Housing and Service Interventions for Families Experiencing Homelessness in the United States: An Experimental Evaluation.

This paper examines the housing and service interventions that work best to end family homelessness and to promote housing stability, adult and child well-being, family and self-sufficiency in the United States. It is based on the short-term (20-month) results of the Family Options Study, which recruited 2,282 families in emergency homeless shelters across 12 sites and randomized them to one of three housing and service interventions or to usual care in their communities. The approaches test both theoretical propositions about the nature of family homelessness and practical efforts to end it. Permanent housing subsidies were most successful at ending homelessness and promoting housing stability and had radiating impacts on all the other domains, suggesting that homelessness among families in the United States is centrally a problem of housing affordability. Project-based transitional housing, which attempts to address families' psychosocial needs in supervised settings, and temporary 'rapid re-housing' subsidies had little effect.