Many of us encounter it daily – at intersections, in our neighborhoods, perhaps just down the street – homelessness. It’s been around for hundreds of years in the U.S. (first documented in the 17th century in colonial America) and is surging to record levels in the country.
While many factors and contexts lead to homelessness and numerous strategies have sought to address it, new research by Matthew Marr, associate professor of sociology at the Green School of International & Public Affairs, and one of his former students compared two approaches employed in Miami-Dade County, with one more efficacious to improving individuals’ future.
Marr’s study found that a housing-first approach that emphasizes rapid placement in housing and connection with voluntary supportive services is more effective than policies that coerce people into shelters and advance criminalization. His research, funded by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, draws on interviews with 20 individuals who have experienced unsheltered homelessness in Miami-Dade County.
Since the fall of 2023, federal funding to the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust has supported more housing vouchers that subsidize rents, increase street outreach and long-term case management, and provide technical assistance to address unsheltered homelessness. It has enabled social service providers to implement a coordinated housing-first approach that contrasts with a status quo approach that, due to a scarcity of housing, relies on long shelter stays.
Matthew Marr
“There was a lot of rhetoric about people on the streets being there because they want to be there – and I knew that wasn’t true,” Marr said. “So I started a pilot project (before I received grant funding) doing interviews with people on the streets, and developed a theory on disengagement from shelters. It's not shelter resistance; people try the shelters, but they disengage because they don't work for them.”
Marr’s study found that many who stayed in shelters did not find them beneficial and received little help to secure more permanent housing – prompting them to disengage from the shelter system and live on the streets, where they were confronted with criminalization measures. On the other hand, housing-first greatly improved physical and mental health and ability to plan for the future, thanks to the outreach workers who assisted them.
“This study reaffirms what we already know: affordable housing with services, and without preconditions, helps individuals experiencing homelessness gain stability and move toward self-sufficiency,” said Ron Book, chair of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust. “Hearing the voices of people with lived experience of homelessness is important to our work, and we take their feedback seriously. There is always room for improvement, but as the study notes, our outreach teams and housing navigation experts are doing tremendous work.”
Green School alumna Melissa Hurtado Nuez, MA ’24, who served as a research assistant and is now a sociology doctoral student at Rice University, gained valuable insights working on the study.
“Through this project I understood the disparities and stigmas that structurally oppress so many in our area,” she said. “Being a Miami local, an immigrant, and a native Spanish-speaker, I connected to so many who had similar backgrounds. I'm proud of the work Dr. Marr is doing and am hopeful about the outcomes of this project.”
Marr’s interest in homelessness goes back some 30 years, when he was an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame and lived and served in a summer service project at shelter in Los Angeles’s Skid Row, which has one of the nation’s largest populations of homeless people.
He studied for his PhD at UCLA, where his dissertation compared transitional housing programs in Los Angeles and Tokyo – his interest in the latter city originating from his study of Japanese culture and language dating back to high school in Long Beach, California, and his many visits to the country.
His research in both countries led to his founding and leading the U.S.-Japan Service Hub Network, an exchange project with faculty and practitioners in Los Angeles, Miami, Tokyo and Osaka. Service hubs are neighborhoods where street homelessness, housing programs, aid efforts, and social movements concentrate. Marr conducts research in all four cities, and hopes to conduct future research on how formerly homeless people successfully integrate into communities.
“This latest report is not the golden key to solving homelessness, but it provides more data supporting housing first and advocating against criminalization,” Marr notes. “I don't think any single government body is ever going to end homelessness. We're talking about a radical restructuring of American society, we'd have to end racial inequality.
“We're all interconnected. On a personal level, more people should be concerned, despite different people having different odds of becoming homeless. … It's a question of what kind of society do we want to live in?”
To read the research report, click here.