The Rise and Fall of ‘Housing First’ in Utah

By Christopher J. Calton of The Independent Institute.

"In 2005, Utah unveiled its 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness using a novel strategy known as Housing First. The guiding philosophy of Housing First contends that the best way to ameliorate homelessness is to provide permanently subsidized, no-strings-attached housing to unhoused persons. When the plan came to an end in 2015, Utah made national headlines, boasting it had reduced chronic homelessness by an astounding 91 percent. Utah’s success inspired imitation across the country. 

Another decade has passed since Utah declared victory, but now it is one of a handful of states that are breaking away from Housing First. The state—along with Georgia and Florida—is returning to the strategies of the 1990s that focused on treatment-oriented solutions to homelessness. 

This prompts an obvious question: how could the exemplar of Housing First’s success transform into a testament to its failure? What went wrong in Utah?

In fact, Housing First in Utah never produced the results that its proponents claimed. The celebrated reductions in chronic homelessness between 2005 and 2015 were spurious. Utah officials manipulated data to produce politically desirable outcomes on paper and obscure their plan’s failure. 

The standard process for measuring homelessness is the point-in-time (PIT) count, which provides a snapshot of that population on a single night. PIT counts are useful, but they necessarily undercount the total number of people who experience homelessness in a given year. For this reason, some jurisdictions also provide “annualized” estimates. Utah’s 2015 PIT counts, for example, reported roughly 3,000 homeless persons in Utah, but the annualized count estimated that 14,000 people were homeless at some point throughout the year.  

Producing annualized estimates of total homelessness is not inherently wrong, but we might question the usefulness of annualizing chronic homelessness. In their 2010 report, Utah officials correctly justified annualized estimates because “people are often homeless only for a short period of time”—i.e., nonchronic cases. Yet in the same paragraph, the report claimed that the chronically homeless population “is about two times greater than that observed on a single night.” 

Annualizing chronic homelessness makes little sense, but it should still not alter the trajectory of population changes since legitimate estimates would employ the same assumptions across time. Utah officials, however, altered their formula each year. In 2010, they determined that annualized chronic homelessness was double the PIT count. In 2011, it was less than double, and officials continued arbitrarily reducing the multiple each year until 2015, when they reported only the raw PIT figure. This was a black-and-white case of data fraud, almost certainly motivated by the desire to show that their ambitious plan was a rousing success. 

Utah’s PIT counts, however, still showed an impressive 50 percent reduction in chronic homelessness between 2005 and 2015, yet this is also misleading. In that decade, the method for determining chronic homelessness changed twice, corresponding to the two largest single-year drops.

Before 2010 the state mistakenly counted people in transitional housing as chronic. Although they fixed the error going forward, they did not adjust their estimates for the previous years, artificially producing the appearance of a significant decline in chronic homelessness. Then, in 2015 the Salt Lake region reported a staggering decline in chronic homelessness, which it attributed to the expansion of permanent-supportive housing (PSH) and “a new process of confirming whether individuals are chronically homeless.” Since the region had only added 34 PSH beds, the lion’s share of the reduction was due to the methodological change.

Between 2010 and 2014—when the counting method was stable—PIT counts for chronic homelessness in Utah increased by 84 percent. Since 2015 it has ballooned by nearly 400 percent. 

Utah became the poster child for Housing First in 2015 because the state officials manipulated the data to obscure the failure of their ambitious 10-year plan. Utah’s policy reversal is an admission of this failure, and the rest of the country should take note. Housing First has never produced the results it promised, and it is time to turn to different solutions."