Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The Barcelona City council launched in 2015 a Housing First pilot programme to test a new approach to help homeless people in the city. The pilot programme, similar to other Housing First programmes, provides secure housing to long-term rough sleepers with no housing readiness requirements. Complementary socio-educative support is also offered to help them integrate into society. The experimental design of the programme randomly selected 50 participants out of 120 eligible candidates with the aim of understanding whether the Housing First programme improves participants´ quality of life, self-recovery and social relationships. Nineteen months after randomization, participants who were randomly selected to participate in the Housing First Program were, on average, in a better situation with respect to their quality of life, self-recovery but not in terms of their social relationships. Twenty-seven months after randomization, although positive correlation persists, even statistically significant effects detected in the first measurement vanish. Therefore, our work indicates that while unconditional housing might be beneficial from the very beginning, in the midterm it is not enough to maintain quality of life and self-recovery of participants. Our recommendation is that, once housing stability is achieved, other services (e.g., support in job search, education, and socialization activities) are needed to accelerate the transitions that participants strive to make in their lives.