What our approach to homelessness can teach us about building better policies, programs and practices.
By Aaron J. Byzak
For nearly a decade, homelessness policy has increasingly organized itself around a deceptively simple idea: Housing First.
The premise is right there in the name. If someone is homeless, provide housing first, without requiring sobriety, treatment or other behavioral changes as a condition of receiving it.
But Housing First wasn’t simply one philosophy among several competing approaches. In California, it became the required framework for state-funded homelessness and housing-based programs covered by state law. At the federal level, HUD made Housing First a major priority in its competitive homelessness funding system, creating powerful financial incentives for communities and providers to fall in line.
That had real consequences. Programs built around sobriety, treatment, accountability or other requirements, including Solutions for Change, found themselves effectively locked out of major sources of public homelessness funding unless they were willing to change the very things that made their models different.
The federal government has recently begun moving away from that policy and reopening the door to a broader range of approaches. California, however, continues to mandate Housing First across covered state-funded programs.
To be clear, Housing First may be entirely appropriate for some people. My issue isn’t that Housing First exists. It is that we took one intervention, designed around a particular understanding of homelessness, and essentially made it the intervention.
That only makes sense if homelessness is one problem. It isn’t.
Think about who we are talking about when we use the word “homeless.” It could be a senior who lived independently for decades but can no longer afford an apartment. It could be a veteran struggling with PTSD. It could be a young person escaping an abusive home. It could be someone living on the street with serious mental illness and addiction. Or it could be a mother, father, or couple with two children whose family has been torn apart by addiction, domestic violence, trauma and instability.
All of these people may be homeless, but that doesn’t mean they have the same problem. And if they don’t have the same problem, why would we expect the same intervention to work for all of them?
At Solutions for Change, we primarily work with families. Over more than 25 years, we have learned that the loss of housing is often the downstream result of things that happened much further upstream: trauma, addiction, mental illness, domestic violence, broken relationships, limited education, employment barriers and childhood adversity.
Our primary intervention is Solutions Academy, a 700-day, college-like residential program. Parents don’t simply receive a place to live. They spend nearly two years addressing trauma and learned behaviors, overcoming addiction and other barriers, developing life and employment skills, and learning how to create a stable and healthy environment for themselves and their children.
Our own longitudinal tracking tells us something significant is happening. Our internal data show a 100% child reunification rate among participating families where reunification is the goal and 87% efficacy in keeping graduates stably housed five years after graduation.
Those are our numbers, and we are proud of them. But we also understand that internal data are not the same as independent academic validation. One of our next steps is to partner with an academic institution to rigorously study the model, validate the outcomes and, frankly, tell us what we can do better.
Because we have also come to an important conclusion: even these results aren’t enough.
There is something fundamentally different about working with homeless families. We are helping adults deal with the downstream consequences of things that may have happened years or even decades earlier. But standing right beside those adults are their children.
Those children are still upstream.
We know from decades of research into Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, that childhood trauma is associated with negative health, behavioral and social outcomes later in life. Children experiencing homelessness and family instability may already be accumulating those experiences.
That means we have an opportunity to do more than help their parents recover. We have an opportunity to intervene before some of these patterns become embedded in another generation.
That realization is driving the next evolution of Solutions for Change. We are taking many of the lessons we have spent decades teaching adults and intentionally bringing them to their children in age-appropriate ways. That includes mentoring and enrichment, educational support, health and wellness, healthy relationships, drug prevention, career exploration, financial literacy, recreation and personal development. It also means exposing kids to careers, education and experiences that allow them to imagine a future beyond the circumstances they happen to be living in today.
We aren’t walking away from what has worked. We’re moving further upstream.
Our goal shouldn’t simply be to help a family escape homelessness today. We should be asking what we can do now to make it less likely that their children experience the same thing 10, 20 or 30 years from now.
This gets to the larger problem with how we talk about homelessness.
I think of homelessness as a complex puzzle. Anyone who has put together a puzzle knows you don’t just start forcing pieces together. You dump them out, turn them over, look for patterns, find the edges and begin figuring out which pieces actually belong together. And, of course, it helps tremendously to know what the picture on the front of the box is supposed to look like.
I’m not convinced we have adequately defined that picture when it comes to homelessness.
Instead, we have taken dramatically different populations, causes and circumstances and collapsed them into a single condition: “unhoused.” Once you define the problem that way, the policy response becomes almost self-fulfilling. If the problem is that someone is unhoused, then the solution is to house them.
Simple enough.
Except homelessness isn’t simple.
We need to be willing to ask a more nuanced question: What works, for whom, under what circumstances, and toward what long-term outcome?
Housing First may be part of that answer. So may treatment, recovery, prevention, workforce development, supportive housing, and accountability-based programs. Different populations will almost certainly require different combinations of these things.
That shouldn’t be controversial. It should be common sense.
After billions of dollars spent and homelessness continuing to devastate individuals, families and communities, maybe it’s time to stop insisting that every piece of this complex puzzle looks the same.
Solutions for Change intends to help figure out where those pieces actually belong.
Because homelessness is not one problem. We shouldn’t keep pretending it has one solution.