When It Comes to Evaluating Results, Homeless Services Are Apples and Oranges

Homeless service providing organizations are regularly pressured to prove their services actually work. We tend to gauge the effectiveness of agencies based on indicators like the number of persons employed and the number of families transitioned into housing. However, not every demographic subset of the homeless population has the sames needs, nor do they all require the same capital, time and expertise commitments to serve.

The needs of the chronically homeless are extensive, and at times intractable. Alternatively, the cyclically homeless (persons able to work who have temporarily slipped into homelessness) have fewer needs that are more easily met. Indeed, it is a very real question as to whether it is better to use limited resource to help people whose needs are more easily met versus pouring resources into a deeper problem that may yield no discernible net impact.

A few months back I was speaking with an executive of a homeless services organization about the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program. HPRP provides money for rental assistance to prevent people from becoming homeless, to help homeless move people into apartments and for motel vouchers. HPRP is a huge effort with an implementation ethos that says it needs to produce big results. The liability with such a mentality is that if success is assessed as HPRP recipients becoming stable after an infusion of rental assistance, then the best way to ensure success is to help those who need it least amongst those in need. Pick the low-hanging fruit to produce the best metrics.

I don't mean for this to be an HPRP expose (indeed, HPRP is an important program). Rather, I use HPRP to contextualize the cultural norms of a homeless service sector that struggles to balance effectiveness with hurting people, and having something to show for it. The pressure to produce outcomes incentivizes homeless service providers to help those most capable of helping themselves, so we can claim their successes as our own.

As homeless advocates, what we care about, ultimately, is helping homeless people find housing. However, this hard-line standard ignores the fact that housing a chronically homeless person is more difficult than housing a cyclically homeless person. If we are to end homelessness, we need our homeless service-providing organizations and our social policies to meet the varied needs of homeless persons. In order for them to do that, we need to understand the needs of sub-populations of the homeless sector and to evaluate programs relative to the demographics they serve.

Photo credit: The Busy Brain