Utah has defied the stereotype of a red state in nearly eliminating chronic homelessness through a government program, and has became the model across the country for providing homeless people with housing before addressing their other needs.
Now, the architect of the state’s program is looking to export the model to other states and towns, even while some conservatives have raised concerns about it.
In 2005, the state began testing a simple idea for housing the chronically homeless: Provide housing before addressing anything else, such as health needs or drug issues.
A decade later, the ranks of the chronically homeless has fallen 91 percent, according to Utah officials.
Even better, from the perspective of big-hearted but fiscally conservative Utahns, state officials believe they saved money with the housing-first approach.
“We know the solution is housing, and affordable housing,” said Lloyd Pendleton, the former Utah Homeless Task Force director who instituted the policy. “You can say, ‘Woe is me, it’s way too expensive,’ but you’re incurring the costs already throughout your system with them being on the street.”
The idea is that by marshaling the state government’s resources to get homeless people into housing, the government can prevent them from the many dangers of the streets and give them stability. Then, on the back end, they save money on health programs and first responders who otherwise would be helping the homeless when they run into trouble.
“It’s an economic argument,” Pendleton said of pitching the concept to conservatives. It’s also a humanitarian one. “These persons who are homeless are our homeless citizens,” he tells right-leaning audiences skeptical of government spending on anti-poverty programs. “If they’re hurting, we’re hurting.”
On average, it cost Utah nearly $20,000 a year to provide aid for a chronically homeless person, taking the costs of healthcare and the legal system into account. Housing that same person is estimated to cost under $8,000.
Utah’s success has been heralded by the Washington Post, National Public Radio and “The Daily Show,” among other high-profile venues.
Having accomplished what he set out to do in Utah, Pendleton is taking time off and speaking across the country, trying to promote the housing-first concept.
Locales that have expressed interest include the state of Washington; Colorado Springs; Redding, Calif.; Everett, Wash.; Hawaii and Los Angeles, he said. “I see people starting to pick up the idea that it can be done.”
A question about the viability of Utah’s housing-first model is whether the state is unique. Utah has unusually strong coordination among agencies, strong private institutions and a relatively small homeless population. For example, it is likely that Los Angeles’ Skid Row has more chronically homeless people than all of Utah.
Another concern is that Utah’s success may be overstated. Kevin Corinth, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, suggested that the finding that Utah’s reforms reduced chronic homelessness by 91 percent might be “overplayed.”
In a forthcoming analysis, Corinth probed the numbers and found that homelessness may not have dropped at all. The statistic, he discovered, may be caused by changes in the way homelessness is measured, rather than by moving people off the streets.
Furthermore, he suggested that the cost savings from the housing-first approach might not be enough to justify its use. While providing housing first might be cost effective for the homeless people who put the most strain on social services, it might not be so efficient for others, he noted.
Corinth clarified that he agrees with the housing-first approach, but that he thinks that governments “should worry more about what happens after” moving homeless people into housing — “on what happens second.”
