Housing First is an Evidence-Based Failure

By Christopher J. Calton.

"“Housing First is an evidence-based solution to homelessness!”

This refrain is repeated ad nauseum in homelessness circles. The pronouncement has begun to resemble a religious creed—a ritualistic profession of devotion to prevailing homelessness policy, and true believers will not have their faith shaken by empirical observation to the contrary.

Those who are more agnostic toward homelessness policy, however, might reasonably express disbelief at the claim that Housing First is an evidence-based solution. Before Housing First became federal policy in 2013, homelessness was steadily declining, even during the Great Recession, and continued to fall modestly until in 2016. Since then, however, homelessness has ballooned by 42 percent, even as homelessness spending has skyrocketed.

What, then, explains the unwavering belief among Housing First evangelicals that their solution to homelessness is “evidence-based”?

The alleged success of Housing First does not come from aggregated homelessness data, but from case studies of different homelessness programs. The Clinton-era strategy for addressing homelessness was a treatment-oriented approach known as “Housing Readiness,” which used housing as an incentive for clients to participate in services, such as substance-abuse treatment and work training programs, with the goal of helping them achieve self-sufficiency.

Housing First took a different approach, making services optional and offering people permanently subsidized housing, with the more modest goal of “housing stability.” The original experiments focused on chronically homeless individuals who suffered from a severe mental illness—people for whom self-sufficiency would likely be impossible.

By redefining the measure of success from “self-sufficiency” to “housing stability,” the engineers of Housing First were able to claim resounding victories over the older approach. Their earth-shattering discovery was that housing stability is greater when housing is subsidized than when it is not subsidized. But, crucially, these successes are confined to the people who are accepted into the program, not the homeless population overall.

Under Housing Readiness programs, roughly one-third of participants remained stably housed, but they also lived independently. This means that when they exited the program, the resources they benefited from could be directed to others.

The primary focus of Housing First, by contrast, is “permanent-supportive housing,” which essentially makes people lifelong wards of the state. The subsidies that sustain them continue to draw from homelessness budgets, leaving fewer resources available for people who are still on the streets.

In other words, Housing First may achieve greater housing stability for the lucky few who get accepted, but Housing Readiness programs were able to serve a much larger population at significantly lower cost.

The problem is exacerbated by Housing First’s emphasis on the chronically homeless. One pillar of Housing First is the mandate that service providers prioritize the most severe cases, which sounds great in theory but works horribly in practice. Because of the scarcity of permanent-supportive housing, outreach workers administer “vulnerability assessment tests” to see who should qualify for placement. Those who have recently fallen into homelessness and, with temporary support, have the greatest chance of achieving self-sufficiency are typically deemed insufficiently vulnerable. Unworthy of assistance, they are often neglected until their condition deteriorates and their homelessness becomes chronic.

The ironic result is that chronic homelessness has grown at an even faster pace than overall homelessness, having doubled since 2016. As economists David Lucas and Christopher Boudreaux explain, “the raw data make clear that chronic homelessness proved not to be the ‘golden goose’ of the evidence-based policy as had been anticipated, but rather the ‘canary in the coal mine’—indicative of a profound disconnect between the intentions and outcomes of this state-led mission.”

Housing First is designed to keep people in the system, rather than shepherding them out of it. This has created the mechanism by which both homelessness and homelessness spending continuously grow—a handful of beneficiaries monopolize available resources while the bulk of the homeless population is left wanting.

After more than a decade of Housing First as federal policy, it is time to admit that this so-called “evidence-based solution” has been an unambiguous disaster."