Because of the misery and deprivation suffered by homeless persons, the initial response to homelessness in the United States focused first on quickly addressing the dire need for emergency food and shelter, and then on providing additional assistance to already homeless persons – ideally to help them move out of homelessness. New preventive measures to help people avoid becoming homeless were largely ignored or put off. But now that efforts to provide emergency good and shelter are well under way throughout the county, many more experts, policymakers, and service organization have begun focusing on homelessness prevention. Nevertheless, actual prevention efforts are still tentative and somewhat haphazard.

Why homelessness prevention?

As long as there are substantial new entries into homelessness, helping only the already homeless cannot significantly reduce the size of the problem. Bailing out the boat can keep the problem from getting worse (and, if done well, might even gain some ground), but bailing will never solve the problem until the leaks are fixed. Failing to fix these leaks (and reduce the size of the homeless population ) through homelessness-prevention initiatives risks further declines in both public compassion for homeless persons and in the critical, still substantial popular support for government and private efforts to address the problem. It also risks the permanent institutionalization of bother homelessness and the already large network of related programs and bureaucracies…

It is often less expensive to help a person or family avoid homelessness than it is to let them become homeless and then provide them with emergency shelter, other homelessness services, and help getting out of homelessness. Moreover, while people living in near-homeless situations face a wide range of basic problems and challenges, preventing them from becoming homeless can keep the existing problems from escalating and can block a host of new ones (thereby avoiding a corresponding increase in the need and demand for costly public and private assistance).

On any given day, there are probably between 350,000 and 750,000 literally homeless persons. By reducing the number of homeless person, prevention efforts would not only reduce the expense of providing emergency food and shelter and other services to them, but also cut the direct social costs from such things as policing and cleaning up after them…Reducing the size of the homeless population enough to lower these costs significantly and produce the many associated benefits and savings will not occur without the federal, state, and local governments, together with the private and nonprofit sectors, implementing a range of new and expanded homelessness-prevention initiatives. To develop a framework for such prevention activities (at whatever level), these questions need to be answered as well as possible:

1. Who are the most at risk of becoming homeless, and how can they be identified? (To help target the prevention assistance most effectively, identify characteristics that make homelessness more likely, and develop strategies for reducing the size of the most-at-risk pool.)
2. Where do homeless persons come from; where were they housed prior to becoming homeless? (To help identify possible sites for intervention assistance.)
3. What events precipitate or cause individuals and families to become homeless? (To help develop prevention assistance that will either keep such event from occurring or enable the most-at-risk to weather them without falling into homelessness.)