What We’ve Learned Over the Years in Addressing Homelessness

Homelessness touches every community, urban, suburban, and rural. And most communities already know what solutions the evidence suggests. Housing First, permanent supportive housing, rapid rehousing: the research is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is whether providers can deliver it, whether people can get in the door, and whether anyone notices in time when it is not working. So the question we keep coming back to with our partners is a narrower one: What have we actually seen work, for whom, and under what conditions? 

A promising approach needs providers who can deliver it, housing and supports people can access, and a way to recognize when something needs to change. Those details shape whether people get housed and are able to stay housed.  

Over the past decade, we’ve helped communities develop outcomes-based contracts for supportive housing, supported Continuums of Care in improving their local homelessness response systems, and worked with states and counties to put new policies into practice. This work reflects a broader focus at Social Finance: helping public dollars support better outcomes for the people they are intended to serve. 

Access to affordable housing underlies all of this. In Delaware, our assessment for Delaware Health and Social Services identified a severe shortage of affordable homes, particularly for families. Our role was to help the state understand the needs and funding gaps. Expanding housing supply is the work of a much broader field, and it remains a constraint that better program design alone cannot resolve.  

Within those constraints, we have learned a great deal about how communities can improve their response. Five themes come up most often. The examples below come from our work in Anchorage, Austin, Clackamas County, and Delaware. 

Plan for the services people will need to stay housed  

For people who have experienced prolonged homelessness and have significant health or behavioral health needs, moving into housing is the beginning of a longer period of support. Case management and access to care can help people address challenges that continue after move-in. Programs need to plan and budget for that support from the start, with room to adjust as people’s needs change.  

• AT Home | Austin-Travis County, TX. We worked with partners to design permanent supportive housing for 200 to 250 people experiencing chronic homelessness who frequently used emergency services. The work included developing a service model that brought intensive case management and health care together, aligning partners around their roles, and coordinating provider procurement. Designing how those services would be delivered, and what they would cost, was as much of the work as designing the housing itself.  

Keep housing accessible and adjust implementation as you learn  

Housing First is an approach that prioritizes access to housing without requiring sobriety or participation in services as a condition of entry. It can guide different program models, including permanent supportive housing and rapid rehousing. In practice, entry requirements determine who a program can reach. Requiring someone to address substance use before accessing housing, for example, can exclude people the program was designed to serve.  

Providers need the staffing and resources to respond when someone is struggling to maintain a tenancy. Evidence can inform the initial design, but communities still need to examine who is being served, who is waiting, and what happens after people move in. A commitment to Housing First should include a willingness to address problems in how the program is operating locally.  

• Rapid Rehousing Scorecard | City of Austin, TX. We helped develop a rapid rehousing scorecard that tracks people’s progress from referral through housing, including time to move-in and housing retention. Providers review results with city staff and Social Finance each quarter to discuss where services are going well and where changes may be needed. The point of reviewing quarterly is that a problem surfaces while there is still time to fix it.  

Give agencies a practical way to work through problems together  

People experiencing homelessness often interact with housing, health care, and public safety systems that have different responsibilities and funding sources. Coordination is more useful when partners agree on how referrals will work, what information they can share, and who is responsible for resolving a problem that crosses agency boundaries.  

• Home for Good | Anchorage, AK. Home for Good brought municipal agencies, service providers, health systems, and law enforcement together around permanent housing and supportive services. Data-sharing agreements supported coordinated referrals, while regular governance meetings gave partners a place to review progress and troubleshoot. Home for Good reduced arrests by 63%, emergency service transports by 32%, and Anchorage Safety Center intakes by 76% among participants.  

Make data available in time to inform a decision  

A report has limited value if it arrives too late to change how services are delivered. In our work, we’ve found that partners need both timely access to information and a regular opportunity to discuss what it means. When a measure changes, the next step is to understand why and decide whether to act.  

• System Dashboard | Clackamas County, OR. In Clackamas County, Oregon, we helped develop a system dashboard that brings together Homeless Management Information System data and county contract data. It allows county staff to examine demand, service use, and capacity together. County staff can now see whether their contracted capacity matches what families are actually asking for. The dashboard does not answer that question on its own, but it makes the gap visible early enough to act on. 

Give people with firsthand experience a role in decisions  

Performance measures tell you that something is going wrong. Participants can tell you why.  Their experience can help a team understand whether services are accessible and whether proposed changes would address the problems participants face.  

• Home for Good | Anchorage, AK. The steering committee included a voting member representing the community the project served, and each meeting began with a participant’s story. This brought participants’ experiences into the same discussions as program data and operational decisions. It gave partners another way to understand changing needs and consider adjustments. The right form of involvement will vary by project, but it should be clear how people’s input will inform the work. 

These experiences have made us more specific about the questions we ask with our partners. Can people access the housing and support being offered? Where are they getting stuck? What can the team change, and how will we know whether it helped? Following through on those questions is a substantial part of improving a homelessness response, and it is where we continue to focus our work. 

To learn more about Social Finance’s homelessness work or connect with our team, contact Anna Fogel who leads homelessness work.