Leapfrogging the Staircase

The problems of the hard-core homeless are many, inter-related and very expensive to fix. Current solutions experience a high rate of failure [bold added]:

Most of the long-term homeless are mentally ill, alcoholic or drug-addicted, often all three. The standard way to help them has long been the “staircase” approach: requiring them to quit drink and drugs before shepherding them through emergency shelters and temporary lodging until they are deemed ready to be housed. But many refuse to sign up. Those who do often fall off the wagon. Typically, fewer than half make it all the way to a (usually subsidised) permanent home.

A new, controversial solution has shown a much higher success rate:

Pathways to Housing gave rough sleepers furnished flats in poor districts. Medical care, treatment for addiction and help in learning to cook, pay bills and so on were offered, but not required. After five years 88% remained housed.

Leapfrogging "rough sleepers" into permanent housing seems to motivate them to stay off the streets. And it saves the taxpayers money:

Denver, Colorado, reckons each of its 300 “heaviest utilisers” costs taxpayers $37,000 a year and that putting them straight into housing with intensive support from social workers would cost less than half as much. Calgary, the first Canadian city to use a housing-first approach, saw average annual savings of more than $30,000 per person from housing its most acute cases.

Of course, the principal objection is not economic but moral. The homeless whose behavior is the worst get the biggest reward, i.e., free housing with no conditions.

We just have to get past our middle-class morality!