Homelessness Assistance Programs Are Unsustainable
For years, homelessness advocates and promoters of the federal strategy to address homelessness have made a bold claim. “We know how to solve homelessness.” According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a D.C.-based advocacy organization, “the solution to homelessness is simple—housing.”
Since the federal government and communities nationwide have signed on to this simple solution, why haven’t we ended homelessness? Or, at least, why does it appear there are more people living on the street than ever before?
A possible answer may come from the community that receives more federal money than any other to address homelessness—and also has the highest number of unsheltered people. That community is Los Angeles.
LA receives billions of dollars each year from the federal government, the state of California, and its own citizens in special taxes to reduce the human misery that unfolds on its streets. The latest estimate reports more than 50,000 people are unsheltered in LA in 2023. That’s an increase of more than 4,000 people from 2022. This year, the region experienced a leveling off of the increase in homelessness.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass came into office focusing specifically on bringing people living on the street inside. Her Inside Safe program has served more than 2,900 people since January 2023. However, the program is very expensive and is limited in its effectiveness.
According to the Los Angeles City Controller’s website, Inside Safe has spent more than $340 million to help 650 people into permanent housing. That breaks down to more than $525,000 per housed person.
At the same time, Inside Safe has failed more people than it has housed, with 819 people removed from the streets returning to the streets after being offered housing and services.
The data gets more troubling when it’s understood that 324 of those classified as permanently housed are in time-limited subsidies. When the subsidies expire, they may be out on the streets again. Only 150, or a little more than 5% of those served, are provided subsidized permanent housing. The vast majority of those in interim housing, 196 of 1,322, have been placed in motel rooms, the most expensive type of temporary housing.
Simply housing people experiencing homelessness doesn’t seem to work to reduce the number of people living on the street. If LA continues to house people to the tune of a half-million dollars per person, its programs will be out of funding within a few months. Having to intake 4.5 people for each person housed is a dismally low return on investment.
There is no way that Los Angeles, or any city, can keep paying costs like this for a housing program with so few successful outcomes. Programs perform very poorly at getting people from the street into housing. There is little to show that as housing for homeless people increases, the number of people on the streets decreases. Morbidity and mortality are not improved for participants–in many places, they get worse. Little data exists that any benefits of housing people experiencing homelessness scales and is replicable.
While every region may not spend as much on housing people escaping homelessness as LA, the lesson learned from LA is that housing–particularly government-subsidized housing–is not the answer to homelessness. Housing is too costly an intervention for any community to sustain. Moreover, the costs of subsidized housing and supportive services fail to provide benefits that exceed the negative externalities communities endure connected to homelessness, such as homeless encampments, increased crime, and decreased quality of life.
A simple regression analysis on national homelessness based on U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data shows that the federal money awarded to communities to address homelessness increases homelessness.
Communities must consider alternatives to HUD’s preference for creating housing. First, communities need better ways to determine what is working and what is not working. The annual Point In Time Count is unscientific and unreliable. Data needs to be local, dynamic, and longitudinal. Data and surveillance systems must connect the dots between housing, shelter, outreach, treatment, and, if necessary, enforcement. Process-oriented performance measures required in each HUD-funded community have been found wanting and must be replaced in favor of outcome measures. The funding of low-performing programs must end.
Second, communities must be free to try new, innovative approaches. While competition and innovation were touted as features of the current program, it has proved to be a one-size-fits-all, overly prescriptive burden for states and local governments. One idea is integrating treatment into housing and shelter programs since the current unsheltered population is highly represented by addiction and mental illness. Another is jettisoning the prohibition on requiring work, sobriety, and participation in exchange for housing.
Third, communities must employ sticks to those who refuse carrots and offers of help. For too long, communities have avoided what they call “criminalizing homelessness” to appease activists and threats of lawsuits from civil liberty groups. The result has been increased crime, addiction, unsanitary conditions, and reduced quality of life. As more and more reports come in, the population living on the streets no longer identifies as “our homeless neighbors” but as grifters, criminals, and those with untreated addictions and mental illnesses. Communities must be free to enforce the law when it becomes plain that those on the streets have little agency or desire to access help.
No one is arguing that housing and shelter must or should not be a part of the solution for people who are living on the streets with nowhere to go. The last ten-plus years of the current approach and program, however, have shown that emphasizing housing as the primary intervention produces bad outcomes and is unsustainable. The Cicero Institute produces alternatives for states and municipalities to address the homelessness crisis effectively. Its policy and legislative ideas focus on innovative approaches that promote accountability, transparency, and outcomes so those in need get the help they need and the communities impacted by homelessness improve.