1. Add housing
2. Subtract social workers
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| Stop the presses! Study finds solution to homelessness is-- HOUSING! |
I’ve often noted the multiple studies which find that 30
percent of America’s foster children could be home right now if their families just had decent housing.
But
a massive 2015 study that recently has been rediscovered (I’ll get to who
rediscovered it below) shows the figure actually might be much higher. And the study has a new twist: Just providing
the housing works far better than also inflicting all sorts of “services” on
families who don’t want them and don’t need them.
In the study, conducted for the U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development during the Obama administration, families living homeless
shelters were assigned to one of four groups.
One group got nothing except whatever the homeless shelter had to offer. The other groups got either priority access
to long-term housing vouchers, commonly known as “Section 8” vouchers, or two versions
of programs in which the housing vouchers were shorter term but the families also
got various social work services.
Outcomes were measured using all sorts of variables
including whether children wound up placed in foster care.
Since this is the NCCPR Blog you know where this is
going. Yep. The families that got just the housing
vouchers did best. They did best on all
sorts of variables – but especially notable is the finding on foster care.
For the control group, those who got no special help, five
percent had lost at least one child to foster care at the end of the study
period. For the group that got plain old
housing vouchers it was only 1.9 percent.
In other words, the functional equivalent of cash and cash
alone cut foster care placement by well over half.
Keep the caseworkers out of it
But surely if we provided vouchers and social workers that would be even better, right? Nope.
The groups upon whom various social work -oriented forms of “help” were
inflicted did no better than the control group.
The best results came when government added housing and subtracted
social workers.
As I’ve noted
previously on this blog, other studies have produced similar results. One study found that for every dollar states
raise the minimum wage “substantiated” cases of what states call “child neglect”
declines by ten percent. In other words:
child welfare systems routinely confuse poverty with “neglect” so if you reduce
poverty, you reduce “neglect.” At least
three other studies found that similar small increases in income significantly
reduced what systems deem to be child maltreatment.
Still
another study documented dramatic improvement in child well-being for
Native American families when casino revenue increased their income by an
average of $4,000 per person per year. [UPDATE, JUNE 17, 2019: And now there's yet another study. This one shows that expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act reduces what child welfare agencies call "neglect."]
But what sets the housing study apart is that, as noted
above, it also compared getting nothing to getting housing for a shorter time
but all sorts of “social services.” This
proved vastly less effective at reducing foster care – or improving the lives
of families in any other way – than the cash equivalent alone.
In fairness, the study doesn’t prove that providing the
services actually caused the worse outcomes. The outcomes might have been worse
simply because the programs with all that social work also providing the
housing help for a limited time. The housing-voucher-only approach allowed
families to keep the vouchers for as long as their income kept them eligible.
But the study does show that “soft services” – the kind
child welfare agencies love to inflict on every family caught in their net – are no substitute for concrete help to ameliorate the worst aspects of poverty. And that means a lot of money
wasted on all those social workers and their unhelpful help would be better
spent on things like expanding the availability of housing vouchers.
That too should not be surprising. It’s not that it’s wrong to provide any kind
of services. There are times when “soft
services” can be helpful – generally when they are provided by, say, a
therapist who’s also helping a parent clean the house. (I’m not kidding about that;
it’s how Intensive
Family Preservation Services work.)
Try helping families instead of the helpers
But the mantra of the social work profession could be “I don’t
do windows.” The services provided by
child welfare systems aren’t designed to help the families. They’re designed to
help the helpers.
So we get endless
counseling sessions and parent education classes which not only often do no
good but can actually do harm, because they wind up stealing time that could be
devoted to things like finding better employment – and better housing. And, of course, the families have to engage
in all these pointless classes and therapy sessions to check off all the boxes
on their “case plan” so it all adds further stress for the family.
But boy is it great for the “helping” professions!
Decades ago, in his book, Families
in Distress, Malcolm Bush explained how it happens:
“The recognition that the troubled family inhabits a context that is relevant to its problems suggests the possibility that the solution involves some humble tasks … This possibility is at odds with professional status. Professional status is not necessary for humble tasks … Changing the psyche was a grand task, and while the elaboration of theories past their practical benefit would not help families in trouble, it would allow social workers to hold up their heads in the professional meeting or the academic seminar.”
So we get housing assistance programs that concentrate on
changing the psyche when they should really be focused on, uh, housing.
And it’s why it is not only wrong, but dangerous to take a “public
health” approach to preventing child abuse.
What’s needed is a social
justice approach.
But this challenges shibboleths of both the left and the
right.
It challenges the self-indulgence of those on the left who
prefer the “grand task” of changing the psyche and who want the psychic rewards
of “healing” people they see as not evil, but definitely sick.
For the right, it challenges the notion that poverty is a
moral failing and that any financial aid must be stingy on the cash and
generous in bureaucratic requirements and general humiliation.
Early on, for example, the vastly
overhyped Family First Prevention Services Act would have allowed federal
reimbursement for concrete help to families – like emergency cash and, yes,
housing assistance. That was taken out
of early versions of the bill after Republicans balked.
When homelessness itself exploded during the 1980s,
conservatives insisted it had nothing to do with Ronald Reagan’s assault on
anything that helped poor people. Instead, it was all supposedly a mental
health problem, and if only we hadn’t shut down all those hellhole mental
institutions everything would be fine. In
fact, as Ann Braden Johnson points out in her book Out
of Bedlam, of anything, it’s the other way around: Prolonged
homelessness can cause mental illness.
(Among those who continue to circulate this myth that
homelessness was caused by shutting down institutions: Advocates of
institutionalizing foster children, who cite it to scare governments out of
shutting down their failed “group homes” “residential treatment centers” and
other rebranded orphanages.)
This study once again shows either that the
homelessness-is-all-a-mental-health-problem theory was self-serving nonsense –
or housing has heretofore undiscovered therapeutic benefits.
Spinning the findings for right-wing consumption
So perhaps it’s not surprising that when Brent Orrell, a “resident
fellow” of the American Enterprise Institute rediscovered
the study he also felt the need to spin it for right-wing consumption. In an essay entitled “When Nothing Beats
Something” he writes:
In Washington’s policy battles, the time-tested adage says, “you can’t beat something with nothing.” The idea is that social ills require solutions and doing nothing is never the right thing to do — bad policy beats no policy every time. … But what if the facts on the ground say otherwise? What if “nothing,” on some issues, does beat “something”?
He then cites the fact that housing subsidies alone beat
housing subsidies and social work as evidence of the benefits of doing “nothing.”
But since when is a housing voucher, provided directly by “big
gummint” itself, nothing?
The control group
in this study is the one that got nothing.
The group that gained the most did indeed get something: Housing
vouchers -- the equivalent of cash assistance with few strings attached.
But the fact that just giving poor people money makes things
better removes the keystone from the entire arch of modern conservative ideology:
The idea that poverty is a moral failing and actually providing concrete help
only encourages laziness and “dependency” collapses.
So I look forward to AEI endorsing a guaranteed annual
income – with no degradation and no time limits. And I can’t wait to see AEI support federal
living wage legislation.
But if that’s too heavy a lift, how about just persuading
your fellow conservatives to amend the Family First Act to allow the same sort
of reimbursement now permitted only for an extremely narrow range of mostly “soft”
services to go to concrete help to families, such as housing assistance, so
their children aren’t consigned to the chaos of foster care.
Now that would really be something.
