I want to understand whether the way we fund and measure homelessness services creates incentives to manage homelessness rather than eliminate it. 🤔

Are we reducing the number of people experiencing homelessness, or are we simply increasing the amount of infrastructure required to manage homelessness? Can a system unintentionally create incentives to continue providing services without creating enough successful pathways out of homelessness?

Are any of our funding structures inadvertently rewarding organizations for the number of people they serve rather than the number of people they successfully help transition out of homelessness?

How do we know that the services we’re funding are actually moving people toward permanent housing rather than simply moving people from one service or facility to another?

I’m not here to accuse anybody. I’m trying to understand something I couldn’t understand when I was homeless:

where does the money go,

what services does it buy,

how many people actually get housed,

and how many stay housed?

I’m asking the system to demonstrate that the money, services, programs, and facilities ultimately produce the outcome the person experiencing homelessness needs: a place to live that they can actually keep.

I don’t know whether the problem is lack of resources, inadequate housing supply, program design, management, fragmented services, or something else. That’s precisely what I want to find out.

I don’t want to know merely how much money we spend on homelessness. I want to know what that money produces. How much is spent on keeping the system operating, how much is spent on services, and ultimately how many people actually leave homelessness and remain housed?

If homelessness is the problem we are trying to solve, then we need to measure not only how many people we serve, but how many people we prevent from becoming homeless, how many people we move into permanent housing, and how many remain housed.