In the Midst of Plenty by Marybeth Shinn, Jill Khadduri

“Shinn and Khadduri’s new book is a thorough yet concise examination of what we know about the nature and causes of homelessness, and the crucial lessons learned. This critically important work provides a roadmap to restoring basic housing and income security as viable policy options, in the face of our daunting inequality divide that otherwise threatens millions with destitution and homelessness.”

Dennis Culhane, Dana and Andrew Stone Professor of Social Policy, University of Pennsylvania

“Marybeth Shinn and Jill Khadduri have combined their significant expertise to create an essential guide about the history of modern homelessness and to offer a clear path forward to end this American tragedy. Their policy recommendations on ending homelessness are culled from the best about what we know works.”

Barbara Poppe, Executive Director US Interagency Council on Homeless, 2009–2014

“The authors of this book have a deep knowledge of its subject, and anyone with a serious interest in ending homelessness would benefit from reading it. The book describes a wide range of approaches that have been used to alleviate homelessness and provides a thoughtful assessment of the evidence on their effectiveness.”

Edgar O. Olsen, Professor of Economics & Public Policy, University of Virginia

“The book provides an excellent overview of the causes of homelessness and a hard‐headed assessment of the efficacy of different policies to address it. The authors offer a clear and balanced summary of research evidence and suggest both incremental reforms to existing programs as well as major, but still politically plausible, expansions. Readers will walk away with a much richer understanding of homelessness along with some hope that with the right set of policies, government can reduce it.”

Ingrid Gould Ellen, Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, Wagner School, New York University

As California grapples with the growing humanitarian crisis of homelessness, Shinn and Khadduri’s book is eagerly anticipated by researchers and policy makers alike. Even in its draft stages, this highly credible and rigorously researched book has informed local strategies to prevent homelessness.

Janey Rountree, Executive Director of the California Policy Lab

Contemporary Social Issues

Contemporary Social Issues, a book series authored by leading experts in the field, focuses on psychological inquiry and research relevant to social issues facing individuals, groups, communities, and society at large. Each volume is written for scholars, students, practitioners, and policy‐makers.

Series Editor: Brian D. Christens

Multiculturalism and Diversity: A Social Psychological Perspective
Bernice Lott

The Psychological Wealth of Nations: Do Happy People Make a Happy Society?
Shigehiro Oishi

Women and Poverty: Psychology, Public Policy, and Social Justice
Heather Bullock

Ableism: The Causes and Consequence of Disability Prejudice
Michelle R. Nario‐Redmond

Social Psychology of Helping Relations: Solidarity and Hierarchy
Arie Nadler

In the Midst of Plenty: Homelessness and What to Do About It
Marybeth Shinn and Jill Khadduri

Forthcoming

Taking Moral Action
Chuck Huff and Almut Furchert

Psychology and Social Justice: Science, Education, Practice and Policy
Jamie Franco‐Zamudio, Wendy R. Williams, Jessica Salvatore, and Vikki Gaskin‐Butler

In the Midst of Plenty

Homelessness and What to Do About It

 

 

Marybeth Shinn
Jill Khadduri

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No alt text required.

For Dave and Tom, with thanks for their love and support, and many dinners cooked along the way.

Foreword

Though many dispute it, we have not always had widespread homelessness in the United States. I know this because my first job out of graduate school was working for a policy advocacy organization (National Association of Neighborhoods) in Washington, DC whose major concern was residential displacement. At the time, in the 1970s, cities were just exiting a period of intense urban change characterized by slum removal, highway construction, and urban renewal. Many affordable urban housing units had been lost. And our organization felt that more losses were to come. Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels that could be paid for by the day, or week, or month were vanishing. Multifamily rental housing (and other than in New York City almost all multifamily housing was rental) was disappearing—converted to ownership in the condominium boom of the 1970s. Cities were sitting on properties acquired through tax foreclosure, and with no resources to repair them they were being lost to the affordable market. In short, federal policies and social movements were resulting in a declining supply of affordable housing, and we feared that the result would be homelessness among very poor people. At the time, this position was viewed as alarmist in the extreme. There was no way, we were told by a prominent liberal senator, that the American people would tolerate widespread homelessness. It simply could not happen.

If only he had been correct. When we started, if someone poor and down on their luck needed a place to live, one could probably be found that same day. If a day laborer spent his earnings at the bar instead of on the nightly rent for an SRO room, he might sleep on the street—for a night or two. But being homeless for weeks or months on end was nearly unheard of.

All of this changed relatively quickly. Affordable housing continued to be lost, and starting in the early 1980s, the relatively robust federal subsidies to replace it were slashed. What had been a national surplus of affordable housing relative to the number of poor households that needed it had turned into a growing national gap. Around 1982, people started sleeping on the steam grates of Washington, DC and the cities across the nation, and homelessness emerged as a national problem.

Over the years since then, the nation has dug itself into a deeper hole on housing, seen homelessness grow and take hold, and moved from short‐term responses like “a hot and a cot” to more effective and sophisticated ones like permanent supportive housing. It has seen the number of people who are homeless recede—but not go away. Homelessness has settled in, and to many it now seems inevitable and unsolvable.

But my experience leads me to believe that it is neither inevitable nor unsolvable in a nation with the resources and capacity of ours. And the knowledgeable and thoughtful authors of this book—two brilliant women who know as much as anyone in the country about the nature of homelessness and its solutions—have done a great service by taking us on a journey through the history of homelessness, how our responses have changed, and how we can end it.

Chapter 1 describes the problem of homelessness in terms of the number, characteristics and trajectories of people who experience it. It describes how people use the various programs that constitute the emerging homelessness system, and looks at how this system has changed over time. It also reflects on the very important fact that homelessness is an experience that a wide variety of mostly poor people face: not a characteristic that defines a person.

In Chapter 2 the authors explore whether homelessness is the result of personal characteristics or outside factors—or an interaction of the two. Here they make the case that housing affordability (a combination of the cost of housing and people's incomes), while not accounting for everything, is the primary driver of homelessness to which personal characteristics or experiences (mental illness, gender identity, criminal records, etc.) contribute. They examine how the U.S. experience of homelessness compares to that of other countries, and why.

Chapter 3 looks at what it takes to end homelessness for people who experience it. If homelessness is defined by not having a home, then acquiring a home must be its solution. The authors describe two approaches to providing that home: long‐term housing subsidies for families and individuals whose problem is largely affordability; and permanent supportive housing (also referred to as Housing First and Pathways to Housing) which provides a long‐term housing subsidy plus services to people with chronic health disorders. They also look at what services people may need to maintain their housing. Chapter 4 explores how the various homelessness interventions are being brought together into homelessness systems, with the goal of coordinating resources to reduce and end homelessness. The authors point out the strong and weak elements of these systems and the challenges not only of delivering quality assistance, but delivering it to scale.

Getting people who have become homeless back into housing is one way to solve the problem. Another is to prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place. Chapter 5 explores this option, pointing out that prevention must first figure out who is going to become homeless and then intervene in a way that stops them from having that experience (the first being harder to achieve than the second). Housing‐focused prevention is examined, as is preventing homelessness for people exiting public systems such as foster care and criminal justice, and geographic targeting.

Finally, in Chapter 6 the authors present a more wide‐ranging vision of a social contract that would ensure all the people of our nation could afford decent housing. They propose various ways to accomplish this from both the housing and the income side. They also point out that making sure people have resources to support a decent standard of living would help to mitigate other problems such as racial discrimination. And they recognize that ensuring everyone has decent affordable housing will require significant political will: will that has not been present over the past 30 years of widespread national homelessness.

Marybeth Shinn and Jill Khadduri have provided us with a full‐fledged history of homelessness and what has been done about it—successfully and otherwise. They make a strong case that ensuring the most vulnerable people have safe, decent and affordable housing would probably cost less and certainly yield far more than allowing tens of thousands of people to become homeless every year. Their wise and educated voices provide a rational vision of how homelessness can be ended. It is to be hoped that this vision will be widely adopted.

Nan Roman

President and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness

Acknowledgments

Many people helped improve the quality of this book—its accuracy, its clarity, the force of its presentation.

Four people were kind enough to read the entire manuscript, and they made helpful comments and corrections throughout: Paul Dornan, formerly responsible for research on homelessness at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); Lucie Khadduri, who lives in Olympia WA, a city with a recent upsurge in homelessness; Daniel Perlman, Series Editor for the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, who provided encouragement throughout the book's long gestation period; and Nan Roman, President and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. Zach Glendening, Molly Richard, and Jason Rodriguez at Vanderbilt University read portions of the manuscript and provided comments that improved clarity and pointed to additional sources of information.

Meghan Henry, project director for the Annual Homeless Assessment Reports at Abt Associates, commented extensively on Chapter 1 and confirmed numbers. John Miller, an experienced journalist, also read Chapter 1 and, along with Meghan, helped us make the chapter more readable. Jill's Abt colleagues Anna Jefferson and Hannah Thomas helped identify and expand the vignettes about people experiencing homelessness that begin Chapter 1. Sally B. Lott described her work as a housing navigator in Chapter 5. Kathryn P. Nelson, who designed HUD's ongoing reports on “worst case” housing problems and needs for assistance, read Chapter 2 and suggested additions and corrections. Barbara Sard of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities read Chapter 6 and provided comments on the housing side of the social safety net. She also enlisted her colleagues at the Center to review portions of Chapter 6 on the income side of the safety net: Ed Bolen, Brendan Duke, Chye‐Ching Huang, LaDonna Pavetti, Kathleen Ronig, and Chad Stone. We thank them for their comments and for their identification of literature that we had missed.

Janine Christiano, Gavin Crowell‐Williamson, Kayle DeCant, and Rebecca Huppi provided help with references, and David Krantz drew several of the figures.

Many thanks to them all. As always, all errors belong to us.

Beth was hosted in turn by the Urban Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center and wrote portions of the book during those visits and during a sabbatical from Vanderbilt.

Jill would like to thank her employer, Abt Associates, for the many research projects on homelessness in which she has participated and for access to wonderful colleagues. Beth had the privilege of working with Jill and Abt colleagues on a couple of these.


Introduction

And homeless near a thousand homes I stood,

And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.

William Wordsworth, 1842
(Guilt and Sorrow Verse XLI)

In the late 1980s, The New York Times ran a series of editorials dubbed “New Calcutta,” lamenting the rise of homelessness on New York City streets and urging the City to action (e.g. “New Calcutta,” 1988). The editorial writers may have chosen their foil poorly—wags complained with some justice that the Times was unfair to Calcutta (Gordon, 1989; Roeper, 1989). But the point of the metaphor was clear. How, the Times asked, could such abject poverty be permitted in a wealthy land?

An entire generation has grown up since homelessness spilled out of skid rows and into the nation's consciousness. Young people have no memories of the days when they did not have to pick their way around their fellow citizens dwelling in the streets, and older adults can scarcely recapture their shocked disbelief that homelessness should arise here, in the United States.

This book argues that the United States and other wealthy, industrialized countries have the resources to end homelessness, if we make the policy choices to do so. Further, there is a good deal of evidence about what works—and what does not work—to prevent and end homelessness for different groups of people. The recent halving of homelessness among veterans (Henry et al., 2018) shows what can be done with will and resources. But to end homelessness it is important to understand more about it and where it comes from.

The book is organized around four questions: Who becomes homeless? Why do people become homeless? How do we end homelessness? How do we prevent it?

Chapter 1 asks who becomes homeless in the United States, focusing on people living in homeless shelters, on the streets, and in other places not intended to be lived in, and on particular groups such as single adults, families, youth on their own, veterans, and people with chronic patterns of homelessness. The chapter also provides estimates of the number of people who experience homelessness each year and shows that, because homelessness is a transient experience, the number is much larger over a longer period of time such as five years or a lifetime.

Chapter 2 asks why people become homeless. Some writers have assumed that the characteristics of homeless people are in themselves a sufficient explanation. This chapter challenges this assumption and examines causes in social policies and sociocultural attitudes, including patterns of social exclusion, as well as individual characteristics. International comparisons help us understand why rates of homelessness are higher in the United States than in most of Western Europe. The chapter argues that homelessness is essentially a housing problem, marshaling evidence on how the current crisis of homelessness came to be.

Chapter 3 asks how to end homelessness for particular groups of people who experience it, focusing on programs with strong evidence of effectiveness for resolving homelessness and improving the lives of families with children and of individuals who have challenges such as severe and persistent mental illness. Chapter 4 expands on this question, by examining comprehensive efforts to end homelessness. It introduces and assesses the components of the homeless services “system” that has grown up to address the problem and describes efforts to act strategically and with sufficient resources.

The final two chapters ask how to prevent homelessness. Chapter 5 considers targeted prevention efforts directed at groups that are at special risk, and Chapter 6 proposes broader policy changes to end the structural conditions that give rise to homelessness.

Some of the findings in each chapter may be surprising. For example, Chapter 1 shows that the age at which people are at highest risk of entering a homeless shelter in the United States is infancy and that half of adults who experience sheltered homelessness over the course of a year do not suffer from severe mental illness or have any other type of disability.

Chapter 2 suggests that the structural factors (e.g. income inequality, housing costs) that cause high rates of homelessness are rather different from the individual vulnerabilities (e.g. having a young child, mental illness) that affect which particular individual or family will succumb. Chapter 4 notes that even service providers with long experience working with homeless people sometimes design ineffective policies and programs. And Chapter 5 shows that prevention programs with more failures may also have more impact (because programs that rarely fail are offering services to people unlikely to become homeless to begin with).

Some may find the title of this book odd—many Americans do not feel that they are living “in the midst of plenty” and so have little to spare for those with even less. Or they may not feel that those with less are deserving of their aid. As we endeavor to show in Chapters 2 and 6, the fact that too many Americans are struggling to get by is also a result of social choices such as recent changes in the tax code that provided most of the benefits to the wealthy.

Throughout this book, our basic theme is that homelessness stems from failures of social policy, in particular policies that fail to provide affordable housing for the many people for whom other social policies fail to provide adequate income either from jobs or (when they are unable to work) from income supports.

Does the United States have the resources to prevent homelessness? We think the answer is yes. To take just one example, America pays far more to subsidize housing for the wealthy than for the poor. Housing subsidies for rich people are written into the tax code, primarily in the form of the income tax deduction for mortgage interest. A series of proposals made over several decades would have capped those subsidies and distributed the savings to moderate income homeowners and renters (in the form of a tax credit rather than a deduction); they would also have been used to provide housing subsidies for people whose poverty‐level incomes mean that they cannot afford basic shelter and are at risk of falling into homelessness.

The final chapter of this book, Chapter 6, describes a number of policy options that would allow the United States to end homelessness. The United Nations included a right to housing in the Universal Declaration of Human rights 70 years ago (United Nations, 1948). Not all countries are wealthy enough to make that right a reality. In the United States, it is within our power to realize that right today.