Mother Jones - In the past nine years, Utah has decreased the number of homeless by 72 percent—largely by finding and building apartments where they can live, permanently, with no strings attached. It's a program, or more accurately a philosophy, called Housing First...
To understand how the state did that it helps to know that
homeless-service advocates roughly divide their clients into two groups:
those who will be homeless for only a few weeks or a couple of months,
and those who are "chronically homeless," meaning they have been without
a place to live for more than a year, and have other problems—mental
illness or substance abuse or other debilitating damage. The vast
majority, 85 percent, of the nation's estimated 580,000
homeless are of the temporary variety, mainly men but also women and
whole families who spend relatively short periods of time sleeping in
shelters or cars, then get their lives together and, despite an economy
increasingly stacked against them, find a place to live, somehow.
However, the remaining 15 percent, the chronically homeless, fill up the
shelters night after night and spend a lot of time in emergency rooms
and jails. This is expensive—costing between $30,000 and $50,000 per
person per year according to the Interagency Council on Homelessness. And there are a few people in every city, like Reno's infamous "Million-Dollar Murray,"
who really bust the bank. So in recent years, both local and federal
efforts to solve the homelessness epidemic have concentrated on the
chronic population, currently about 84,000 nationwide.
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