How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness (2015)

Am I off here? Does it not seem naive to say: "they're homeless, so let's just give them an apartment and say our 'homeless' rate dropped"? As if that was the essential problem? What about the mental health and drug (etc) issues that created the environment for unsustainable work...

I'm not saying it sounds like a bad solution, but it seems like a bandaid on a gaping wound.

A big focus was on re-employment and having a fixed postal address. Those who lost their jobs and then their homes with no fixed address were unable to obtain another job and hence fell into a spiral of chronic homelessness.

One of the big takeaways from Italian policy was to firstly provide temporary housing. The second was to create a 'virtual' postal address for anyone affected by homelessness. This apparently helped a lot in enabling people to climb out of homelessness and back onto the career ladder.

The program has ended up being quite expensive to run, and it's not actually cost effective, to the point where homeless advocates actually criticize the program's in effectiveness.

It's also caused negative impact for other residents in the buildings or nearby areas. Depending on what the stipend provided by the government is and whether it's above or below market rate, landlords will either intentionally neglect and blight buildings in order to run them down, or they will refuse to rent to market tenants, with the knowledge that they can make more money from the stipends for homeless housing. This, of course, makes it more difficult to find housing and has the effect of driving prices upwards.

1) Inflows: higher housing costs increase the inflow into homelessness. Whether it is job loss, drug addiction, mental illness, or whatever...if you have higher housing costs, you are more likely to end up homeless.

2) Outflows: higher housing costs become a higher bar to leaving homelessness. Let's say someone can address, over time, their underlying cause to homelessness. That person will take longer to overcome the bar of housing costs in a high cost area than an equivalent person with lower housing cost bars to overcome.

Both of these arguments seem obvious, almost tautological, but combined what you have is a higher rate of inflows, and a lower rate of outflows. This means two things: ceteris paribus, you have more homeless people, and the homeless people that you do have take longer to leave homelessness.

Now take into account the fact that in high housing cost areas, housing costs more to build because land prices and construction prices are higher (even taking into account Eminent Domain), and you have: 1) More demand (in terms of quantity of people) for relief housing 2) Higher expected time of use of housing. 3) Higher cost of building housing.

These factors are multiplicative, not additive. Combined, I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of attaining the same success rate is two orders of magnitude higher in San Francisco than it is in Salt Lake City. Construction costs alone take care of your first order of magnitude...now multiply those by the higher inflow rates and outflow rates.

This solution is obvious, but you can't put the cart before the horse. Salt Lake City never had to worry about it...San Francisco does.