What is not working about the US response to homelessness? Every year, cities spend more on services, but homelessness is on the rise and public frustration with the status quo is growing. Providers are exhausted. Residents are skeptical. Leaders feel stuck. It is time to reorient homelessness services towards outcomes.

What if we’re trying to solve too many problems at once with a system built to solve none of them well? This thought experiment draws on our work at the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab (GPL) with state and city leaders across the US to explore what it might take to radically redesign the way communities serve people with severe mental illness living on the street. There is a helpful and illuminating precedent from communities across the country about what it takes to reimagine a complex system.

Reorienting Homelessness Services: The Challenge and the Broken Status Quo

Cities and counties are spending billions of dollars on homelessness services each year, and yet when the GPL speaks with government leaders and community members across the United States, we hear similar concerns:

  • As a city leader, I care about people in my community who are experiencing homelessness, but I’m frustrated that we keep being told the only solution is putting more money into the same system. We need to be able to show that this spending works or we will lose residents’ trust.
  • My fellow service providers are well-intentioned and care a lot, but funding rigidity means we spend a lot of energy on administrative overhead, tracking activities back to specific funding sources rather than just trying to serve people with the resources they need, when they need them. We’re always told the system is too expensive, but none of us individually has enough resources or flexibility to do what we think needs to be done for our clients.
  • My loved one has an illness and is living on the street. We have tried to get them help, but it’s an impenetrable tangle of overlapping services. Providers tell us they don’t have space or can’t do anything because my loved one is hard to work with.

Read the full article about redesigning homelessness services by Gloria Gong at Stanford Social Innovation Review.