Cost Savings

The first study to quantify the public costs associated with homeless people before and after supportive housing placement was published in 2001. It is often referred to in shorthand as “The Culhane Report.” More than a dozen studies have since quantified the ways homeless people with disabilities utilize various public systems, including hospitals, emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, shelters, jails and prisons. Some studies explore the “targeting” of resources. These interventions place individuals who typically overuse specific systems into supportive housing and track their use of those systems before and after housing. Other studies quantify tenants’ use of multiple systems before and after placement. All studies, however, point to the same conclusion: 1) Leaving vulnerable individuals and families homeless costs a surprising amount of public dollars and 2) Providing these same people with supportive housing saves enough money to pay for their housing at the very least. Supportive housing helped save area taxpayers millions of dollars in several of the below studies.