Publications on Homelessness

In this commentary for The Washington Post, researchers Martha Burt and Sam Hall recommend, among other things, that Washington, D.C., offer permanent supportive housing to those who have been homeless the longest or have the most severe forms of disability. Making major changes in its data system would help the city have real-time information regarding homeless people.

This report, the first of three completed under contract to the D.C. Department of Human Services to assess the District of Columbia's homeless assistance system, examines seven functions that The Community Partnership manages for the District. These include contracting for emergency shelter; orchestrating the District's Continuum of Care; managing and monitoring contracts between homeless service providers and DHS, HUD, and DHCD; quality assurance and program monitoring; rule setting related to provider and client rights and obligations; data collection and analysis; and performance standards and client outcomes. Findings feed into and helped shape the final recommendations offered in the second and third reports.

This report is the second of three for our contract to assess the District of Columbia's homeless assistance system. It looks at the system as a whole, including the flow of people into and through the District's emergency shelter system, the overall structure of the system, and the ways that homelessness impacts D.C. government agencies and the programs they have for addressing it. One critical set of findings-that very few people account for a very large number of shelter days while most people coming in to shelter use very few system resource-leads to the major recommendations of our assessment.

This final report for our contract to assess the District of Columbia's homeless assistance system summarizes findings and presents major recommendations: (1) move chronically homeless people from shelters and streets into permanent supportive housing with appropriate supportive services, (2) create a process that prioritizes who gets the 2,500 new PSH units, (3) transform emergency shelters to use half the beds and specialize more, and (4) make the homeless management information system work as a tool to measure system progress by opening it and using better analytic techniques. The Mayor and Interagency Council are already making progress on the first two recommendations.

In 2005, the Hilton Foundation gave CSH a five-year grant to launch an initiative in Los Angeles County to reduce the number of long-term homeless people, with a special focus on people with serious mental illness. The Urban Institute, which is evaluating the grant's impact, did a baseline assessment of homelessness and permanent supportive housing in 2005. A 2007 report assessed the policy and system changes that, working with others, CSH efforts had stimulated by that time. This report documents two-year changes in the level of homelessness in Los Angeles and the availability and characteristics of PSH availability. A second policy report will be available in fall 2008.