In the Midst of Plenty. Marybeth Shinn

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.