Resource Roundup: Preventing Housing Crises and Homelessness

As we move through the objectives in Home, Together this year, we’re spending April on Objective 1.2—increasing capacity and strengthening practices to prevent housing crises and homelessness. Efforts to prevent homelessness are not yet well researched and the strategies are still being innovated and tested, but we’ve pulled together some resources to help as you learn and explore.

Reducing the prevalence of risk of housing crises

• The Center for Evidence-Based Solutions to Homelessness’ recently published Homelessness Prevention: Review of the Evidence includes citations to many recent studies. You can also watch a webinar about the report .
• HUD’s LGBTQ Youth Homelessness Prevention Initiative has generated several planning resources .
• Safe Housing Partnerships has resources for preventing homelessness among victims of domestic and sexual violence .

Reducing the risk of homelessness while households are engaged with or transitioning from systems

Child Welfare

• Building Partnerships to Support Stable Housing for Child Welfare-Involved Families and Youth reviews how child welfare professionals can collaborate with affordable housing and homelessness services to help families.
• Addressing Housing Instability in Child Welfare , by CSH, summarizes steps state policy leaders and communities can take to optimize the Family First Prevention Services Act and Five-Year State Plan to keep families facing homelessness together and housed.
• Youth Homelessness in Los Angeles County: Innovation with Child Welfare, Juvenile Justice and Coordinated Entry Systems highlights pilots underway in Los Angeles.
• Building Capacity to Evaluate Interventions for Youth/Young Adults with Child Welfare Involvement At-Risk of Homelessness, from HHS, provides planning and other resources for developing interventions for youth with child welfare involvement who are most likely to experience homelessness.

Justice System

• Re-Entry Starts Here: A Guide for Youth in Long-Term Juvenile Corrections and Treatment Programs , from the Department of Justice, provides guidance to young people on housing and other re-entry issues.
• Connecting People Returning from Incarceration with Housing and Homelessness Assistance provides ways for corrections agencies, reentry service providers, state and local governments, and community partners to help people exiting the criminal justice system connect with available housing resources.

Healthcare

• Partnering with Hospitals to End Homelessness provides some of the ways hospitals can work to help prevent and end homelessness.

TANF

• Enhancing Family Stability: A Guide for Assessing Housing Status and Coordinating with Local Homelessness Programs for TANF Agencies , by the Office of Family Assistance in HHS, encourages TANF agencies to add housing status questions as part of their typical intake process.

Targeting assistance to prevent housing crises from escalating into homelessness

• Former USICH Executive Director Barbara Poppe worked with Your Way Home in Montgomery County, PA, to help develop a community-wide homelessness and eviction prevention strategy called Unlocking Doors to Homelessness Prevention .

• Watch researcher Matthew Desmond talk about his book, Evicted, which explores the causes and consequences of evictions across America. Explore community data at the Eviction Lab .