Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper will summarize the experimentally-based evidence from the Family Options Study of the effects of three assistance approaches on several aspects of family well-being 37 months after families entered homeless shelters. The approaches are permanent housing subsidies with no additional services, temporary community-based rapid re-housing subsidies with limited case management focused on housing and self sufficiency, and program-based transitional housing with extensive psychosocial services. The experiment contrasts priority offers of each intervention to the usual care received by comparable families given no special offer of assistance.  Outcomes include homelessness and housing stability, family preservation, adult well-being, child well-being, and family self sufficiency. Twenty months after random assignment, housing subsidies had strong effects on homelessness and housing stability and some additional positive effects in each additional domain, with more scattered effects on child well-being than in other domains.  Subsidies also reduced work effort.  The 37-month outcomes will show the extent to which shorter-term effects endured, and whether additional effects emerged over time.  Past studies of effects of subsidies on work effort suggest that such effects may be temporary.  The theory behind psychosocial services, which are thought to lay the groundwork for later success, and recent empirical evidence on neighborhood effects on children both suggest that effects may emerge over a longer period.