Four times cheaper to house SF’s unhoused than to not? Probably not.
[in response to: “San Francisco Homelessness: Four Times More Expensive Not to Solve,” by Beth Coffelt-Roth-Barreiro, in Bay City Beacon].
The core claim about costs of housed vs unhoused residents, credited to Kevin Fagan of the SF Chronicle, appears to be poorly supported. In the original Chronicle article it is not sourced, but I asked Kevin about in this thread: https://mobile.twitter.com/tmccormick/status/748563885326639104.
It seems he was referring to the 2015 “Home Not Found” study commissioned by Destination:Home, Santa Clara County.
However this study found pre-housed costs of around $60k, not $80k; uses estimated rather than actual post-housed costs; and also notes that it would be net money-saving to house people only for the top 5% cost-incurring homeless, and only if it had been accurately predicted who that highest-cost cohort would be each year, and they were housed only for that year — which is very far from what does or is likely to happen.
In addition, the report and the article make the quite debatable assumption or claim that fewer services provided to the now-housed former homeless can be translated proportionally to savings or reallocation of funds. This is not a realistic picture of how service funding works: the San Francisco police department, for example, is by no means assured to ask for or be allocated decreased funding just because it made fewer homelessness-related service calls the previous year. Likewise the county hospital system, etc.
Finally, the study and the article do not appear to consider the key issue of homeless-services demand being dynamic and altering in response to services. If there were a major boost in services such as broad provision of housing to the currently unhoused, it’s reasonably possible that over time, other people on the margins of homelessness or in nearby areas could shift into the SF unhoused population, replacing some who’d been housed.
To some degree this appears to be what has happened, since SF has over many years moved 1000s of people into permanent supportive housing (7700 units, as noted in article), yet the unhoused population has remained relatively steady in SF over 15+ years.
[For a broader but similarly skeptical view of Permanant Supportive Housing cost claims, see also:
“Permanent Supportive Housing for Homeless People — Reframing the Debate.” N Engl J Med 2016; 375:2115–2117. December 1, 2016. Stefan G. Kertesz, M.D., et al. dx.doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp1608326]
It’s a complex issue, and housing the unhoused is surely the right thing to do for various reasons. Yet to understand and act effectively, we need to resist credulity and truly examine claims about how the issues can be truly addressed.
—
Tim McCormick
Oakland
