Scotty Franzyshen

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Housing, employment, community, and life in Butte County

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Homelessness: Are We Solving the Problem or Managing It?

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?

These aren’t accusations. They are questions I think we should be willing to ask.

What Does the Money Actually Produce?

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?

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, lack of affordable housing, lack of extremely affordable housing, program design, management, fragmented services, funding structures, 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 keeping the system operating?

How much is spent on services?

How much is actually connected to housing?

And ultimately:

How many people actually leave homelessness and remain housed?

Prevention

If homelessness is the problem we are trying to solve, then we should not only ask how we help people after they become homeless.

We should also ask how many people we prevent from becoming homeless in the first place.

Is preventing homelessness less expensive than responding to homelessness after someone has lost their housing?

Are we putting enough resources into preventing people from entering homelessness, or are we primarily funding the response after homelessness has already occurred?

A person who loses housing because of a relatively small financial crisis may require relatively little assistance to remain housed.

Once that person becomes homeless, the resources required to help them may become much greater.

This makes prevention an important part of the homelessness equation.

The Housing Problem

Homelessness cannot be separated from the availability of housing.

There is a difference between:

A person can be working, receiving benefits, or doing everything expected of them and still be unable to find housing they can afford, qualify for, or physically access.

If the available housing costs more than a person’s sustainable income can support, then telling that person to “get a job” does not necessarily solve the housing problem.

Sometimes the problem is not simply a lack of income.

Sometimes the problem is the lack of a place to live that the person’s available income can actually support.

The Pathway

I want to understand the entire pathway:

Prevention → Homelessness → Stabilization → Services → Housing Application → Housing Placement → Permanent Housing → Housing Retention

At every step, we should be able to ask:

What is supposed to happen next?

Where is the exit door?

A referral is not a housing placement.

A housing placement is not necessarily permanent housing.

Permanent housing is not necessarily housing stability.

If someone moves from one program or facility to another but never obtains a place they can actually keep, has the system solved the housing problem for that person?

Services vs. Outcomes

There is an important distinction between providing a service and producing a housing outcome.

An organization might provide:

All of these things can be valuable.

But we should still be able to ask:

What was the intended pathway from the service to housing?

And:

How many people actually made that journey?

For example:

“We served 500 people.”

is very different from:

“We served 500 people, 137 obtained permanent housing, and 119 remained housed for at least 12 months.”

Both numbers describe activity.

Only the second begins to tell us something about the housing outcome.

Housing Retention Matters

Getting someone housed is not necessarily the end of the problem.

If someone obtains housing and loses it six months later, we should want to understand why.

So success should not simply be:

Person entered housing.

It should also include:

Person remained housed.

That means asking:

The ultimate goal shouldn’t simply be housing placement.

It should be housing stability.

One Size Does Not Fit Everyone

Every person experiencing homelessness is an individual.

Someone who lost a job may need something very different from someone with severe mental-health needs.

Someone leaving prison may need something different from an elderly person who lost housing.

Someone struggling with addiction may need a recovery environment.

Someone else may simply need an affordable room and enough income to pay the rent.

Not everyone needs the same program, the same shelter, the same level of supervision, or the same type of housing.

The question should not simply be:

“Do we have a bed for this person?”

It should be:

“Do we have an appropriate place for this person?”

Dignity does not necessarily mean giving everyone the same thing.

Dignity can mean giving people an environment appropriate to their circumstances.

What Happens to People Who Don’t Fit?

Every program has eligibility requirements, rules, limitations, and capacity constraints.

That is understandable.

But there is an important question:

What happens to the people who don’t fit the program?

What happens to someone who:

If the answer is simply “they are referred somewhere else,” then I want to know where that somewhere else is.

A referral should be part of a pathway.

It should not become the end of one.

The Entry and Exit Equation

There is a simple equation I keep coming back to:

People entering homelessness − People exiting homelessness = Change in homelessness

If more people are entering homelessness than leaving it for permanent housing, then the overall problem cannot shrink regardless of how many services we provide.

So I want to know:

How many people are entering homelessness?

How many people are actually exiting homelessness into permanent housing?

Are we currently producing more permanent housing exits than new entries into homelessness?

If not, what would it take to change that?

That is a much more meaningful question than simply asking how many people were served.

The Incentive Question

I am not assuming that anyone wants homelessness to continue.

I am not saying that nonprofit organizations aren’t trying to help.

I am not saying that government agencies aren’t trying to help.

There are many possible reasons why the system may not be producing enough successful housing outcomes:

But I do think we should examine whether our systems create unintended incentives.

If an organization receives funding to serve people experiencing homelessness, are we primarily measuring:

Or are we also measuring:

Could a system unintentionally become better at managing homelessness than eliminating it?

Could organizations be doing good and necessary work while the overall system still fails to produce enough permanent housing exits?

If so, the problem may not be individual bad actors.

It may be the way the system itself is designed and funded.

Where Does the Money Go?

I want to be able to follow the money.

Not because I assume anyone is doing anything wrong.

Because I believe the public has a reasonable interest in understanding what public and charitable resources actually accomplish.

I want to understand the relationship between:

Money → Programs → Services → People → Housing → Housing Stability

How much money enters the system?

Where does it go?

How much is spent on:

And then:

What happened to the people those resources were intended to help?

How many were served?

How many were housed?

How many remained housed?

How many returned to homelessness?

Measuring the Entire System

If homelessness is the problem we are trying to solve, then we need to measure more than individual program activity.

We need to look at the entire system.

Prevention

How many people were prevented from becoming homeless?

Stabilization

How many people were moved from unsafe homelessness into an appropriate temporary environment?

Housing

How many people obtained permanent housing?

Retention

How many remained housed?

System Change

Is the overall number of people experiencing homelessness actually decreasing?

This creates a much different way of looking at success.

Instead of asking only:

“How many people did we help?”

we can also ask:

“How many people no longer need our help because they have a place to live and can keep it?”

The Question I Keep Coming Back To

I’m not trying to prove that nonprofits are bad.

I’m not trying to prove that government is bad.

I’m not trying to prove that any particular program is failing.

I’m trying to understand whether the system is producing the outcomes that the people it is intended to help actually need.

Because:

Helping a homeless person is not necessarily the same thing as helping a homeless person become housed.

And:

Helping someone become housed is not necessarily the same thing as helping them remain housed.

If ending homelessness is the goal, then ultimately we need to know:

How many people entered homelessness?

How many people were prevented from entering it?

How many people exited it?

How many obtained permanent housing?

How many remained housed?

And perhaps the most important question of all:

Are we actually reducing homelessness, or are we becoming increasingly effective at managing it?

The Question Behind All the Questions

I don’t have the answer yet.

That’s the point.

I want to look at the evidence.

I want to compare what organizations say they do with what they actually have the capacity to do.

I want to compare the money invested with the services delivered.

I want to compare services delivered with housing outcomes.

And I want to understand what happens to the people who don’t make it through the system.

Maybe the answer is that we simply don’t have enough housing.

Maybe we don’t have enough extremely affordable housing.

Maybe we need better prevention.

Maybe we need different kinds of housing.

Maybe we need better coordination.

Maybe some programs work extremely well while others need improvement.

Maybe the funding structure needs to change.

Maybe the system is doing much better than the available outcome data suggests.

I don’t know yet.

But I think these are reasonable questions to ask.

And I think people experiencing homelessness deserve answers.