Housing people who are homeless makes them not homeless. It’s not just common sense – rigorous studies have shown that if you give homeless people housing, they usually stay in it.
But housing homeless people doesn’t necessarily reduce the number of people who are homeless over the long run. How is that possible? The “homeless” are not a fixed set of people. If you put people into housing who otherwise would have made it on their own, the number of homeless people doesn’t fall.
Homeless in San Francisco, Twenty20.
Up to now, there has been little nationwide evidence about how housing affects the number of homeless people. That hasn’t stopped the Obama administration from doubling down on housing as its key solution for ending homelessness. The number of permanent supportive housing beds for formerly homeless people has grown by more than 50% since 2007.
In new research, however, I find no evidence that permanent housing for the homeless has reduced the number of homeless people. Communities that increased housing saw small immediate reductions in their homeless populations, but these reductions were wiped out after one year. Meanwhile, communities that cut shelters saw major reductions in homelessness with no additional people found sleeping on the street.
Does this mean we should cut all housing and shelter programs for the homeless? Absolutely not.
For one thing, the study has important limitations. The data I use are highly imperfect (although they are the same data used by the Obama administration to assess the nation’s success in ending homelessness). Counts of the unsheltered homeless are conducted on a single night in January by volunteers throughout the country, and many people may be missed. Also, it’s possible that the communities that added housing or shelter would have had even more people in shelters or on the streets had they not done so.
But even if shelters do not significantly decrease the number of people literally sleeping on the street, and even if housing does not lead to major reductions in homelessness, they can still be good things. Shelters can provide respite from unsafe living conditions and offer needed supportive services. Permanent housing can serve as a platform for overcoming other challenges like addiction and untreated mental illness. The problem with evaluating our homeless assistance system solely based on how many homeless people we find is that we evaluate it less on how it actually assists the homeless.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to count homeless people or that we shouldn’t study how housing and shelter affect how many there are. If more dollars are spent on housing without reductions in homeless populations, that means there will be less money to serve people in the future. My findings suggest this should be a major concern. But the solution is not to establish goals to end things; it is to customize assistance to each person based on how much help they truly need.
At the same time though, we shouldn’t lose sight of the bigger vision. A lot of programs for the homeless are expensive and offer extensive supportive services. For our most vulnerable brothers and sisters, this can be a worthy and necessary investment. But we have to worry a lot more about how well these services improve people’s lives and not just about how they affect the number of homeless people we can find. Otherwise, we may fail at accomplishing both goals.
Read the full paper here. Access other research in AEI’s Working Paper Series here.
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