Homeless Crisis Response Research
A Prevention-Centered Approach to Homelessness Assistance: A Paradigm Shift?
Dennis Culhane, Stephen Metraux and Thomas Byrne
May 2011
Prevention has long been cited as an important part of any strategy to end homelessness. Nonetheless, effective prevention initiatives have proven difficult to implement in practice. The lack of a prevention-oriented policy framework has resulted in responses to homelessness that focus primarily on assisting those who have already lost their housing...
Adopting Best Practices: Lessons Learned in the Collaborative Initiative to Help End Chronic Homelessness (CECH)
Sarah A. McGraw, Mary Jo Larson, Susan E. Foster, Marilyn Kresky-Wolff, Elizabeth M. Botelho, Emily A. Elstad, Ana Stefancic and Sam Tsemberis
April 2010
The Collaborative Initiative to Help End Chronic Homelessness (CICH) was established to provide housing and supportive services for individuals experiencing chronic homelessness. As part of this initiative, 11 projects across the country received funding to apply models of best practices to support their clients in housing...
A Paradigm Shift in Housing and Homeless Services: Applying the Population and High-Risk Framework to Preventing Homelessness
Jocelyn Apicello
September 2009
Unfortunately, the practice of homelessness prevention is still in its infancy and there is little science base for its implementation. Risk factors for homelessness have been identified at multiple levels: the individual, institutional, and societal levels. Addressing all three in prevention practice is necessary. The population/high-risk framework is the ...
Housing Stability among Homeless Individuals with Serious Mental Illness Participating in Housing First Programs
Carol Pearson, Ann Elizabeth Montgomery and Gretchen Locke
April 2009
This article presents findings from an exploratory study of three programs using the Housing First approach to provide permanent supportive housing for single, homeless adults with serious mental illness and often co-occurring substance-related disorders...
Rearranging the Deck Chairs or Reallocating the Lifeboats? Homelessness Assistance and its Alternatives
Dennis P. Culhane and Stephen Metraux
December 2008
At present, homelessness in the United States is primarily addressed by providing emergency and transitional shelter facilities. These programs do not directly address the causes of homelessness, and residents are exposed to victimization and trauma during stays. Communities need an alternative that is more humane, as well as more cost-efficient and effective at achieving outcomes...
The Applicability of Housing First Models to Homeless Persons with Serious Mental Illness
Carol L. Pearson, Gretchen Locke, Ann Elizabeth Montgomery, and Larry Buron
July 2008
In recent years, increased public attention has been focused on the hardest-to-serve, chronically homeless population, a substantial number of whom are mentally ill. Because the Housing First approach addresses this population, it has emerged as a favored policy response among many in the advocacy ...
Housing First for Long-Time Shelter Dwellers with Psychiatric Disabilities in a Suburban County: A Four-Year Study on Housing Access and Retention
Ana Stefancic and Sam Tsemberis
July 2007
Housing First is an effective intervention that ends and prevents homelessness for individuals with severe mental illness and co-occurring addictions. By providing permanent, independent housing without prerequisites for sobriety and treatment, and by offering support services through consumer-driven Assertive Community Treatment teams, Housing First removes some of the major obstacles...
Critical Time Intervention: An Empirically Supported Model for Preventing Homelessness in High Risk Groups
Daniel Herman, Sarah Conover, Alan Felix, Aman Nakagawa and Danika Mills
July 2007
Critical Time Intervention (CTI) is designed to prevent recurrent homelessness among persons with severe mental illness by enhancing continuity of care during the transition from institutional to community living. After providing the background and rationale of CTI, this paper describes the elements of the model...
Community-Wide Strategies for Preventing Homelessness: Recent Evidence
Martha R. Burt, Carol Pearson and Ann Elizabeth Montgomery
June 2007
This article summarizes the findings of a study of community-wide strategies for preventing homelessness among families and single adults with serious mental illness, conducted for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The study involved six communities...
Testing a Typology of Family Homelessness
Dennis P. Culhane, Stephen Metraux, Jung Min Park, Maryanne Schretzman and Jesse Valente
May 2007
This study tests a typology of family homelessness based on patterns of public shelter utilization and examines whether family characteristics are associated with those patterns. The results indicate that a substantial majority of homeless families stay in public shelters for relatively brief ...
Characteristics of Transitional Housing for Homeless Families
Martha R. Burt
September 7, 2006
This report was written in preparation for a larger study sponsored by HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research to examine the effects of transitional housing (TH) on homeless families. The larger study involves following a sample of homeless families for one year after they leave transitional housing to understand what happens to them and ...
Evaluability Assessment of Discharge Planning and the Prevention of Homelessness: Final Report
Garrett Moran, Rafael Semansky, Elizabeth Quinn, Rebecca Noftsinger and Teresa Koenig
September 22, 2005
Past research has indicated that many people with severe mental illnesses and substance abuse problems who experience homelessness travel in “institutional circuits,” or move repeatedly through systems and institutions such as state psychiatric hospitals, jails and prisons, ...
Strategies For Preventing Homelessness
Martha R. Burt and Carol L. Pearson
May 2005
Homelessness prevention is an essential element of any effort to end homelessness either locally or nationwide. To close the front door of entry into homelessness, the central challenge of prevention is targeting our efforts toward those people that will become homeless without the intervention. Providing prevention assistance to people who would ...
The Prevention of Homelessness Revisited
Marybeth Shinn
2004
Conceptual and methodological problems plague efforts to prevent homelessness. Attempts to identify individuals at risk are inefficient, targeting many people who will not become homeless for each person who will. Such interventions may do useful things for needy people, but evidence that they prevent homelessness is scant....
Housing First, Consumer Choice, Harm Reduction for individuals with a dual diagnosis
Sam Tsemberis
2004
This study examined the longitudinal effects of a Housing First program for homeless, mentally ill individuals on those individuals’ consumer choice, housing stability, substance use, treatment utilization, and psychiatric symptoms. Two hundred twenty-five participants were randomly assigned to receive housing...
Strategies for Reducing Chronic Street Homelessness
Martha R. Burt
2004
This is an experimental time for programs to reduce chronic street homelessness. The many communities trying to end chronic homelessness must learn about successful approaches, construct their own strategies, and locate the necessary resources to fulfill their plans...
Examining Policies to Reduce Homelessness Using a General Equilibrium Model of the Housing Market
Erin T. Mansura, John M. Quigley, Steven Raphael and Eugene Smolensky
September 2002
In this study uses a general equilibrium simulation model to assess the potential impacts on homelessness of various housing-market policy interventions in the four largest metropolitan areas in California...
Towards a Comprehensive Homelessness Prevention Strategy
Eric Lindblom
1991
Because of the misery and deprivation suffered by homeless persons, the initial response to homelessness in the United States focused first on quickly addressing the dire need for emergency food and shelter, and then on providing additional assistance to already homeless persons—ideally to help them move out of homelessness...
