Introduction to Keeping America Housed, a Special Edition of Housing Policy Debate

Keeping America housed is growing more difficult. For at least four decades, the United States has suffered an increasingly acute affordable housing crisis for lower-income people, who have endured untenable and unstable living conditions. The number of people experiencing homelessness has hovered around half a million on any given night, and the number of people living unsheltered is increasing (U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, 2021). Many millions more live on the edge of homelessness, struggling with rent burden, low-quality housing, overcrowding, and the constant threat of eviction (Alvarez & Steffen, 2021; Gromis et al., 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the problem of housing insecurity, with unprecedented levels of unemployment that rendered millions of tenants unable to pay their rent, leaving them at risk of eviction and adding more to the rolls of the homeless. As more fortunate people hunkered down in their homes to avoid spreading the virus, thousands of vulnerable people found themselves forced to sleep in tents and on the streets, offering policymakers a graphic reminder of the significant housing precarity in our major cities.

This special issue examines the challenge of keeping America housed and highlights a few approaches that emerged during the pandemic. The issue includes seven articles, starting with a description of the vast homeless emergency response system and efforts made during COVID-19 to enhance shelter capacity through the use of hotels. It then turns to homelessness prevention and the challenges with targeting these efforts. Recent years brought not only the pandemic but also a long overdue moment of racial reckoning. In response to the rallying call to end structural racism embedded in our systems, this issue concludes by examining how race plays a role in homelessness.

The primary response when someone becomes homeless in the U.S. is emergency shelter, a temporary bed to sleep at night. People often think of shelter as a band-aid—the minimum we should do. Indeed, shelter can often be life-saving, protecting people from literally sleeping on the street. There is, however, a misconception that emergency shelter costs substantially less than providing housing, when studies show that providing shelter can be expensive (Spellman et al., 2010). In addition to being costly, emergency shelter is not a solution to homelessness, as it doesn’t provide a permanent place to live. Unfortunately, instead of a lean infrastructure set up to respond to emergencies and get people back into housing, crisis response has become a permanent part of our safety net, and a large one at that.

As Culhane and An (2021) demonstrate in their study, the shelter “system” is a complex and sprawling industry. Yet—as the authors of this study point out—despite this investment, the need for shelter exceeds the number of beds available, and more than 200,000 live unsheltered on a given night (U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development, 2021). They estimate the annual cost of providing universal shelter would be $12.6 billion but caution policymakers to evaluate this number against the cost of permanent housing in the form of housing vouchers.

The pandemic helped illuminate the public health need to bring people in off the streets and highlighted the challenges of preventing the transmission of the virus while providing temporary shelter in congregate settings. The unprecedented widespread use of hotels as emergency shelter was a primary community response to homelessness during COVID-19 (Batko et al., 2022). Although these efforts haven’t yet been fully evaluated, some promising evidence has emerged.

It is essential to hear from people who experienced homelessness during the pandemic and what it was like to move from congregate settings to private living spaces and document their experiences. Robinson et al. (2022) interviewed 18 residents in New Haven, Connecticut, who moved from congregate shelters to hotel rooms with private bathrooms and some with kitchenettes. Residents reported a greater sense of stability, increased control over their daily lives and schedules, and that the hotels, despite the fact the they were not permanent housing, afforded residents a greater sense of privacy, safety, and security. The authors noted that hotels “supported the sense of ontological security” described in the literature as the feeling of being “at home.”

Colburn et al. (2022) describe King County’s efforts during the pandemic to move people out of high-density shelters to hotel rooms to limit the transmission of the virus among a vulnerable population. Their study, which collected quantitative and qualitative data, showed lower rates of transmission of COVID-19 in the cohort of people who were moved from congregate settings to hotels. Further, resident and staff respondents reported greater engagement, improvements in health and well-being, reduced interpersonal conflict, and greater focus on future goals. In light of these promising outcomes, we hope both of these studies can inform longer-term thinking about noncongregate shelter options and transforming resources like hotels or empty commercial space into permanent affordable housing.

Instead of increasing the availability of affordable housing, the U.S. policy response to managing the growth of homelessness has, thus far, been to shelter people and then manage the waiting line into permanent housing through coordinated entry systems. The goal of coordinated entry is a more efficient system that allocates resources based on prioritized needs and helps people exit homelessness faster to appropriate housing placements, emptying shelter beds for people newly experiencing housing crises. Ecker et al. (2022) describe the four common components in these systems (a) access; (b) assessment; (c) prioritization; and (d) matching and referral. They highlight the significant gap in the research, noting that coordinated entry systems have not been evaluated and little is known about their impact. Further, and gravely concerning, the authors of the study note that assessments used as a part of coordinated entry may be “contributing to inequitable access to housing.”

Given the overwhelming challenges and costs associated with helping someone experiencing homelessness to find their way back into housing, preventing homelessness seems like a smart policy move. Most evidence points to universal housing subsidies (alongside increases in affordable housing units) as the key to preventing widespread homelessness (Shinn & Khadduri, 2020). This universal approach could protect everyone at risk and improve the overall well-being of families and children. Congress, however, has thus far ignored the overwhelming evidence about what works and has been slow to invest in national infrastructure to keep people permanently housed.

Instead, policymakers and implementers are left to resort to “selective prevention,” trying to figure out how to maximize the use of scarce resources by identifying the people most likely to become homeless among a huge risk group and targeting services to this select group (Fowler et al., 2019; Shinn et al., 2013). Predicting who will become homeless and who will not is difficult, and the limited evidence suggests program administrators are not doing it very well. Aiken et al. (2022) use a survey of Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) grantees to explore this issue, finding that most program administrators targeted rental assistance resources too far upstream to help tenants at immediate risk of homelessness and that changes in outreach methods, eligibility criteria, application and documentation requirements, and subsidy structure are needed to ensure better targeting to people at risk of homelessness. There are some data-based approaches to targeting prevention, and New York City’s HomeBase program is often cited as an example of targeting prevention resources effectively (Shinn et al., 2013). Mullen et al. (2022) revisit New York City’s recently revised risk assessment tool, applying it to a cohort of 48,450 families. They found that it remains powerful in identifying the families at highest risk and note that continuous evaluation of the model and practice are important for maintaining a tool’s value.

One article in this issue focuses not on homelessness intervention but on diagnosing the problem. It argues that, given the disproportionate impact of homelessness on people of color, scholars in their research and policymakers in their policymaking must pay attention to race in designing and evaluating programs that respond to homelessness. Fowle (2022) reviews the empirical and theoretical literature, provides a history of the causes of racial disparities in homelessness, and asks policymakers to consider “meaningful solutions to racialized homelessness” that “account for historic harms, situate homelessness in a broader system of racialized socioeconomic inequality, and seek to disrupt systems of racial stratification.”

Today the pandemic is far from over, but it is fading from the national spotlight. Homelessness remains, still garnering headlines in many major cities and often leading to a different response—one not discussed in this issue but critical to note: the criminalization of homelessness. As rents rapidly increase and eviction moratoria and rental assistance enacted during the pandemic have expired, we need policymakers to rethink our response to homelessness, follow the evidence, and move away from band-aid and punitive solutions to keeping America housed by fully investing in housing subsidies and producing affordable housing units.

Mary Cunningham Urban Institute [email protected] Samantha Batko Urban Institute [email protected]