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How Utah embraced Housing First by just giving the homeless homes

October 4th, 2014 | Posted by pfmarchive in uncategorized

140922_r25495-906Housing First isn’t just cost-effective. It’s more effective, period.

In 2005, Utah set out to fix a problem that’s often thought of as unfixable: chronic homelessness. The state had almost two thousand chronically homeless people. Most of them had mental-health or substance-abuse issues, or both. At the time, the standard approach was to try to make homeless people “housing ready”: first, you got people into shelters or halfway houses and put them into treatment; only when they made progress could they get a chance at permanent housing. Utah, though, embraced a different strategy, called Housing First: it started by just giving the homeless homes.
Read the rest of this story at The New Yorker…

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