Presentation given by Dr Eoin O'Sullivan, Trinity College, Ireland at a FEANTSA conference on "People who are homeless can be housed: An insight into successful practices from across Europe", Cardiff, Wales, 2008

1. Preventing Homelessness?
Eoin O’Sullivan,
Trinity College Dublin.

2. • What are we preventing?
• How do we know we have prevented
homelessness?
• Preventative Strategies, Primary or universal;
secondary and tertiary.
• Prevention or deterrence?

3. Understanding the complexity of
homelessness
• Nicolas Pleace argues for a complex definition and suggests that
any meaningful notion of homelessness needs to be
disaggregated ‘into meaningful and verifiable groups of people
with shared pathways into and through homelessness’.
• Such an approach would seek to identify distinct sub-
populations within the overall homeless population rather than
examining homelessness as a self-contained category. The
category ‘homeless’ is further divided by gender, age, location,
response, and so on.

4. • The complexity perspective is also informed by the view that
explanations of homelessness cannot be directly inferred from
the individual characteristics of homeless persons.
• In other words, for every homeless person with risk factors such
as a care history, family breakdown, physical or sexual abuse,
offending behaviour, lack of social support networks, and so on,
there is a further unquantifiable, but nonetheless large number,
who have some, if not all, of these characteristics, who are not
homeless.
• Homelessness is not the predicable fate of poor people and
individual correlates of homelessness are inefficient predictors
of future homelessness.

5. Distorting the Reality of Homelessness -
Methodological Issues
• Much of the existing research on homelessness relates to those
households who are either long-term homeless or repeatedly
use homeless services. In contrast, little is known about the
characteristics of people who stop using homeless services after
a short time.
• As research has moved away from cross-sectional or point-in-
time surveys to longitudinal approaches researchers became
increasingly aware that households moved into and out of
homelessness on a more frequent basis than cross-sectional
studies revealed.
• Cross-sectional research, primarily utilising structured face-to-
face interviews, provided information on the ‘demographics
and disabilities’ of the homeless, but in the process distorted the
reality of the situation.

6. • In addition, cross-sectional research has little relevance to social
policy making because of its inability to identify previous
circumstances that may be associated with the duration, ending,
and recurrence of homelessness.
• More importantly, point-prevalence bias leads to the
confounding of causes of the occurrence of an event with the
cause of its persistence and one consequence of confounding
incidence and cause is that it can lead us astray in designing
interventions.
• For example, as it seems clear, if mental illness and substance
abuse are not important initial causes of homelessness,
preventative policies focusing on such factors will have a
limited impact on its incidence.

7. The Composition of the Homeless Population
• Cross-sectional studies over-estimate the severity of
homelessness, as at any point in time, those who are long-term
or chronically homeless will be overrepresented in such
research.
• Robust longitudinal research (from New York and Philadelphia)
has highlighted the dynamic nature of homelessness with the
majority both entering and exiting homelessness relatively
speedily. In broad terms, three sub-sets of the homeless
population could be identified:
• those who were long-term users of emergency services
and / or rough sleepers;
• those who had ongoing episodic bouts of homelessness;
• and those who were temporarily homeless, but rapidly
exited and did not return to homelessness.

8. • Approximately 80 percent of the homeless were in the final
category. These research findings, which broadly applied to
both homeless individuals and homeless families, albeit with
some important differences, demonstrated that the majority of
individuals and households did and could exit homelessness.
• While not denying the importance of preventing homelessness,
it is clear that doing just that was more problematic that often
presumed.
• As Shinn et al (2001: 96) have argued in relation to the United
States,
‘current efforts to prevent homelessness are largely based on
questionable premises. Tributes to their effectiveness are statements of
faith that cannot withstand scientific scrutiny. (Most such efforts do
useful things for needy people but have only a marginal impact on the
prevention of homelessness).’

9. Homeless Interventions
• In understanding the whether or not a household experienced
an additional episode of homelessness following an initially
successful exit, we need to distinguish between ‘dependent’
and ‘independent’ exits.
• ‘Independent’ exits are generally to private accommodation,
without formal support from social service type agencies and
where the costs of the accommodation were largely borne by the
resident, albeit with support in the form of housing allowances.
• ‘Dependent’ exits on the other hand ranged from transitional
housing to staying with family and friends. Those who made
independent exits were less likely to return to homelessness
than those who made ‘dependent’ exits. This appeared to be
particularly the case when accompanied by welfare support in
the form of financial assistance.

10. • Emerging research suggests that the most important factor in
not returning to homelessness appears to be access to a private
residence rather than agency-managed transitional housing or
informal arrangements such as staying with family or friends.
• The apparent lack of success of transitional housing in
preventing returns to homelessness is compounded by other
research which highlights that those homeless households who
resided in service intensive homeless services did not have
shorter stays than those in less service intensive projects.
• What the authors describe as the ‘therapeutic incarceration’ of
homeless families in transitional housing, whereby a
disciplinary regime was imposed to ensure adherence to the
‘life-skills’ that would prevent homeless, actually worked to
maintain dependency. This, the authors concluded was because
individual deficits were not the primary reason for
homelessness, rather the lack of affordable housing was.

11. Conclusion
• The results from over a decade of research into homeless
entries, homeless careers and exits from homelessness are
extraordinary consistent. Homelessness, as an objective
condition, occurs episodically to a considerable minority of the
population (at least in the United States).
• Longitudinal research shows that the majority exit
homelessness relatively quickly and those most likely to exit on
a permanent basis, are those who access affordable housing and
or obtain financial assistance to maintain such housing.

12. • Transitional housing schemes and other
interventions that aim to train or mentor individuals
to reduce their risk of homelessness are largely
ineffectual, as access to housing rather than
individual deficits largely determines a return to
homelessness.
• Therefore, universal services offer the best means of
preventing homelessness. Targeted preventative
interventions are expensive, invidious and
scientifically dubious and may lead to unintended
outcomes. Advocates of such interventions must be
able to demonstrate their effectiveness of their
strategies, not simply assume them