This brief is based on a new Urban Institute Press book, Helping America’s Homeless: Emergency Shelter or Affordable Housing? by Urban Institute researchers Martha Burt, Laudan Y. Aron, and Edgar Lee, with Jesse Valente. Both publications were funded mainly by the Melville Charitable Trust and the Fannie Mae Foundation.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Institute, its trustees, or its sponsors.

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GROWTH OF THE HOMELESS SERVICE SYSTEM

Largely because of federal leadership and funding—through the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 and its annual modifications—the homeless service system in the United States grew tremendously in the 1990s. Available beds more than doubled, from about 275,000 in 1988 to about 607,000 in 1996. Emergency shelter capacity increased about 20 percent during that period. The availability of transitional housing and permanent housing with supportive services for disabled formerly homeless people also grew. Such programs were virtually non-existent in the 1980s. By 1996, at an estimated 274,000 beds (160,000 transitional and 114,000 permanent), capacity at these sophisticated programs equaled that of emergency shelters a decade earlier.

With the growth of shelter capacity, the homeless service network was able to serve more people, and more people in desperate circumstances came forward seeking services. Rather than being a self-fulfilling development, the availability of services and the demand among the poor indicate a profound level of need. Changes in emergency food services confirm this interpretation. Emergency food services receive far less government support than do shelter and housing programs. Yet they too grew during the 1990s in response to the greater demand. In 1996, central-city soup kitchens and mobile food programs served almost four times as many meals per day than they did in 1987. No similar evidence is available for food pantries, which mostly serve poor housed families rather than homeless people, but they too likely saw demand swell. These statistics show that temporary assistance, which has increased over the past decade, cannot prevent many individuals from becoming homeless.

WHAT SHOULD COMMUNITIES AND LEGISLATORS BE DOING?

Virtually all federal programs related to homelessness focus on serving people who are already homeless. When assistance is restricted to those who are homeless tonight, not much can be done to prevent homelessness tomorrow. Developing capacity to serve those who are already homeless while ignoring prevention does little to change the underlying problems among the very poor. Only policies that expand the availability of affordable housing to people with below-poverty incomes will ensure stable homes for these individuals. However, policies during the past decade have moved in the opposite direction.

The results of a decade and a half of research to determine what works to end homelessness are fairly conclusive about the most effective approaches. Providing housing helps currently homeless people leave homelessness. It also prevents people from losing their homes. In fact, without housing, virtually nothing else works.3 Housing often needs to be accompanied by supportive services, at least temporarily, but such services without a housing component cannot end homelessness.

Evaluations of demonstration projects, and the experiences of providers in many communities around the country, also have shown that even the most chronic, most severely mentally ill people can be brought off the streets and can live stable lives, if they are supplied with housing. The same is true for families headed by a mother struggling with mental illness. With the appropriate help, even people with extensive histories of substance abuse have left the streets and obtained stable housing. Furthermore, the evidence shows not only that making these services available works to end homelessness, but also that, for long-term homeless people with substance abuse and mental health histories, these service provisions are virtually cost-neutral.4

With adequate housing resources, homelessness can also be averted for the many people who approach the homeless service system because they do not know where else to turn. Communities throughout the country that have committed such resources have developed a variety of effective programs to prevent homelessness, including:

• Programs that negotiate with landlords and help with bad credit histories;
• Housing trust funds, rental assistance programs, and access to funds that can solve a household’s short-term problems, such as paying back rent, security deposits, and other moving expenses;
• Programs that encourage developers to build or renovate attractive, accessible properties; and help managers ensure good maintenance and repair; and
• Programs that help people develop personal and family financial management skills, establish or reestablish good credit and rental histories, and retain housing.

When a community ensures that housing within reasonable price ranges exists, offers its members living-wage jobs, provides quality schooling to develop individuals’ capacity to hold good jobs, and offers other supports for families and individuals, people can maintain stable housing. But far too few communities have these resources or are positioned to provide them. The answer? Put simply:

• Rebuild communities, especially the most troubled ones;
• Build more housing and subsidize the costs to make it affordable to people with incomes below the poverty level;
• Help more people afford housing, by providing them with better schools, better training, and better jobs; and
• Prevent the next generation of children from experiencing homelessness.

Without these basic building blocks of a civil society, we are creating an underclass of persistently poor people vulnerable to homelessness. The costs of this neglect are too high in terms of both individual lives and public dollars for health, mental health, and correctional institutions. It is more effective, more humane, and ultimately more fiscally prudent to invest in prevention and support that leads to self-sufficiency and independence among all residents.

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