes sense at a personal and a societal level.

* If you or anyone you know has struggled with what’s now referred to as “opioid use disorder,” it matters a lot.

* He’s a psychiatrist.

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Job training and workforce development funding is sometimes found in strange places

We keep an eye on as many parts of the federal grant-making system as we can,* which sometimes reveals peculiarities—the latest being from the Department of Energy (DOE), in its “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law: Advancing Equity through Workforce Partnerships” Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA). Normally, one would expect job training and workforce development funding to be run through the Department of Labor (DOL), which says that its purpose is “To foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States [. . . and] advance opportunities for profitable employment.” The DOE, however, is now getting into the business of advancing “opportunities for profitable employment.” This makes this job-training funding opportunity easy for the unwary to miss, since a good funding opportunity for job training and workforce development is being stashed in a federal agency that’s normally devoted to energy research, development, and implementation.

Look closely at the Advancing Equity FOA and you’ll see evidence of a funding entity set up to fund research, not job training. For example, you’ll find that “Applicants must submit a Letter of Intent and a Concept Paper by 5:00pm ET” by September 13, 2022. I’ve been in this business for decades and can’t recall seeing a Concept Paper required for a job-training grant, because job training grants don’t require novel research (neither can Isaac). “Research” is, by definition, uncertain as to whether it’ll succeed; if we already know something is going to succeed, or likely to succeed, we’d call it “implementation.”

Continue reading Job training and workforce development funding is sometimes found in strange places

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Congress passes gun reform bill: News for nimble nonprofits and public agencies

Our usually dyspeptic Congress recently passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act AKA Gun Reform Bill, which has funding for new discretionary grant programs in it. Since the advent of COVID in 2020, Congress has passed a series of trillion dollar-plus spending bills containing many grant opportunities for nonprofits, public agencies, and businesses involved in stuff like electric vehicle batteries, geothermal energy, solar panel research and construction, and much more. We know, as S + A has been at, near, or over full capacity for most of the past 2.5 years; we thought this flood would slow, as it did in 2010 following the 2009 Stimulus Bill. But we were wrong, which is great news for us grant writers—and for nonprofits and public agencies.

In addition to a raft of reforms aimed at (pun intended) rising gun violence, the 80-page Gun Reform Bill has $750M to “incentivize” states to pass Red Flag laws. Translated from Washington-speak, this likely means big formula grants to the states, which will in turn likely pass through much of their federal funding into RFPs for local agencies to “do something.” The “something” won’t be all that important, as the goal will be to get the money to the streets. The Bill also allocates billions to schools and communities (this means CBOs, or community-based organizations) to expand mental health programs. These new funding rivers—they’re too big to be mere “streams”—will likely flow through the Department of Education, SAMHSA, HRSA, OJJDP, HUD, etc., in the form of RFPs over the next few years.

Other grant ornaments will emerge from the Gun Reform Bill, proposed Climate Emergency executive actions, and additional legislation this and next year that addresses emerging problems. The feds like to throw money at problems, call the money “important action,” and see what sticks. Around the time of the Columbine shooting in 1999, President Clinton and Congress ramped up funding for odd things like “Midnight Basketball,” as well as one of our favorites, the 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) program, and many other programs that were supposed to improve school mental health services, mentoring, and provide safe after school hours activities. Since then, we’ve seen the Sandy Hook school massacre, the Uvalde school massacre, and many others. But we’re doing something. In the first decade of the 21st Century, we wrote at least 50 funded 21st CCLC and similar grants.

The FY ’23 federal budget year begins October 1, and smart local agencies will start planning now to get their piece of the mental health and related grant pies. Even if your agency has little behavioral health experience, this is the time to develop some and form partnerships to make your grants applications more believable than they might be otherwise.

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“Homelessness is a Housing Problem”: When cities build more housing, homelessness goes down

Maybe you’ve seen the headlines: “Affordable housing in California now routinely tops $1 million per apartment to build” (that’s up a few hundred thousand from 2017, when we wrote “L.A. digs a hole more slowly than economics fills it back in: The Proposition HHH Facilities Program RFP“). At a million dollars a unit, not many units will be built, and California will continue to suffer from high housing costs in general and high levels of homelessness. The topic is, unfortunately, timely; I’ve been reading a book, Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns, which covers what you’d expect based on the title. Yet there’s a naive, common view that homelessness is primarily about “mental illness” and “drugs” and other potential contributors to homelessness; while those factors exist, the lower the cost of housing, the easier it is for someone on the margin of being housed or being homeless to stay housed. The lower the cost, the easier it is for family, SSDI, Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV, formerly called Section 8), and other income supports to keep a person housed. Intuitively, this makes sense: it’s easier to cover $750 in rent than $2,000 in rent, even for someone with mental illness and drug problems. As the cost of housing goes up, the number of people who fall from the margins of being “housed” to being “homeless” goes concomitantly up. While mental illness and drug abuse are factors, they’re secondary to housing costs, and they’re really red herrings relative to overall housing costs and ongoing housing shortages across America.

The homelessness problem is intractable without zoning reform and the removal of barriers to new housing construction, whether those barriers are height maximums, parking space minimums, or “neighborhood input” or “community input.” Those last two are functionally barriers to building anything, anywhere. We’ve worked on Los Angeles Prop HHH proposals, and, despite that Proposition raising $1.2 billion for housing, not much has materially changed. Why? California makes building anything, anywhere, astonishingly difficult. Until we can increase the supply of housing, we’re going to see homelessness problems.

Colburn and Aldern—the authors of Homelessness is a Housing Problem—write that “the roots of the homelessness crisis in many cities in the United States were being misdiagnosed, often to frustrating and harmful ends.” This is not a failing the Left can easily blame on the Right: the housing crisis is most acute in places like California, New York, and Washington State—all of them solidly to the left. Currently, however, “one of the [. . .] phenomena driving polarization in the country is a grafting of our political identities onto national (as opposed to local) politics.” The more local one gets, the more concrete the policy issues.

Most housing decisions are made at the local level, not the national level, of U.S. politics (which is a mistake). Colburn and Aldern cite data finding that “Seattle and San Francisco, for example, have roughly four to five times the per capita homeless population of Chicago.” Chicago is seeing its population decline, and the city is also building a lot of new housing, which alleviates the supply-demand mismatches common elsewhere. Mental illness and drug use seem to spread relatively evenly across the country—so why aren’t all cities seeing homelessness spikes? The answer: some are much less expensive than others. For example, “Charlotte [. . .] has grown as fast as San Francisco and Seattle, but because of a relatively robust housing supply response, the city has not faced the housing shortages that plague many coastal cities.” Drugs, mental illness, and other issues are simply far easier to deal with when the rent is lower.

The authors’ data shows little to no correlation among various cities’ levels of drugs, mental illness, and poverty relative to homelessness. “Regions with high rates of poverty and unemployment—like Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore—have some of the lowest per capita rates of homelessness in the country.” Moreover, “For a highly impoverished household, it is likely easier to access housing in Detroit or St. Louis, where median rents are between $600 and $700 per month, than in San Francisco and Santa Clara County, where costs are three to four times higher.” Do see the graphs in the book.

Housing shortages are a policy choice, and Colburn and Aldern aren’t the only ones to notice the problems. Zillow Research finds that “Homelessness Rises Faster Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income“—which, again, is exactly what one would expect. We can look abroad, too: “Finland ends homelessness and provides shelter for all in need.” This makes intuitive sense: if there is more housing available, and housing is cheap, it’s going to be much harder to be homeless for an extended period of time. Very few people, even those with drug and mental illness problems, “want” to be homeless. California and New York introduce numerous and complicated barriers to building more housing, and they see homelessness rates soar. Dallas and Houston are somewhat easier places to build housing, and, while they don’t have zero homelessness, they have a lot less. Houston “Moved 25,000 People From the Streets Into Homes of Their Own.” L.A. and San Francisco can do the same any time they want. L.A. used to be zoned for ten million people, in 1960. By 1990, it was zoned for only 3.9 million people. I guess technology got considerably worse from 1960 to 1990, when transistor counts in computer chips dropped, as did the efficiency of gas-powered vehicles (this is sarcasm).

The immediate, emotional response to a person screaming on the street—”homelessness must be caused by mental illness”—is not always the optimal one. There’s typically a long backstory to that person winding up on the streets. A fair number of people writing online seem to have an inaccurate notion of how the price formation process works.

One sees other mistakes of cause, like people railing against “investors” who buy housing units. Investors recognize the obvious: if municipalities restrict the supply of housing, as demand rises, so will prices, allowing them to earn supernormal returns. If housing is a “good” investment, the cost of housing will be expensive. This is a poor local and national policy, but it’s one we’ve been collectively and foolishly pursuing for decades, and we should stop doing it. Making being alive affordable, instead of unaffordable, is good for human flourishing. Moving to the suburbs, exurbs, or the sticks is not a great answer, either, because then the housing may be superficially affordable, but the cost of transit goes up, both in literal money terms and in terms of time. Unless or until we get fast transit from the exurbs to other places—self-flying flying cars would be nice—we’ve got technological limits on how far we can go.

It’s hard to address the issues of people whose model of the world is simply wrong; if someone believes that “bloodletting” is a cure for disease, and ignores the evidence to the contrary, at some point, one will conclude that dealing with a “person who has a wrong view of the world.”

A 2020 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finds that “median rent increases of $100 a month were associated with a 9% increase in homelessness in the areas we examined.” Building more housing, and simplifying the process of building housing, is a key way to get more people housed and off the streets; housing shortages are causing many of the homelessness problems that have become especially evident in recent years.

Regular people see that most of the long-term homeless do appear to have substance abuse and mental health issues, and then think that substance abuse and mental health issues are the sole cause of homelessness, while ignoring correlations between the cost of housing and the rise of homelessness—in other words, they’re not thinking at the margin (I suspect “thinking at the margin” is pretty rare). Houston is getting homeless people housed. Why isn’t Los Angeles?

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant-making process is slow, even during a pandemic

StatNews reports that the NIH is “a slow-moving glacier” and that the agency’s “sluggish and often opaque efforts to study long Covid draw patient, expert ire.” The news get worse: Congress allocated $1.2 billion to study long COVID, but “so far the NIH has brought in just 3% of the patients it plans to recruit.” The major defense of one NIH employee? The $1.2 billion effort is moving “much faster than we’ve done anything else before” and the NIH’s “usual pace can be even slower.” How reassuring. Unfortunately, the NIH’s Covid-19 response is typical; as we wrote in August 2021, the federal grant-making apparatus is so slow that the private “Fast Grants” initiative attempted to do just what its name implies: make grants fast. And it did: within days at first, and then within two weeks. By contrast, the NIH has never learned how to go fast, and, as far as we can tell, neither have other federal agencies (although HRSA did eventually kick out some telemedicine money faster than we’d have imagined).

Why haven’t federal agencies learned to go fast? I think part of the answer is poor feedback mechanisms. No federal agency goes out of business from moving slowly—no one loses a job, money, or anything else. If even a pandemic can’t shake NIH out of their torpor, what will? A war? Maybe. We couldn’t even bother to make substantial modifications to the absurd clinical trials process during the COVID-19 pandemic, and instead relied primarily on throwing more money at the problem, while NIH continued to crawl at a snail’s pace.

America does the same thing with infrastructure construction: instead of reforming and eliminating bureaucratic rules to reduce the cost of building new infrastructure, we attempt to throw money at the problem until we manage to (partially) bulldozer our way through it. The problems being that the “throw money at it” solution takes way too long, costs too much, and leaves us with too little infrastructure at the end. But there is no single Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for bureaucratic rules, so nothing changes—much like the stalled COVID study. The StatNews article notes that “A group of two dozen COVID-19 experts recently released a report that excoriated the NIH’s progress as well, noting that recruiting for the study has been painfully slow” and that “The experts argued the Biden administration should create a long COVID task force to hold agencies accountable for progress.” Unless the task force has the power to fire, demote, and restructure, it’s unlikely to achieve much.

Speed is important for many reasons, one being that the faster you can do something, the more you can do of the thing, and the sooner you can get feedback. One sees this feedback process—sometimes called the “Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act” (OODA) loop—in all sorts of endeavors: as the loops tightens, more of the thing gets done, or learned. In computer programming, for example, compiling or deployment that used to take hours or days now happens instantly, allowing for fast feedback to programmers, and letting the programmers get better, fast. Something similar is true in writing: the faster a person writes and gets useful critical feedback, the quicker the revision process becomes (assuming the editor is good and the writer in an improvement mindset).

The opposite is also true: as noted above, our bloated infrastructure rules from laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) mean that building things like subway or light rail line extension takes a decade and costs billions of dollars. So we build that infrastructure with such agonizing slowness that we never get network effects going, and most people talk of “toy trains” that “go to nowhere,” and, unfortunately, they have a point: if it takes 10 or more years to build a few miles of rail, most people are going to scoff at that rail. The road to improving the U.S.’s transit emissions starts with reforming NEPA. The law is supposedly designed to improve the environment, but instead it locks in the current system, which is not very climate friendly—the law is having the exact opposite of its intended effect.

By the time the NIH completes its studies, the studies might not matter any more. It’s like a person taking five years to decide to ask someone to get married: by the time person 1 asks, person 2 may already be married and have kids. If you wait sufficiently long, opportunities disappear.

Failure to study COVID with sufficient speed will leave people suffering, and possibly dead. That is bad. Despite it being bad, no one seems able or willing to attempt to overcome the problem.

If you don’t think speed and attention matter, try writing anything substantive with interruptions every few minutes: you’ll never get anywhere, and the end result will be unpalatable.

I wish I had a solution to these problems, but I don’t. The normal grant-making process works on a “good enough” basis, and it is typically more about redistributing money to favored communities and populations of focus than truly achieving the nominal goal of whatever the grant-funded program happens to be. Once you realize that, the rest of the system’s apparent peculiarities fall into place. Unless and until Congress wants to make substantial changes to how the federal government works, I think we’re likely to see business-as-usual continue. By far, the most successful part of the federal response to COVID was Operation Warp Speed, which rapidly kicked money to the usual suspects, in the form of pharma companies, and made pre-committments to buy large numbers of vaccine doses even if the clinical trials didn’t work out, such that trials could be conducted quickly and, if the money is “wasted” on ones that don’t work out, that “waste” is trivial relative to the amount of benefit from even a single successful trial.

Warp Speed operated at warp speed, while the NIH is still ambling along in a buggy. That’s been our experience with federal grant-making agencies: they stroll along, and nothing can or will hasten them. That’s a shame, because the country and world face real problems. As with NEPA and CEQA, however, many problems are mandated by legislators, or increased by the rule-making machinery, and no one with sufficient clout seems interested in solving them. These problems also don’t map neatly to right or left ideological talking points. The answer to whether we need “more” or “less” government, for example, is that we need more efficient and effective government, which is neither “more” or “less:” it’s orthogonal to that question, and the solutions aren’t amenable to sound bites.

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Substance Abuse Disorder/Opioid Use Disorder (SUD/OUD): Traditional treatment versus harm reduction for grant writers

We’ve been writing Substance Use Disorder / Opioid Use Disorder (SUD/OUD) treatment grant proposals since 1993, so we’ve been at it for long enough to see waves of funder preferences around approaches come and go. SUD/OUD are hard problems, and made harder because of the misinformation and disinformation about Oxycodone and Oxycontin that Purdue Pharma and its subsidiaries spread for decades, in a way that’s likely worse than the way the cigarette companies once marketed their wares.

For the first 20 years or so in business, the SUD/OUD treatment grant proposals we wrote were usually based on the standard “Step-Down” paradigm, in which people with addiction receive treatment along a continuum of care from a high level of care and then “step down” to lower care levels in increments, leading to eventual recovery and self-care. Following engagement, referral, or self-presentation and development of an individual treatment plan (ITP), the step-down levels are more or less like this:

  • Detoxification/hospitalization
  • Inpatient treatment
  • Intensive outpatient treatment
  • Outpatient treatment, often including 12-Step peer support groups and, for those with OUD, medication assisted treatment (MAT)
  • Recovery and self-care

The levels can be further broken down, but the above is a common schema. As patients move down the treatment continuum, they usually receive case-managed wraparound supportive services—like legal assistance, workforce development, primary/dental care, affordable housing, etc.— at least until they are in recovery and have been “clean and sober” for six to twelve months. The “affordable housing” part has gotten much harder, though, because most cities use zoning laws to restrict the supply of housing, which causes prices to rise, which makes a given housing unit difficult for a grant-funded organization, or a person with drug addiction, to afford. Also, it’s an unfortunate reality that most people with SUD/OUD will relapse multiple times, sending them to the top of the treatment pyramid again. In this way, step-down treatment is something like the classic board game Chutes and Ladders I played as a kid. “Step down” was the main “treatment game” available for decades, although methadone was sometimes used for what we now call OUD.

About ten years ago, we began noticing a difference in SAMSHA, HRSA, and other RFPs for SUD/OUD: those agencies now want usually applicants to augment treatment to include “harm reduction.” As defined and described by SAMHSA, “Harm reduction is critical to keeping people who use drugs alive and as healthy as possible, and is a key pillar in the multi-faceted Health and Human Services’ Overdose Prevention Strategy.” Most of our clients resisted this shift but have gradually gotten on board the harm reduction train as pure harm reduction RFPs, like SAMHSA’s “FY ’22 Harm Reduction NOFO,” began to appear. The shift isn’t surprising, because in grant seeking it pays to follow the golden rule. No, not that golden rule, this one: “The people with the gold make the rules.”

Harm reduction projects usually involve a van-based outreach model in which Peer Support Workers (PSWs) go in teams to what are termed “hot spots” to engage people living with SUD/OUD. “Hot spots” include places like homeless encampments, shelters, parks, etc. The outreach effort can be either obvious (e.g., signage on the van and PSWs in logo t-shirts) or on the down low (e.g., plain white van and PSWs in street clothes), or a hybrid version using magnetic signs placed on the van, or removed from it, depending on the needs of a particular location on a given day. The PSWs distribute harm reduction supplies like clean syringes (with or without exchange), alcohol swabs, sterile water ampules, spoons, fentanyl test strips, sharps containers, and condoms, along with emergency food, clothing, hygiene items, and so forth. The outreach van is also used to provide some direct services in the field like wound care, rapid HIV tests, and naloxone administration.

The most extreme version of harm reduction are safe injection sites: while these are illegal in most of America because the drugs themselves are technically illegal, if widely available, three safe injection sites have recently and prominently opened, two in NYC and one in San Francisco. One key problem with a safe injection site initiative is that few businesses or residents want one near them, much like no one wants to be in proximity of a methadone clinic, so permitting is a real challenge. We’ve yet to write a safe injection site proposal but likely soon will.

A key difference between the standard treatment model and the harm reduction model is that clients are typically not tracked (when Joe or Mary shows up for supplies, their identity isn’t verified and they aren’t entered into a client database for tracking), and, most significantly, services aren’t case-managed. PSWs will offer “warm handoffs” for follow-up treatment like MAT and other center-based services, but there’s no automated follow-up from the harm reduction team.

We’re just grant writers, so we don’t have an immediate opinion as to whether step-down treatment or harm reduction is more efficacious, and most studies on the subject are somewhat questionable, although every treatment/harm reduction proposal we write claims the project design uses “evidence-based practices” (EBPs). When in doubt, claim both “evidence” and “innovation” for your program, leaving aside that those two are often mutually exclusive. If your agency provides SUD/OUD treatment, consider adding a harm reduction component, as this is clearly where the feds are going with grant funds. A cynic might conclude that the feds are pushing harm reduction because it’s much cheaper than providing longitudinal case-managed treatment, but we’ll leave that conclusion to others.

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How to prepare a DOT “Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity” (RAISE) application

NOTE: This “how to” post is a companion to “The Dept. of Transportation (DOT) issues first RFP under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law: Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE). You should probably read that post first, which was posted yesterday.

The recently passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) has $1T (yes, that’s a “trillion”) for a cornucopia of funding from DOT, DOE, and other Federal agencies. BIL authorizes grants for an array of infrastructure projects, including lead water pipe replacement, high-speed internet, transportation and public transit, airports, passenger rail, electric-vehicle charging stations, electric utility infrastructure, environmental remediation, and the development of time machines (okay, I made up the last entry to see if you’re paying attention).

DOT just issued the first RFP under the new BIL (see note and link above), and a flood of other infrastructure RFPs will be published in the coming months: do as much as can be reasonably be completed in advance, even though you won’t know the specific requirements until the RFP is available. Follow these action steps and you’ll be ready to submit technically correct applications without organizational hysteria as the deadline approaches:

  • Designate a project manager or, as Apple and other tech companies refer to this person, the “Directly Responsible Individual” (DRI).
  • Most funding under the BIL will be for planning and/or development of some sort of physical improvement, structure, or facility. This kind of proposal is very different than a typical human services or R & D proposal: the narrative sections are usually relatively short and often are not composed of a single narrative, but rather are disjointed responses to highly specific questions scattered throughout the RFP; these small narratives may have to be included in different sections of the final application. Severe word or character counts restrictions will likely apply for each narrative section, making it harder to tell a coherent “narrative story” about the project and engage the imagination of the readers who will score the proposal. There should be a section for an abstract or project summary, which may be the grant writer’s only opportunity to draft a topic paragraph that answers the six essential questions that every proposal must include: Who, What Where, When, Why, and How (the 5 Ws and H). If there’s no abstract or project summary, find a place somewhere to include this topic paragraph. The final application, when printed out by the funder*, will look like a layer cake with the narratives interspersed with a myriad of forms, drawings, and exhibits that can easily run to over 200 pages. It is crucial that the RFP application instructions be closely followed, as no matter how great the project concept or the political juice behind it are, the application will not be scored and will be tossed if it’s deemed technically deficient. In most cases, you will not have an opportunity to correct deficiencies.
  • Make sure that your agency can demonstrate site control in the form of a title, right-of-way easement, lease or lease-option. If leased, the term of the lease must be longer than the useful life of the proposed capital improvement(s).
  • Hire an architectural and/or engineering firm to conduct design studies and eventually working drawings needed to obtain a building permit. Due to concerns over climate change and sustainability, select an architect/engineer who will design to meet high-level LEED “green building” standards.
  • Have the architect/engineer develop a master timeline to take the project from concept to moving dirt and establish the critical path for project completion. Once the timeline is set, the DRI should convene the first of a series of “all hands” meetings involving key internal and external stakeholders (e.g., utility company representatives, fire department, etc.). As the project moves forward, keep your eye on the critical path and adjust the timeline frequently. The DRI must keep the project moving forward.
  • Make sure that the architect/engineer interfaces with the jurisdiction’s planning department and/or building department to understand the land use and zoning constraints on the site, as well as the level of environmental review that will be needed. Determine required hearings and discretionary permits/approvals and the anticipated timing of getting the permits/approvals (add these to the project timeline). Depending on the project concept, county, state, and/or federal permits/approvals may be necessary (e.g., EPA, State Office of Historic Preservation “SHPO”, etc.)
  • Have the architect/engineer prepare a conceptual site plan for agency review and, eventually, a second trip the planning/building departments for a reality check. The DRI should schedule any necessary pre-building permit public hearings. The public hearings will need to be formally noticed and widely advertised–these hearings will be where cranky, angry local NIMBYs will show up to complain. No matter how altruistic the project seems, assume that there will be organized opposition and develop a plan to co-opt the opposition or at least address their concerns. We’ve constructed a legal world in which building anything, anywhere, is dragged down by this process, to the detriment of all of us, but Seliger + Associates doesn’t make the rules, we just write the proposals.
  • If feasible, given the project timeline and anticipated RFP release, have the architect/engineer prepare detailed working drawings, based on the conceptual plan (as revised) and apply for a building permit. While not always possible, the best way to demonstrate project feasibility to a funder is having obtained a building permit. This makes it possible to use the ever popular “but for” argument in your proposal: “but for only the grant, the project can be immediately implemented.” This argument is a variation on President Obama’s “shovel ready projects” argument when the 2009 Stimulus Bill was passed.

If all of the above steps are completed, you still won’t have a shovel-ready project; instead, you’ll have an “on the shelf” project and will vastly increase the likelihood of a positive funding decision, as funders for these kind of projects prefer applications that look like they can be quickly started. No funder wants to approve a grant for a project that can’t be built expeditiously—or built at all.

Generally, with an on-the-shelf project, the only step needed after the grant is awarded is to conduct a public-bid process to select the general contractor. A complete application without gotchas and fumbling is the way to soften the stone-like hearts of funder decision makers as they imagine attending the ground breaking ceremony with President Biden and, ideally, Kim Kardashian on hand.

 

* While Seliger + Associates and our readers live in the digital world of 2022, for many federal agencies it’s still 1997. Although most federal proposals are digital uploads, in many cases the proposals are printed out for review and scoring. Thus, all attachments should be 8 1/2″ x 11″ and reviewers will likely view the proposal in grey-scale print outs, not on the 27″ iMacs and 24″ Dell side monitors we use, so beautiful color graphics may be wasted.

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The Dept. of Transportation (DOT) issues first RFP under the “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law:” “Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity” (RAISE)

The Department of Transportation (DOT) just issued an RFP for the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) Grants program; this being the federal government, the actual name of this program is the “Local and Regional Project Assistance Program in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (“Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’)”, which is even longer than the short title we shoehorned into the title of this post. Why have one program name when two will do?

Although RAISE isn’t a new program, this RFP is significant because it appears to be the first one issued under the recently passed “Infrastructure Bill.” While in FY ’20 there was a paltry $1B available for RAISE, this year there’s $1.5B (and yes, that’s “billion”). The max grants are $5M in urban areas and $1M in rural areas, so hundreds of RAISE grants will be made. The RFP says RAISE grants may be used for “surface transportation infrastructure projects that will have a significant local or regional impact.” The deadline isn’t yet published, curiously, but there’ll be an update notice published on Jan. 30 in grants.gov that should have the deadline.

Eligible applicants include states, local governments, transportation districts and agencies—including ports, and Indian Tribes. While nonprofits aren’t directly eligible, they could be part of an applicant consortium and receive sub-grants for things like environmental justice, equity, workforce development, ethnic-specific community outreach and engagement, etc.

RAISE and other transportation programs, new and old, to be funded by the Infrastructure Bill, are really aimed at what is sometimes called the Concrete Lobby. The Concrete Lobby is an unholy alliance of construction companies, developers, local elected officials and appointed bureaucrats, unions, investment banks, lobbyists, chambers of commerce, and similar self-interested parties. In many ways, the Concrete Lobby is an analog of the Military-Industrial Complex that likes politicians who like foreign wars, so the government will buy more bullets. In this case, the Concrete Lobby wants the government to “buy more concrete.”

When I was a Community Development Director for CA cities in the 1980s, we always paid close attention to local Concrete Lobby members because they could easily and often would hand-pick candidates for local office, disrupting planning and redevelopment efforts (despite their efforts, though, local municipalities still severely restrict housing construction). Environmental groups and other NIMBYs typically opposed the Concrete Lobby, using tools like the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and State Offices of Historic Preservation (SHPO) to tie up or defeat local development projects, including those aimed at transit and transportation.* We see the results today: traffic gridlock and spectacularly high housing prices that hurt the poor the most, but hurt almost everyone. Depending on how the city I was working for felt about a particular project, we’d either support or surreptitiously attempt to sabotage environmental and NIMBY opposition. If you’re an environmental activist, keep in mind that, while you’re playing a one to five year game, the Concrete Lobby and their sycophants in government are playing a 30 to 50 year game.

With so much grant money now sloshing around looking for transportation projects and the rise of “woke environmentalism,” I’m guessing that the Concrete Lobby will try to co-opt opposition by most environmental groups with visions of subcontracts, as well as the virtue signaling sacraments of environmental justice and the suddenly popular shibboleth of “equity.” If you represent an eligible applicant for RAISE grants or a nonprofit interested in subcontracts, this is the time to look for good project concepts. We’ll soon post a companion article on how to develop a competitive grant proposal for RAISE and its ilk. These kinds of proposals are very different than typical human services proposals as the narratives are short, but the attachments are huge, resulting in what we call “layer cake” applications.

* When I was Community Development Director for the City of San Ramon in the San Francisco East Bay around 1990, we worked hard to get the regional transit authority to add bus lines through San Ramon to connect to the BART heavy rail system. We imagined that our largely upper middle class and progressive residents would love the idea of reducing use of cars for commuting. They were environmentalists, right? Wrong! Within two weeks of the new buses, which were standard size or larger articulated buses, rolling though town, about 200 people in matching anti-bus t-shirts showed up at a city council meeting denouncing the intrusive buses that were keeping them awake at night and “ruining their quality of life.” I had the thankless task of facing this mob. The City Council immediately caved and directed me to renegotiate with the transit authority. The result was to remove most trunk bus lines and add a few mini-buses, which defeated the point of connecting to BART for commuting.