What services for the homeless help alleviate the problem?
The real push has been on permanent solutions. Communities are thinking about shrinking emergency shelters. They don’t want people to have to stay in these shelters for very long because they don’t really do much good. There are new kinds of services, such as the permanent supportive housing approach, that help people who have been homeless for years get into housing and stay there. Research results support the effectiveness of this strategy and the willingness of people homeless for 15 or 20 years to enter this type of housing and to stay—an 80 to 85 percent retention rate over a two-year period. In fact, original estimates of the number of units needed to serve a particular population size have had to be expanded because turnover has been low. Even for people perceived as needing transitional help, the move has been to put them in housing and to offer supportive services for as long as they need it, but to back off when they don’t need the help anymore. This is called the “transition
