Offering Housing To The Homeless Could Increase Demand For It

The very term homelessness suggests that providing low-cost housing is the right cure for the problem. But there are reasons to think that is not always the case.

It's crucial to think differently in regard to the two largest, and quite different, populations which are grouped together as homeless: single adults and low-income families with children.

Single adults — some 11,000 of the 58,000 New York City shelter residents — include many with mental health and substance abuse problems. These include those most in danger from the current frigid cold. They can be described as the British do — as street-sleepers, or those “sleeping rough.”

Many have fallen through the cracks of our porous mental health and drug treatment programs. Housing per se is not the answer for them. Instead, we must provide shelter and supportive services—mini-institutional replacements for a previous generation's precipitously-closed mental hospitals.

For the families with children — many headed by single parents who had been doubled-up with family but were not literally on the street -- our strategies should not be the same. We must acknowledge the risk that offering housing units will increase demand and even the formation of more such households, which are often homes to children who will face toughest type of poverty and greatest economic disadvantage. In other words, the “homeless” family problem is actually a subset of our challenge in assisting low-income, single-parent families without encouraging their formation.

Indeed, we must take care to avoid the risk that expanded government benefit programs—such as housing based on the combination of low-income and the presence of dependent children—may discourage the steps that will help improve a household's long-term economic condition. As the University of Maryland poverty researcher Douglas Besharov observed in 2013 Congressional testimony, “Means-tested benefit programs undermine much of the good they do because their very structure creates substantial disincentives to work and marriage.”

Some cities, notably Atlanta, have linked housing voucher assistance for such families to a work requirement. Another alternative to the costly construction of additional subsidized housing for such families: short-term assistance, either through public housing units or the use of some of the city's 125,000-plus housing vouchers.

But housing alone, no strings attached, is not likely to break what can be an inter-generational poverty problem.

This piece originally appeared in The New York Times

This piece originally appeared in The New York Times