Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Homelessness and residential instability impose a high cost on families’ wellbeing and health. Federal and local governments have implemented new strategies for preventing homelessness through financial assistance and other related services, but few methodologically rigorous evaluations of homeless prevention programs have been conducted. This paper explores the impact of the largest homeless prevention program in U.S. history, the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program (HPRP). The research question is: did HPRP prevent young adults and students from becoming homeless or doubling up with other families? I exploit the fact that this program was not implemented at the same time across U.S. counties. This study conducts two separate analyses to examine the impact of HPRP on families’ residential instability. The first is to estimate the impact of HPRP on the proportion of K-12 students experiencing homelessness at the county level, by matching HPRP funding availability with this information. The second is to estimate the impact of HPRP on the probability of young adults’ families doubling up (moving to live with another family), with the unit of observation being the individual families (from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth). Preliminary results show that in counties where the funds were exhausted earlier, young adults’ families were more likely to double up relatively to places where the funds were still available until the end of the program. However, there is no discernible impact on students’ homelessness, suggesting that HPRP was more effective in preventing undesired moves than entry to shelters.