from Hacker News

Experimental Australian scheme to eradicate long-term homelessness

by jamesk_au on 4/30/15, 6:31 AM with 16 comments

  • by visoz on 4/30/15, 1:29 PM

    The reason this worked is because 1) the charity took the time to do economic modelling that shows the actual benefit to government in dollars, and 2) the scenario is actually tractable to this sort of modelling.

    There are a lot of nonprofits out there that can't get funding because their benefits are difficult to quantify, or because their benefits are too diffused and doesn't impact government bottom line directly.

  • by gwern on 4/30/15, 4:28 PM

    > After three years, researchers found that 75% of the Journey to Social Inclusion participants were still in stable housing, compared with 58% of the other group.

    The analyzing-results link is the fulltext, for those who missed it: https://www.sacredheartmission.org/sites/default/files/publi...

  • by EricSu on 4/30/15, 12:55 PM

    It's great to hear this turned into a win-win. A high rate of the homeless people in the program remained in stable housing after 3 years and modelling show that the program helps the government save money by investing in homeless people rather than dealing with them with police and medical services.

  • by jwilliams on 4/30/15, 5:49 PM

    This mirrors some of the results of the Housing First program in the US - and similar elsewhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First

    There are quite a few analyses of the results in Utah, which saw a substantial reduction in homelessness.

  • by tomjen3 on 4/30/15, 6:04 PM

    So we go from 58% being non-homeless to 75% being non-homeless in return for spending a lot of money on them?

    Somehow that doesn't seem like a lot. I would have expected the original number to be much smaller.

    It will be interesting to see how this works out in the long term, as well as a way to focus on the 17% who benefitted from the program.

  • by crusso on 4/30/15, 12:05 PM

    They had great results, it seems, but the headline is misleading. Homelessness was not eradicated.