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We have almost no idea which anti-homelessness programs work well and which don’t, says Canada’s former Parliamentary budget officer, despite the millions upon millions of dollars we spend on them each year.
Kevin Page has kept watchdogging since he left the federal government in 2013, at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy. He’s also a co-chair of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, and he hit Ottawa City Hall last week to argue against the Salvation Army’s plans to build a major new social-services campus in Vanier.
The charity’s plan to spend $50 million-plus on the project, which includes a 140-bed emergency shelter and 200 more short-to-medium-term units, is out of step with current thinking on how best to fight homelessness, he argued (along with many, many other people in the three days of public hearings before city council’s planning committee). Collectively we should be spending on programs that use the “Housing First” philosophy, the idea that no matter what a person’s problems are, finding him or her a clean apartment with a kitchen and a bathroom and a door that locks is almost always the best way to start.
Ottawa City Hall council chamber was packed Nov. 14, 2017 as the planning committee heard submissions on the Salvation Army expansion plan into Vanier. Most in attendance were in opposition to the new shelter.
The problem is we have a patchwork of programs even just in Ottawa that are called Housing First and very little idea which ones help people the most, let alone what makes them effective. The federal and provincial governments both fund them and there’s so much crossing over, overlapping and interlocking that it’s hard to tie any result to any funder. It’s like a mad game of Plinko: money goes in at the top and different kinds of help for homeless people come out at the bottom, but good luck figuring out who’s paying for what.
Page and his institute’s chief economist Randall Bartlett set economics student Alannah McBride to see what data she could gather.
“It’s hard to follow the money. It takes time and effort and you can easily make mistakes,” Page said.
The institute’s report — a wonkish blog post, really, based on unfinished research — compares three agencies with Housing First programs: the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Ottawa branch, the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, and the City of Ottawa. The first two are funded by the province and do well at keeping participants housed for six months, the institute says. Ninety-three per cent of the CMHA’s clients have housing six months after they start; 81 per cent of the Sandy Hill centre’s clients do. Pretty good.
The municipal government’s program does worse, in the institute’s findings, keeping 66 per cent of its clients housed for six months. The number is dragged down by especially bad numbers for the program’s Indigenous participants, of whom only 54 per cent stay housed for six months.
The city says its “housing retention rate” is 85 per cent overall, according to a written statement from Shelley VanBuskirk, the city’s director of housing.
“This analysis wasn’t meant to target the City of Ottawa’s homelessness programs,” the institute says. “Instead, it was intended to highlight the fact that much of the funding for homelessness initiatives — be it at the federal, provincial, and municipals levels — is not tied to outcomes. This is a problem, as well-intended funding to support our communities’ most vulnerable may be being spent in a manner which does not meaningfully help those people.”
Through upper-level governments, we seem to be paying for a program with poor results, the report concludes.
Truth is, we can’t even be sure of that.
Aside from the contrary information from the city on the bottom-line numbers, the institute compared results from different years. It didn’t look at how much money each program spends or what its target population is. The mental-health association specializes in people living with mental illnesses; the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre focuses on people with significant drug problems. The municipal program focuses on “long-stay shelter clients with varied and significant complex needs,” VanBuskirk said.
Which of these groups is toughest to find housing for? Maybe worse-looking numbers aren’t so bad if the challenge is bigger, like comparing test results for schools in radically different communities.
“Is it an apples-to-apples comparison? No, probably not,” Page said. “It’s what there is.”
The Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health has its own Housing First program, not included in the reckoning; we don’t know what Wabano’s results are, to judge the city’s against.
These programs also don’t operate independently. The mental-health association helps fund the Sandy Hill centre’s program and provides case-management services to the city, helping individual people they’re better equipped for. The Wabano Centre and other Indigenous-focused groups do case-management work for the city, too.
Everyone is just trying to help everyone else but the result is a system that’s profoundly baroque.
“There’s definitely more work that needs to be done,” Page said.
The federal government is on the verge of announcing a decade-long, multibillion-dollar housing strategy, which people who work in the business have been seeking for decades. Fine, Page said. Let’s be sure we see what the money buys when we spend it.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
Kevin Page has kept watchdogging since he left the federal government in 2013, at the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Fiscal Studies and Democracy. He’s also a co-chair of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, and he hit Ottawa City Hall last week to argue against the Salvation Army’s plans to build a major new social-services campus in Vanier.
The charity’s plan to spend $50 million-plus on the project, which includes a 140-bed emergency shelter and 200 more short-to-medium-term units, is out of step with current thinking on how best to fight homelessness, he argued (along with many, many other people in the three days of public hearings before city council’s planning committee). Collectively we should be spending on programs that use the “Housing First” philosophy, the idea that no matter what a person’s problems are, finding him or her a clean apartment with a kitchen and a bathroom and a door that locks is almost always the best way to start.
Ottawa City Hall council chamber was packed Nov. 14, 2017 as the planning committee heard submissions on the Salvation Army expansion plan into Vanier. Most in attendance were in opposition to the new shelter.
The problem is we have a patchwork of programs even just in Ottawa that are called Housing First and very little idea which ones help people the most, let alone what makes them effective. The federal and provincial governments both fund them and there’s so much crossing over, overlapping and interlocking that it’s hard to tie any result to any funder. It’s like a mad game of Plinko: money goes in at the top and different kinds of help for homeless people come out at the bottom, but good luck figuring out who’s paying for what.
Page and his institute’s chief economist Randall Bartlett set economics student Alannah McBride to see what data she could gather.
“It’s hard to follow the money. It takes time and effort and you can easily make mistakes,” Page said.
The institute’s report — a wonkish blog post, really, based on unfinished research — compares three agencies with Housing First programs: the Canadian Mental Health Association’s Ottawa branch, the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, and the City of Ottawa. The first two are funded by the province and do well at keeping participants housed for six months, the institute says. Ninety-three per cent of the CMHA’s clients have housing six months after they start; 81 per cent of the Sandy Hill centre’s clients do. Pretty good.
The municipal government’s program does worse, in the institute’s findings, keeping 66 per cent of its clients housed for six months. The number is dragged down by especially bad numbers for the program’s Indigenous participants, of whom only 54 per cent stay housed for six months.
The city says its “housing retention rate” is 85 per cent overall, according to a written statement from Shelley VanBuskirk, the city’s director of housing.
“This analysis wasn’t meant to target the City of Ottawa’s homelessness programs,” the institute says. “Instead, it was intended to highlight the fact that much of the funding for homelessness initiatives — be it at the federal, provincial, and municipals levels — is not tied to outcomes. This is a problem, as well-intended funding to support our communities’ most vulnerable may be being spent in a manner which does not meaningfully help those people.”
Through upper-level governments, we seem to be paying for a program with poor results, the report concludes.
Truth is, we can’t even be sure of that.
Aside from the contrary information from the city on the bottom-line numbers, the institute compared results from different years. It didn’t look at how much money each program spends or what its target population is. The mental-health association specializes in people living with mental illnesses; the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre focuses on people with significant drug problems. The municipal program focuses on “long-stay shelter clients with varied and significant complex needs,” VanBuskirk said.
Which of these groups is toughest to find housing for? Maybe worse-looking numbers aren’t so bad if the challenge is bigger, like comparing test results for schools in radically different communities.
“Is it an apples-to-apples comparison? No, probably not,” Page said. “It’s what there is.”
The Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health has its own Housing First program, not included in the reckoning; we don’t know what Wabano’s results are, to judge the city’s against.
These programs also don’t operate independently. The mental-health association helps fund the Sandy Hill centre’s program and provides case-management services to the city, helping individual people they’re better equipped for. The Wabano Centre and other Indigenous-focused groups do case-management work for the city, too.
Everyone is just trying to help everyone else but the result is a system that’s profoundly baroque.
“There’s definitely more work that needs to be done,” Page said.
The federal government is on the verge of announcing a decade-long, multibillion-dollar housing strategy, which people who work in the business have been seeking for decades. Fine, Page said. Let’s be sure we see what the money buys when we spend it.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
