COVID-19 has put a spotlight on the deep racial inequalities in our world and we wanted to bring this issue to the forefront during our Vanguard City Summit. This convening will allow Vanguard Cities to ask questions and think more deeply about the intersection of race, caste, and homelessness in their own communities, and discuss ways to better address the issues related to race and caste in homelessness service provision, systems, and policy.

Housing First is a homeless assistance approach that offers permanent housing with supportive services. Many Vanguard Cities are working to expand housing-led approaches to homelessness including Housing First and this convening will focus on the implementation of Housing First, deploying support services, and how cities can scale up Housing First to end homelessness in their communities.

Many cities have drastically changed their systems due to COVID-19. This convening will focus on strategies to keep positive changes in cities post-pandemic and also have a discussion on ending homelessness with systems thinking. The convening will focus on lessons learned during the pandemic, positive systems changes, and what the road forward looks like regarding ending homelessness in a post-COVID-19 world. We will also talk about ways communities can re-orient systems using data to advance work to end homelessness.

Vallesi et al. describe the Wongee Mia project, a pilot project spearheaded by the Housing First collective impact organization 50 Lives 50 Homes, centered in Perth, Western Australia. The initiative aims to establish culturally appropriate responses to the Aboriginal homelessness and address the differentiated needs of Aboriginal people who experience much higher rates of homelessness due to a history discrimination and social exclusion. The Wongee Mia project uses a participatory action research framework, using a family-centered approach to addressing homelessness and working in consultation with Aboriginal Elders who are heavily involved in the development of the project.

From: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

Anderson and Collins investigated the extent to which Indigenous people were over-represented in urban populations in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and sought to identify the causes of this phenomenon. In each of the cities for which they were able to find reliable homelessness data, they found Indigenous people over-represented in the homelessness population, with Indigenous populations often representing a percentage in the homeless population at least five times higher than their representation in the population overall. While the authors acknowledge that social indicators related to poverty and marginalization factor into Indigenous homeless, they argue that other considerations unique to Indigenous groups, such as historical colonialism and cultural disconnect, accentuate these problems.

From: Housing Studies

This article is an investigation into the phenomenon of social exclusion among various racial and ethnic minority groups located in European countries and the United States. Radu explores the concept of ‘durable inequality’ and how “individual factors interact with structural factors such as poverty to push already marginalized people into homelessness.” This categorical social exclusion factors into the causes of homelessness for many marginalized ethnic groups, including North African migrants in France, the Roma community in Italy, and the immigrant populations in Nordic countries.

From: Inquiries Journal

A collection of key resources and glossaries compiled by Funders Together to End Homelessness.

This article features a broad overview of research related to the connection between race and homelessness in the U.S. The review also focuses on the potential causes of overrepresentation of Black U.S. citizens in the modern homeless population and the need to consider race when developing programs and policies that address homelessness.

From: World Medical & Health Policy

Noting the drawbacks to using point-in-time counts to gain a comprehensive view of who experiences homelessness over time, this study sought to measure racial disparities in lifetime prevalence of homelessness in the U.S. Using survey data from the National Institute on Aging’s Health and Retirement Study, the authors found that while 6.2% of the survey respondents had experienced homelessness at some point in over the course of their lives, significant racial disparities existed with 16.8% of the non-Hispanic Black population experiencing homelessness compared to 4.8% of non-Hispanic whites.

From: Demography

While this article discusses the intersectionality of homelessness and a number of other marginalized categories of people, the authors note that “[r]ace is the most established demographic illustrating the discriminatory impact of homelessness on marginalized groups.” The authors argue that a number of compounding factors contribute to the disproportionate representation of racial minorities in the homelessness population such as public policy decisions that have entrenched segregation and concentrated poverty; historical exclusion from federal programs that facilitated home ownership and wealth accumulation for white citizens; and discrimination in the private housing and employment market. These effects can be exacerbated when race is combined with another marginalized status such as being a previously incarcerated person or having a mental illness.

From: Digital Commons – Seattle University School of Law

This study found that the previously incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to experience homelessness than the general public. Given the racial composition of the prison population in the U.S. and the disproportionate representation of Black Ameriacans in the incarcerated population, this fact has particular relevance to addressing homelessness prevention. The authors of the study found this phenomenon to be particularly pronounced among formerly incarcerated Black women, who experience a rate of sheltered homelessness nearly four times that of formerly incarcerated white men.

From: Prison Policy Initiative

Keller et al. describe the challenges faced and strategies used in implementing the Housing First model in different Canadian cities, outlining how those tasked with implementing the program adopted a flexible approach while still adhering to the core principles of Housing First. Topics addressed include the use of congregate and public housing (rather than scattered site housing); cultural adaptiveness (as it pertains to Aboriginal populations, immigrants, refugees, and so on); and the importance of technical assistance and the role of site coordinator in implementation.

From: American Journal of Psychiatric Rehabilitation

This article describes a study that sought to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the At Home/Chez Soi Housing First project. The At Home/Chez Soi project operates in a number of major cities across Canada, using a scattered-site, intensive case management Housing First model. The randomized clinical trial determined that roughly half of the costs of the program were offset by reduced service usage in other areas (e.g. shelter costs, emergency department visits), lending further evidence to claims regarding Housing First’s cost-effectiveness as a homelessness intervention.

From: JAMA Network Open

‘Housing First’ is a recovery-oriented approach to ending homelessness that centers on quickly moving people experiencing homelessness into independent and permanent housing and then providing additional supports and services as needed. It is an approach first popularized by Sam Tsemberis and Pathways to Housing in New York in the 1990s, though there were Housing First-like programs emerging elsewhere, including Canada (HouseLink in Toronto) prior to this time. The basic underlying principle of Housing First is that people are better able to move forward with their lives if they are first housed. This is as true for people experiencing homelessness and those with mental health and addictions issues as it is for anyone. Housing is provided first and then supports are provided including physical and mental health, education, employment, substance abuse and community connections.

Housing First in Canada: Supporting Communities to End Homelessness says, “Housing is not contingent upon readiness, or on ‘compliance’ (for instance, sobriety). Rather, it is a rights-based intervention rooted in the philosophy that all people deserve housing, and that adequate housing is a precondition for recovery.”

From: Homeless Hub

This guide provides an overview of Housing First, explaining how the intervention works, describing the principles on which the Housing First approach is founded, and outlining key components of Housing First programs. Despite being targeted towards a European audience, much of the Housing First information contained in the guide is applicable to a variety of social contexts.

From: Housing First Europe Hub

Pleace and Bretherton explore issues relating to the widespread adoption of Housing First and adapting it to different social contexts. The researchers propose a Housing First typological framework whereby the core operational principles and philosophy of Housing First are used to distinguish Housing First from other forms of homelessness interventions, but that is flexible enough to accommodate the variation that may exist among Housing First programs. They contend that while there is still work to be done regarding understanding the specifics of what makes Housing First effective, enough evidence exists to be confident that Housing First can be adapted to varying contexts.

From: European Journal of Homelessness

This book describes, as pragmatically as possible, the Finnish way of reducing homelessness, the special characteristics of the Finnish Housing First model, as well as its differences compared to the American Pathways Housing First model. For us, Housing First is a living and evolving model, an approach to doing work on eliminating homelessness. We hope that this book will be useful and brighten up the day of everyone who in their own country, in their own city, does work on eliminating homelessness and wants to make use of the Housing First model and our experiences with applying it.

From: Y-Foundation

Homelessness in 2030 includes essays from leading researchers around the globe. The only guidance for the essays was the title, Homelessness in 2030, a word count, and an always necessary deadline. The essays arrived, but still a lot of practical work was to be done to turn the bundle of texts into this book. What came together was an inspiring and illuminating collection of visions for the future. The idea is to distill the wisdom needed to end homelessness from all the knowledge the leading researchers have gained from their extensive work.

From: Y-Foundation

Woodhall-Melnik and Dunn conducted a review of studies evaluating the effectiveness of Housing First programs, specifically those with quantifiable outcomes. They concluded that participation in Housing First programs was associated with higher rates of housing retention, decreased involvement with the criminal justice system, decreased shelter and emergency health services use, and quality of life improvement.

From: Housing Studies

Now is the moment to bring everyone home. COVID-19 changed the urgency with which our country treats homelessness and our sense of what can be done. We won’t go back. 

The Covid pandemic is exposing cracks in numerous public systems—including health care, finance, and housing. In fact, says Rosanne Haggerty, founder of Community Solutions and a global expert on homelessness, the three are closely linked. Before Covid, homelessness was an epidemic on its own. Now, with 40 million Americans newly unemployed, a crisis looms, and Rosanne sees a historic opportunity to end homelessness once and for all. We spoke with her about the challenges and opportunities facing America, and what new mindsets are needed and possible.

What the Coronavirus Proved About Homelessness — Britain’s efforts to house thousands of people amid the pandemic prove that even the most intractable problems are solvable—with enough political will.

Coronavirus Exposes the Inextricable Connection Between Housing and Health –Escalated efforts to get homeless and unsheltered people off the streets during coronavirus can serve us long after the crisis is over.

The information and resources here are intended to answer questions and support your community to develop and sustain a quality By-Name List on your journey to ending chronic and veteran homelessness.

The SHARE framework sets out clear principles to inform how preventing and ending homelessness should be framed and assessed. It aims to take into account all relevant data, while also setting the highest standards for transparency and accountability when working to prevent or relieve homelessness.

US Department of Housing and Urban Development has developed the following seven system-level performance measures to help communities gauge their progress in preventing and ending homelessness.