The Housing First approach to ending homelessness is based on the principle that housing is a basic right and therefore all homeless individuals should be provided with permanent housing. Might work for Finland, but right off the bat, I see three problems: cost, space and unintended consequences.
Consider San Francisco, where supportive housing units run about $400,000 each to construct. Building enough units to house the city’s current homeless population of 7500 individuals would cost roughly $3 billion. Maybe you could save a little money by making the units teeny but the unit itself is only part of overall costs. And even teeny units take up a lot of space when you add them all up. For instance, single resident occupancy (SRO) rooms are just 80 square feet, enough for a bed, dresser and little else. San Francisco’s largest SRO hotel has 248 units. It would take 30 such SRO hotels to house the city’s current homeless population. That’s a lot of new buildings taking up a lot of valuable real estate in a city that doesn’t come close to meeting the housing needs of its low- and middle-income workers - not to mention its thousands of affluent tech workers. For some context, San Francisco completed just 4,500 new housing units in 2017, down 14 percent from the previous year.
And then there is the issue of “build and they will come”. Maybe not so much in Sioux City but San Francisco is another matter. The weather, culture, and community make it an attractive destination. Many of the city's current homeless come from elsewhere, of whom close to a quarter say they moved to San Francisco to access its homeless services. Add guaranteed permanent housing to those services, even a cruddy SRO, and we’ve got a problem, Houston. (Actually, Houston would probably have a problem too). Demand does respond to supply.
It’s also important to remember that homeless young adults, even those with mental health issues, often move on to school, jobs, and independent living. A quick offer of permanent housing could make it easier for these young adults (about 30% of the homeless population in San Francisco) to settle for a subsidized lifestyle, at least for a bit longer. Simply being offered a free bus ticket back home might be what some homeless individuals need to get their lives back in order.
On the other hand, the chronically homeless, especially those in their 50s and 60s, may not be able to manage independent lives off the street. For them, stabilization in subsidized housing may be the most realistic outcome . So we need to come up with a way to make subsidized supportive housing cheaper.
Next: One way to make subsidized supportive housing cheaper