Doug Shipman is settling into his new role as Atlanta City Council president. Since his swearing-in earlier this month, he’s appointed committee chairs, presided over a couple of council meetings, and met with state officials.

He’s also poring over hundreds of pages detailing city finances and funding distribution processes, all packed into three thick binders. It’s here where he says he can find ways to fix the city’s long-beleaguered HIV housing program.

“It’s really a tactical thing,” he says of finding a solution. “And often the devil is in the details.”

The City’s Department of Grants and Community Development is tasked with administering about $23 million annually in HOPWA funds to dozens of HIV housing contractors in 29 counties around Atlanta. 

The city also received an additional $3.3 million in HOPWA funds to help with Covid-19 pandemic rent relief as part of the 2020 CARES Act. More than a year later, the city has only distributed half the money. The City Council recently voted to contract with the United Way of Metro Atlanta to distribute the rest of the funds or face having to return them. 

Some 1,500 people with HIV and AIDS are assisted by Atlanta’s HOPWA program with another nearly 2,000 on a waiting list. There are nearly 60,000 people in Georgia, but still, millions of federal funds remain bottled up while HIV organizations are forced to take out loans as they wait for reimbursements from the city, oftentimes many months late. 

In 2008, for example, the city was sitting on about $7 million in unspent HOPWA funds from previous years. In 2019, the unspent federal money jumped to more than $40 million. The unspent HOPWA money now totals roughly $70 million.  

 After Living Room sued the city over late payments, HUD investigated the city and warned officials its failure to fulfill its financial responsibilities could result in losing all future HOPWA funding.  

Stable housing is key in mitigating the spread of HIV by ensuring patients receive medical care. For the past several years, Georgia has remained one of the top states with the highest rates of HIV/AIDS cases, with more than 50,000 people living with HIV. Fulton and DeKalb counties are at the epicenter. 

In 2019, an estimated 1.2 million people in the U.S. had HIV. Of those, 235,400 were Black gay and bisexual men, according to the CDC. Of the 36,801 new HIV diagnoses in the U.S., 26% (9,421) were among Black gay and bisexual men. 

Positive Impact Health Centers, one of the largest HIV housing providers, became so frustrated with the city’s inability to make timely payments, it quit the program. LGBTQ activists continue to plead with city officials to do something to make tens of millions of dollars available to provide housing for one of the city’s most vulnerable populations. 

“I think part of the struggle has been that the city is not set up to really understand the needs of the providers,” Shipman said. “The city has looked at this program and said, ‘OK, what does the city need to do to check all these boxes?’ Instead, we should be saying, ‘Wait a minute, we're trying to serve these providers so that providers can serve clients’ and really taking it from that direction.”

Paperwork, documentation, reports — all the information the city requires from providers to receive HOPWA funding could be what’s harming the entire process, Shipman said. In those three binders on his desk, he is searching for ways to streamline the process so money can get out quicker. 

He said his experience in the private sector, as well as CEO of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and CEO of the Woodruff Arts Center, exposed him to complicated grants and funding processes that sometimes demand multiple signatures and hundreds of pages for a provider to fill out.

“Can we make it simpler? Can we pre-approve this stuff? Those types of things, I think, that is the fastest way to solve the program,” he said. 

Bolstering HOPWA with private funding is also a way to help repair the broken program, Shipman said. 

“When a program like this is in trouble, it limits your ability to get philanthropic help and any kind of other help,” he said. 

“Programs like this are and should be federally funded, but also if they're working well, they can often attract other philanthropists,” he said. “And I think that the inability to get this program to work well also makes it even more difficult to get additional philanthropic dollars to support it,” he said.

Over the years, providers have suggested the state take over the program. But Shipman wants the city of Atlanta to maintain control. He and Mayor Andre Dickens have spoken about the issue and Shipman said fixing HOPWA is a priority for this administration. Dickens has said he wants to assign a lawyer from the city’s legal department to the HOPWA Advisory Committee to identify other legal resources that can help do a “deep dive” into the HOPWA regulations and processes to determine where the bottlenecks are and how to fix them. 

Shipman is also talking to council members and educating them on the issue. As council president, his aim is to keep HOPWA on the radar so it is not lost as the city tackles other serious topics such as public safety, infrastructure, and affordable housing.

“My approach thus far is to try to delve deeply and get the data. I want to get down to the details. I want to see exactly what the balances are and where they are, what's the status of the fund, what's remaining, what are the challenges, and then to try to understand what is it that we can do to speed things up,” he said. 

“At the end of the day, this works best when the city government is enabling partnerships with those that are closest to the work.”