Shinn talks about years of gathering information on what works to keep people housed
Dr. Beth Shinn is one of the leading national researchers on homelessness and has been working on studied interventions and solutions for more than three decades.
After 16 years teaching at Vanderbilt University, she is preparing to transition to be a research professor. During her time at Vanderbilt, Shinn also helped develop a screening tool so that the Vanderbilt Emergency Department has the ability to determine people’s housing status and refer people with a lack of housing to social workers. In 2020, Shinn published “In the Midst of Plenty: Homelessness and What to Do About It,” an in-depth gathering of solutions in the sphere collected during her extensive research.
“I’m still excited about the research,” Shinn said. “I’m doing a study right now in New York City on unconditional cash transfer to try to help families with babies get out of New York City shelters.”
As Shinn moves away from teaching, she spoke with The Contributor about the issues facing Nashville and the United States when it comes to solving homelessness.
“We have the research that shows us what to do for different groups — there are different solutions for different groups,” Shinn says. “And as a country, we have resources. It’s a question of where we allocate [them]. It’s a question of political will.”
What are the biggest misconceptions people still have regarding homelessness?
The single biggest misconception people have is that folks want to be homeless. That it’s a choice.
But that depends on what is on offer. So, if what is on offer is a congregate shelter that kicks you out during the day, where you can’t stay with your loved ones or your beloved pet, where you can’t bring your belongings, then there are people who will say, “I would rather stay outside.”
But if what is on offer is an apartment, even a very modest apartment, even a hotel room, where you have a little privacy, where you can live with the people that you want to live with, where you can have your pet, where you can control your life, pretty much everybody that I have talked to, who was outside, would jump at that chance.
A second big misconception is that people bring homelessness on themselves by their own actions. Study after study has shown that rates of homelessness across cities are highly associated with rents. Higher rents lead to higher levels of homelessness.
There are people who make bad choices all over, but it’s hard to believe that places with high rents have more people with bad choices. It’s the rents that drive rates of homelessness.
Now, if there aren’t enough housing units to go around or there aren’t enough housing units that are affordable, people who are most vulnerable in various ways are going to lose out. Sometimes people make an analogy to the game of musical chairs. If there aren’t enough chairs when the music stops, somebody’s going to be left standing, and the person left standing is the person who is a little slower, who can’t reach the chair in time. So, somebody who has a mental illness or a substance use disorder may not be able to reach the chair. But when housing is abundant and when housing is affordable, everyone can be housed.
You have done research on prevention. Are we doing enough in regard to prevention of homelessness as a nation and if not, what are some low-hanging fruits that cities like Nashville should consider?
There are two ways to think about prevention. One is about stopping generating homelessness. Our homeless service system houses a lot of people, but we keep generating more. To stop generating so much homelessness, we need to have more affordable housing. And by affordable housing, I mean housing that is affordable to people with very low incomes below 30 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI).
But there are also some targeted prevention programs that can be helpful for populations that are at very high risk. And two populations that are at very high risk are young people who age out of foster care and folks who are leaving prisons and jails.
We don’t expect middle class kids to make it on their own when they turn 18 or they turn 21, their parents subsidized their housing and college dormitories. They get their room back or they can stay at home with their parents until they can make it on their own. Kids who are aging out of foster care don’t have those resources. So, they’re a very high risk group.
Folks who get out of prison with nothing if they can’t go back to family, have a very hard time breaking into the housing market and getting a job that will support them in the short term. And so, they’re very likely to become homeless.
Those are two groups that are very high risk and that we could do a lot to help.
You were the lead researcher on the Family Options Study released by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). What are some key findings in regard to family homelessness?
In that study we recruited over 2,200 families from homeless shelters in 12 sites around the United States. We used a lottery to give them access to different housing and service interventions to end homelessness. We looked at what happened over the next three years.
What we found is that giving people access to long-term housing subsidies — typically in the form of Housing Choice Vouchers, sometimes called Section 8 — that held their housing costs to 30 percent of incomes not only ended homelessness and all other forms of residential instability that we looked at, but also had radiating benefits for other aspects of family life. Access to vouchers reduced substance use, reduced domestic violence, reduced psychological distress, reduced food insecurity.
Things that can sometimes cause homelessness were reduced when families simply had access to housing that was affordable. Kids’ school attendance improved. Their behavior improved. There were fewer instances of separation of children from their parents. These enormous, radiating benefits [resulted] simply from giving folks access to affordable housing. Now that’s families.
That’s not folks with serious mental illnesses. But the families didn’t get any other specialized services. They could use whatever services were available in their community. The only intervention that was provided was access to these housing subsidies.
I understand there is a follow-up to the Family Options Study underway. What is the purpose, and when do you think you’ll have preliminary results from that?
We’re very excited about that. I’m no longer in the lead [on that project]. It’s 12 years later, and we’re very excited to find out what happened to the families and whether your family having a housing subsidy when you’re a child, put you on a different trajectory into adulthood.
We just got out of the field. Meaning we just finished the interviews. We are making sure that there are no errors in the data and so forth before we go on to analysis. It’ll probably be a year before the findings come out. But we’re very excited about learning about how long the effects last and what happens to the households that didn’t get any special intervention.
Is homelessness solvable and why do you or don’t you believe so?
It’s definitely solvable if we’re willing to put in the resources.
We have cut homelessness among military veterans by more than half since 2010 because we put in the resources. The Department of Housing and Urban Development put in housing resources. The Department of Veterans Affairs put in service resources. We worked with prevention. We have worked with different kinds of housing resources. The mayors responded to a Mayor’s Challenge in the Obama Administration to give priority to veterans, and it worked.
Most of the decrease happened during the first six or so years after 2010. It’s slowed a little bit recently, but we keep generating more homelessness among veterans and among everybody else, which is why we haven’t gotten even lower.
Finland has essentially ended homelessness as we define it. They have a broader definition than we do, so they haven’t met their own goals. Most European countries have lower levels of homelessness than we do because they have a better social safety net. And we could end homelessness here if we were willing to put in the resources.
We’ve seen articles popping up that say the Housing First approach does not work. What is your opinion?
Well, the research shows that the Pathways to Housing model of Housing First works.
When Sam Tsemberis first developed the Pathways to Housing First model in New York and I was involved in one of the early evaluations, he called it the Consumer Preference Independent Living Model. That doesn’t come as trippingly off the tongue as Housing First. The idea was consumer preference is what people wanted. It was upfront. [Also] housing should be independent. So if people want to live in sober housing, great! But they shouldn’t be forced into sober housing if that’s not what they want. If they want to live with other people of their own choosing, great. But they shouldn’t be forced to have roommates not of their choosing if they don’t want to. The idea is, you lead with what people want and what will help them to accomplish their goals and that leads both to sustained housing and in many cases recovery.
The problem is that everything gets called Housing First, whether or not it adheres to that model. The key features of that model are first, giving people access to affordable housing with wrap-around services that they control. So, the access to housing is without prerequisites for sobriety or participation in treatment and extensive services are available. That can include medical and substance and psychiatric services and vocational and recreational services, but only those services that people choose. Because services work better when people choose them than when they’re foisted on folks. That model that foregrounds choices by the consumer, by the tenant in the housing, is one that’s been very successful. Fidelity studies have shown that the closer the fidelity to that model, the better the results.
The problem is that once it was shown that Housing First worked and the federal government said Housing First should be our policy, then everybody said, “Oh, we’re doing Housing First!” And Housing First became nothing more than low barriers at the start, and maybe we’ll require services later, and maybe we won’t give independent housing, and maybe we will adhere to the basic tenets of the model.