Upping the Odds on Successful Prevention and Rapid Rehousing

By Mary Cunningham, The Urban Institute

Every day I wade through dismal headlines and discouraging data. Perhaps most troubling is that communities that were once reporting declines in homelessness are now reporting significant increases, particularly among families.

I could feed you gloom and doom statistics by the spoonful, but let’s look for something positive instead.

There’s certainly a lot of buzz around the $1.5 billion Congress recently appropriated through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 for homelessness prevention and rapid rehousing. The new fund represents a whopping increase—in some communities, ten times current budgets—for homeless assistance. The scope—prevention and rapid rehousing—is also new to all but a handful of communities across the country. As such, it could both prevent catastrophic increases in homelessness—like those of the 1980s—and transform the homelessness assistance system by building communities’ capacity to shift from sheltering to prevention and rapid re-housing.

While the appropriation of these funds was met with a huge sigh of relief, a lot hinges on the infusion’s success, and since these funds will all but fly out the door, concern about lack of local capacity is well placed. Here’s where philanthropy could help. It’s all about leverage: by supporting program implementation, foundations up the odds that these funds will be used strategically and efficiently. A few ideas that could go a long way:

• Knowledge Building. To implement programs, communities will need concrete tools and templates right away. There are some model practices to emulate, but no accessible “how to” guides. Foundations could support intermediary groups, like the National Alliance to End Homelessness, to write and distribute these guides.


• Technical Assistance. Communities will need ongoing support to help them answer the day-to-day questions of implementation. Besides funding nonprofits that provide nuts and bolts technical assistance, foundations could create a peer-learning network to connect program administrators who are already operating model prevention and rapid rehousing programs to those just starting off.


• Research and Evaluation. Since there’s relatively little empirical data on the long- or short-term efficacy of homelessness prevention, shelter diversion, and rapid rehousing, foundations should support the development of strong performance measures and rigorous research. Why not bring a group of researchers together to identify communities that could serve as “learning laboratories” across the country, feeding policymakers real time data as programs are implemented?

We are still a long way off from truly good news, but implementing this fund wisely could give us the one headline we’re looking for: despite the terrible economic outlook, communities are preventing homelessness and getting people back into stable housing.

Read Mary’s most recent brief on next steps for preventing and ending homelessness.

What do you think of Mary's suggestions for the role philanthropy can play in providing leverage? What other ideas and strategies have you used, or would you suggest?

About the Author

Mary Cunningham is Senior Research Associate for Metropolitan Housing and Communities at The Urban Institute in Washington, DC.