Should housing really come first?
The idea is deceptively simple: how do you solve homelessness? By giving people homes. That is the essence of a recently developed approach to homelessness called Housing First, which inverts the traditional shelter-based approach by first providing the homeless with apartments, and then working on issues like drug addiction and psychiatric problems. The advocates of shelters, on the other hand, prioritize emergency housing and rehabilitative services, operating under the belief that the homeless need support and training before they can transition into independent living.
Housing First appears to have a stellar record and is strongly supported by Congress and leading homelessness researchers. The operators of traditional shelters, naturally, raise objections to the Housing First approach, and, while it is easy to refute these objections, it is important to recognize they arise from a fundamentally different way of looking at the problem of homelessness. While traditional shelters are far from perfect, the viewpoint of their advocates adds depth and complexity to the problem and provides a marker by which to consider the results of Housing First.
An Apparent Success
The statistics on Housing First have made many giddy with the prospect of drastically reducing or even eliminating homelessness. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, chronic homelessness dropped by about 30 percent between 2005 and 2007, primarily because of the Housing First approach. Dennis P. Culhane, one of the principal investigators for the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress, is a strong advocate of the housing-based approach. “Shelters are the sign of homelessness,” he told the HPR. “They do not end homelessness. What ends homelessness is housing programs and prevention programs.”
Advocates of the shelter system disagree. Larry Fitzmaurice, CEO of the New England Center for Homeless Veterans, told the HPR that the problem is more complicated than simply handing out apartments. Joe Bell, a counselor at the NECHV who was once homeless himself, explained to the HPR that the structure and rehabilitation provided by a shelter are essential to learning how to live independently. At shelters, “you have to learn how to clean up, straighten your bed out, keep your locker clean, wash, do the laundry, even have kitchen duties,” Bell said. “This trains you to go back out, because when you’re homeless, you have no discipline, you have no structure.”
These objections are not particularly strong. Those who enter the housing provided by Housing First are not abandoned; they are offered counseling and support services to help them adjust to independent living. Culhane argued that the homeless are less likely to succeed when sobriety or psychological stability is prioritized over housing. Intermediate steps “often create barriers to people getting into housing,” he noted, “because they create a lot of rules and requirements that many of these individuals who are on the street can’t navigate.” This argument strikes at the heart of the shelter method; many shelters demand that residents satisfy the requirements Culhane indicts, like completion of a rehabilitation program, before they allow residents to transition to more independent living.
A Valid Viewpoint
For these reasons, it is easy to write off shelter advocates as guardians of a failed system. However, their objections to Housing First do not stem only from resistance to change but from a completely different viewpoint on homelessness. Shelter advocates — in a classic case of the chicken and the egg — see homelessness not as a disease, but as a symptom of other problems, which is why they believe structure and services are essential to the transition away from homelessness.
Housing First therefore provides a one-dimensional view of the problem. Those weighing the two alternatives must consider not only the results of the shelter-based system, but its underlying philosophy as well; doing so adds nuance and allows for better evaluation of the apparently unmitigated success of Housing First. Providing the homeless with homes “looks good on paper,” Bell admitted, but reformers must be sure they are not merely sweeping the problem under the rug — or into an apartment. Many of the homeless are homeless for a reason, and those problems must be resolved before they can become functioning members of society, a fact that one must take into consideration when weighing the impact of Housing First.