In his NYTimes Fixes column, David Bornstein noted: "Homelessness is an extremely adverse childhood experience."
He included that observation in a must-read overview of how cities are dealing with homelessness. He used a heartbreaking series -- Invisible Child by New York Times reporter Andrea Elliott -- as his starting point. Elliott followed 12-year-old Dasani Coates and her homeless family through New York City's miserable bureaucracy that just adds more woes to families. The story drew more than 2,200 comments.
Dasani’s family had been in good housing in Staten Island, but they had lost it. That’s when the alarm bells should have gone off. “When they lost their housing there should have been a crisis intervention approach to reverse the loss and get to the problems behind it,” explains Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who is one of the country’s leading researchers on homelessness and assisted housing. “Whatever the problems are — addictions, bad financial management, mental health — they should have been kept in housing and assisted. None of those things are helped by being in a shelter. It just multiplies the problems at tremendous expense.”
What could help is expanding a program like Home to Stay, which focuses on the root causes. Home to Stay is a partnership between New York’s Department of Homeless Services, the Robin Hood Foundation and four other organizations: Center for Urban Community Services, Community Solutions, Jericho Project and Women In Need.
Each year, these organizations seek to move at least 120 “episodically” homeless families — families that repeatedly lose their housing — into permanent housing. (A randomized trial published in December indicated that Home to Stay’s clients moved out of shelter more quickly than control group families and stayed out longer, but more evidence is needed to see how families continue to fare and where and how the approach works best.)
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/how-to-help-homeless-families/
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