Silicon Valley Discovers the Cheapest Way to Help the Homeless: Give Them Homes

[KamaAina]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/santa-clara-silicon-valley-homelessness

Santa Clara County is perhaps best known as the home of Silicon Valley. It also has one of the country's highest rates of homelessness and its third largest chronically homeless population.

An extensive new study of the county's homelessness crisis, published yesterday, finds that the most cost-effective way to address the problem is to provide people with homes. Those findings echo a similar approach that's been successfully adopted in Utah, the subject of Mother Jones' April/May cover story....

They found that much of the public costs of homelessness stemmed from a small segment of this population who were persistently homeless, around 2,800 people. Close to half of all county expenditures were spent on just five percent of the homeless population, who came into frequent contact with police, hospitals, and other service agencies, racking up an average of $100,000 in costs per person annually. Those costs quickly add up—overall, Santa Clara communities spend $520 million in homeless services every year.

The study also highlights solutions. The researchers examined Destination: Home's program, which has housed more than 800 people in the past five years. The study looked at more than 400 of these housing recipients, a fifth of whom were part of the most expensive cohort. Before receiving housing, they each averaged nearly $62,500 in public costs annually. Housing them cost less than $20,000 per person—an annual savings of more than $42,000.

[HassleCat]

1. H 4 H

Habitat for Humanity does this, or at least they used to, before they got ll wrapped up in building houses in other countries. There are other "sweat equity" housing programs in the country, and they produce great results, although they don't have the funding to address too many cases.

[upaloopa]

2. I don't think this is what you think it is

I read and reread it. It says housing and services for a small population of homeless costs more than housing for a larger population of homeless. That if true is not new.
Seems what they did was stop the services and spent the money on housing. So the fist population that had housing still has housing but no services or they take money from some other program to pay for services.
I work for another CA county and I work on several homeless grants that are provided by HUD. To get permanent shelter from HUD a homeless person has to have severe disabilities such as severe mental illness. They get a place to live and supportive services for their mental illness. If we stopped the supportive services than that money could be used to house more homeless.
I think that is what is being done here.
They are not saving money just spending it differently.

[daredtowork]

3. This seems to be happening in Berkeley

They narrowed the definition of the homeless to super case-manage them, but in the process they deprived the marginally poor of services, putting a much broader spectrum of people at risk for homelessness. While there is supposed "savings" involved in this approach, none of it was used to help the historically impoverished neighborhoods that were further divested by this boneheaded move.

It's a Red Queen's Race to fix homelessness by creating more homelessness.