Over the past 20 years, conservatives have engineered two notable public-policy success stories in the United States. One is welfare reform, which dramatically reduced the number of people on welfare, and arguably convinced some large number of former and would-be recipients to go to work.
The other is "broken windows policing," which in the early 2000s, likely helped cause the sharp drops in the crime rates of New York and other cities.
But progressives have a fascinating success story, too. It is the "housing first" approach toward reducing chronic homelessness.
And it's about to make its way to Grand Forks, for the same reason that it has taken root in other cities: It works.
It shouldn't work, economic theory suggests. But it does work, at least toward the specific goals of getting homeless people off the streets and reducing their involvement with the health care and criminal justice systems. And both of those outcomes save taxpayers money.
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In any event, that's the argument supporters have presented before - and it's a persuasive one. It persuaded Republican President George W. Bush's administration, the officials in which first took notice of housing-first and supported it with funding. It persuaded city councils around the country, including in Fargo and Duluth.
And it'll likely persuade authorities and the public here, because the numbers housing-first advocates can offer truly are impressive.
"Housing first" does exactly what its name implies: provide housing first. It gives chronically homeless people the chance to move off of the streets and into small, rent-subsidized apartments. And it does so without preconditions - in other words, without demanding that the tenants first stop drinking or start drug treatment.
Well, who wouldn't take up an offer like that?
Exactly.
But lo and behold, the civic generosity does what it's supposed to do.
In Seattle, "findings from an evaluation published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2009 included taxpayer savings of more than $4 million over the first year of operation, reflecting significant reductions in hospital emergency room visits, inpatient hospitalizations and stays in sobering facilities and shelters," the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness reports.
Studies elsewhere have generated similar results, demonstrating "substantial savings in public costs for hospital care (emergency room and inpatient hospitalizations), sobering centers, shelters, ambulance services, jails and other services."
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The real puzzle is this: If you subsidize something, economic theory holds, you get more of it. And in fact, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the more services a city provided for homeless people, the more homeless people that city drew.
But that cause and effect breaks down with "housing first," as far as we can tell. Cities with housing-first programs see their homeless population fall, but without a corresponding balloon in the demand for the subsidized apartments.
Nor do the program's administrative costs seem to grow exponentially and crowd out the police, emergency-room and homeless-shelter savings.
What's going on?
Again, it's a puzzlement. But given that it's happening in connection with a lowered incidence of chronic homelessness, it's a great problem for society to have.
- Tom Dennis for the Herald
