Ep 68: Summarizing the Research on Homelessness with Janey Rountree (Pathways Home pt. 8)

In this final installment of the Pathways Home series on homelessness policy and research, we discuss lessons and key takeaways from the previous seven episodes with our UCLA colleague, Janey Rountree.

Show notes:

• Click here to find all eight episodes of the Pathways Home limited series on homelessness.
• Blackwell, B., & Santillano, R. (2023). Do Time-Limited Subsidy Programs Reduce Homelessness for Single Adults? California Policy Lab.

Transcript

Shane Phillips  0:05  
Hello! This is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This is the eighth installment in Pathways Home, our series on research into the causes of and solutions to homelessness. This episode will conclude the series with me, my co hosts — Mike Lens and Mike Manville — and one of our UCLA colleagues, Janey Rountree discussing what we heard over the past several months, and the lessons and insights that we've drawn from these interviews. There was a lot to cover, much more than we could ultimately contain in an hour long conversation, but we did fit as much as we could. 

Putting together this limited series has been a really wonderful experience, and I hope it's helped all of you who are listening to think differently or more expansively and deeply about the problem of homelessness, its risk factors and causes, its consequences, and its solutions. Just as importantly, we hope it's given you new ways to talk to your friends and neighbors and elected officials about homelessness, and that this series can be shared with the people you know who don't know much about the subject of homelessness, but who wants to know more, from either an hour of listening, or from eight. 

We want this episode to serve as a sort of summary of the series, however incomplete, so in this intro I'll share just one overarching lesson that I took from speaking to all of our guests and reading about their work, which is that homelessness is an eminently solvable problem. It's not inevitable, and it's not unfixable. We know of many interventions proven to end homelessness for most people experiencing it, we know of systems and programs that keep those at greatest risk of homelessness from experiencing it, and we know that improving housing affordability — which means building our way into housing abundance — lowers the systemic risk of homelessness so that adequate resources are available to those with the greatest needs. As this understanding grows among elected officials, planners, advocates, and the general public, policy is changing to reflect it. Change comes slowly and ending homelessness is too urgent a problem for the progress we make to ever feel fast enough — as fast as it should be. But progress is happening, and I hope our listeners walk away from this series with a sense that ending homelessness is within our grasp, because I really believe it is. 

The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Gavin Carlson, and Jason Sutedja. As always, you can send comments and questions to shanephillips@ucla.edu. With that, here's our conversation with Janey Rountree.

Our guest this week comes to us from two floors above and a few doors down the hall from the Lewis Center offices. Janey Rountree, Executive Director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA. Janey is collaborating with us on some homelessness related work right now, but she and CPL have done a great deal more homelessness research on their own and with other partners, including some that we're definitely going to talk about today. Janey, thanks for joining us on the Housing Voice podcast for a second try at recording after unfortunate lawnmower incident, and thank you even more for agreeing to listen to five or six hours of previous episodes to prepare for this conversation.

Janey Rountree  3:38  
Thanks for having me. I'm a huge fan of the podcast, so it's a real pleasure to be here.

Shane Phillips  3:43  
And I have two co-hosts this time for our special episode, Mike and Mike: Mike Manville and Mike Lens. Hello and welcome. 

Mike Manville  3:52  
Hello.

Michael Lens  3:52  
Hello, Shane. Hello, Janey. Hello, the other chair Mike. I gotta say, I've been listening as well to these episodes, particularly on the Pathways Home series, and Shane, you're doing an excellent job. I've been having a— well, not exactly a blast. It's not uplifting material all the time. But I'm learning a lot, and I hope we can wrap it up in a neat little bow today.

Shane Phillips  4:16  
Yeah, I hope so. And thank you. So it is our custom to ask guests for a tour of somewhere they've lived and want to share with our audience. And while this is not a standard episode, I think we will stick to that format. So Janey, where are we headed?

Janey Rountree  4:30  
I love this question because it made me reflect on the fact that I've lived in and worked in 10 different cities and eight different states everywhere from the South to the Northeast, the Midwest and now in California, which I think may have been the origin of my love of public policy. But I will take us to one specific location my family now lives in on the northern coast of Maine in a little town called Blue Hill

Shane Phillips  4:55  
I feel like you could not be further away from them in the continental U.S.

Janey Rountree  5:00  
Yes, yes, that's true. That was not intentional. But yeah, Blue Hill is wonderful. It's filled with rocky coasts and pine forests, and it has in the winter it has this really distinct smell of seawater and, and snow and pine. And when you go, you can eat crab rolls and blueberries, and everyone should go there at least once in their life.

Michael Lens  5:23  
Mike Manville, which was the seaside location that used to live in? Cape Cod?

Mike Manville  5:29  
I spent four and a half years on Nantucket Island. 

Michael Lens  5:33  
That one. Wow.

Janey Rountree  5:34  
Oh wow. Yeah, I used to teach high school English on Vinalhaven Island. I don't know if you've Oh, yeah. Off off me. Yeah. That's the Rockland area. So we'll have to have another podcast about island life. I don't know.

Mike Manville  5:46  
Oh, yeah. No, there's nothing quite like it. I was that's where I first became a planner. 

Shane Phillips  5:50  
Yeah, Nantucket Island. Those are your people, right, Mike?

Mike Manville  5:54  
Yeah, you know, they're just not quite enough money for me.

Shane Phillips  6:01  
All right, so before we get to talking about the previous seven episodes, Janey, can you say a bit about the work you and your colleagues at the California Policy Lab have done on homelessness in recent years? 

Janey Rountree  6:13  
Sure. I helped found the California Policy Lab at UCLA about seven years ago with Professor Til von Wachter. He's an economist at UCLA. And our mission is to generate research insights for government impact, we like to say or quote, the fact that the state of California is going to spend Mark Zuckerberg's entire net worth twice every year. And very little government spending is informed by rigorous evidence. And we're trying to change that culture here in California and Los Angeles. We work on homelessness and a number of other issues. And most recently, we've been focused on employment and homelessness, preventing homelessness, including using predictive algorithms to try to prevent homelessness here in LA. We've looked at our unsheltered population here and looked at service histories for serious mental illness and a range of other projects. We published a study last year looking at the impact of time limited housing subsidies on homelessness, so happy to dive into any of those studies. And they certainly relate to a lot of the topics you've been covering over the last few episodes of the podcast.

Shane Phillips  7:16  
Yeah, I'm excited to see how those kind of complement and fill in some of what we've talked about, and maybe some of the things we missed, as well. So we're going to cover a lot here today. And I'm sure we'll bounce around between topics. But I do want to try to give this conversation some structure. And I think the place for us to start is on the root causes of homelessness, the structural causes being the focus of our first conversation with Greg Colburn. The main message of that conversation is the title of Greg's book. Homelessness is a housing problem. His research and actually the research of many others, going back at least 20 years finds that if you want to understand why places like Los Angeles, Seattle and New York have so much higher rates of homelessness than places like Detroit, and Houston and Kansas City, then you need to look at the housing market. The thing that differentiates the cities and metro areas with lots of homelessness from those with relatively little is not the prevalence of unemployment or poverty, mental illness or substance abuse. It's not whether the politics of local leadership or the generosity of social services. It is at the end of the day rents and vacancy rates at least much more than any other one thing. places with high rents and low vacancies have high rates of homelessness and places with low rents and high vacancies have low rates of homelessness. Greg is quick to point out that this does not mean things like poverty and mental illness play no role in homelessness they clearly do. But these individual factors act as the precipitating events that push people into homelessness. And precipitating events like job loss or interpersonal conflict are much more likely to result in homelessness in places where housing is expensive, and scarce. If you lose your job, or if you have a drug problem, it is much easier to end up homeless if the cheapest studio in your city rents for $1,500 per month, rather than 400. Our second conversation was with Margo kachelle, the lead investigator on the California statewide survey of people experiencing homelessness, and that one was much more focused on individual risk factors and experiences. One thing that stood out to me in that conversation is how at the individual level, people did tend to understand their homelessness as the result of some specific event or bad decisions that they made as individual problems essentially, rather than a product of systemic problems. And we can talk about why that's entirely rational and understandable. It's not surprising, really, or even wrong. I just think it captures in some way how both of these things can be and often are true, but the one that draws your attention really depends on your vantage point. So that's kind of my Initial summary of our conversation about causes and the first few episodes, but I want to first turn it over to you, Janey to hear kind of what you're thinking about how you responded to it, and we can kind of open it up from there. Sure.

Janey Rountree  10:13  
So let's start with the book by Greg Coleman, which was just an excellent, he called it a piece of translation. He's taking a lot of research over many years, from a number of different people to support the case that our housing issues are the structural cause of homelessness, and translate it in a way that's extraordinary and really accessible. And I'm so glad he's been able to go to so many places and talk about that work. The one aspect of structural causes of homelessness that I found myself wanting to add, I think, to his explanation is the role of income. When we talk about the effect of a housing shortage on homelessness, we're really talking about how expensive that housing is, and how rent burdened people are meaning how much of their monthly income they're forced to spend on housing, and how precarious that is, if your studio is $1,500 and not $400, right. But I want to reflect for a moment on when we talk about income, how extraordinarily low income people are when they experience homelessness. And just to share a couple of facts. We linked people over a 10 year period who had enrolled in any kind of Homeless Services in LA, we linked those records to state wage records. And a very large number of people were working and working really recent to their homeless episode within two years, almost 40%, but their annual wages were $9,900. So it's this is extraordinarily low. That number was fully supported years later, when Margo did the survey and her study that came out last year, they asked participants in a survey how much money they were making that would allow someone to report non official income sources as well, we were looking at official income wage records, this would be a slightly broader definition. Even then, the average income of someone experiencing homelessness in her study was $11,000 a year. And

Shane Phillips  12:09  
that was before they became homeless, right at the time they became homeless is that

Janey Rountree  12:13  
that's right. Yeah, that's right. So I just it's worth emphasizing this, that homelessness is a function of housing and income, we can imagine a world where there is more housing, and you have increased supply that drives the cost down, we still need to pay attention to income inequality in our country who has access to jobs, what those wages are, how they're earning money. As we're solving the problem of housing infrastructure.

Mike Manville  12:42  
My only question to that is, you know, people are very low income who are homeless in Los Angeles and San Francisco. But I mean, I suspect there's more people making less than $15,000 a year in Detroit than in Los Angeles.

Janey Rountree  12:57  
That's right, I want to emphasize that I don't think income is the structural causes of homelessness, that income will go farther in a housing market where you're paying less for rent, I just think that we need to pay attention when we're solving the crisis of homelessness, we need to pay attention to things like income supports who has access to them. This is particularly true of older adults, many of whom experience homelessness, as we heard after the age of 50, often because they're out of the labor market, for the first time they might have had an injury, we need to pay attention to the role of social security, for example, for those those kinds of individuals, right. So I agree with Greg and I, this is not in any way a disagreement, it just adding a dimension, I think to what that household burden looks like each month as you're trying to make those housing costs and really high cost housing markets.

Shane Phillips  13:45  
To some extent, and I know this is oversimplifying a little bit, but, you know, I look at the rate of homelessness in Los Angeles compared to the rate of homelessness in Cleveland or Kansas City. And that gap is sort of the part that is explained by housing. Every place has homelessness, regardless of their housing costs. It's just the housing costs to some extent are explaining, again, you know, this is this is Greg's whole point there explaining why it varies so much. But to your point, regardless of housing costs, high low, there's always some and that's largely because of a lack of income supports and things like that for the people who no amount of affordability is necessarily going to be enough, at least for some period of time. Right?

Janey Rountree  14:34  
That's right. The estimated shortage of affordable housing in Los Angeles is over half a million units. You might have even better or more precise information that was an estimate in a recent study, but that's a massive housing shortage. And of course, that's the root cause of people experiencing homelessness in our region in our state.

Shane Phillips  14:52  
Just pulling on some things that occurred to me in our conversation. Firstly, with Greg, you know, one thing that stood out to me And then we talked about this in that episode is how he was so careful to qualify every statement and say that and say what he didn't mean, when he said that, you know, this is a housing problem to not dismiss things like income, and so on. And he made this point, or I made this point that you could tell that he had been challenged on these things so many times that he had said, homelessness is a housing problem. And people had responded, not listening to all the other things. He had to say that Oh, so you're saying mental illness doesn't matter that drug use doesn't matter that poverty doesn't matter. And you could just see how challenging this is on the communication side, how ready people are to jump to these conclusions and misconstrue what you're saying.

Janey Rountree  15:45  
I have a take on that. I would I think you asked Greg that question. And I don't recall exactly what what he said. But I think that there's a dynamic going on where it would be helpful from a communications point of view to clarify that in a place like California, we have two really serious public policy problems that we're trying to solve at the same time. One is addressing the housing crisis that is the root cause of homelessness. to unwind homelessness, we have to build housing, we have to increase density, we have to rollback the federal, state and local policies that have created our massive housing shortage. At the same time, we have 10s of 1000s of individuals in Los Angeles alone, over 70,000 people who are experiencing homelessness right now, most of whom are unsheltered, the solutions to their conditions might be different than the long term solutions that are going to address the cause of their homelessness in the first place. And I think that's what people want to hear they want they want acknowledgement that people who are unsheltered and living with a variety of conditions, some of which are worsened by the fact that they are unsheltered need support, they need help, they need a variety of resources, they need access to health care, they need access to hygiene, they might need access to emergency shelter depending on their circumstances. And that that is a urgent crisis that deserves an urgent policy response that needs to run in parallel to an urgent policy response to our housing shortage. So I think that's an that that was a theme that came up in nearly every episode of the podcast. And I think sometimes when we only want to talk about the root causes, and we don't acknowledge that crisis, people feel like you're not that you're willing to wait 30 years until we solve our housing crisis to address what is really a very urgent humanitarian crisis on the street that might have a set of related but slightly different solutions that need to happen on a faster timeline.

Mike Manville  17:46  
I couldn't agree more with that. I think that some of what Greg apparently runs into I'm sure as people acting in bad faith and you know, picking a fight with him. But I think the other issue is that it's very easy to hear someone say homelessness is a housing problem and interpret that as the solution to the 1000s 10s of 1000s of people on the street is simply to build housing. And there just isn't that that evidence base is nowhere near as clear, right, this could very well be a classic example of a what you do with a horse when it's in the barn. And when it's left the barn, right, like building a lot of housing is preventing the horse from leaving the barn. Once people are on the street, that is not obviously the solution. You know, it might be part of the solution. But I can very much understand why people if they interpret the message as saying that become defensive or upset. I think Janey's absolutely right about that. Yeah,

Michael Lens  18:42  
I agree entirely. Mike just brought up people acting in bad faith, you know, I hope I'm acting in good faith. Most of the time anyway. And, you know, when I summarize homelessness, statistics and data, particularly for students in class, when I'm talking about this, you know, kind of a 10,000 foot level, I always spend a little time, probably because I was statistics professor at one point, I always spend a little time talking about like, just how challenging it is to have really, really accurate numbers of people experiencing homelessness on any given night for X number of nights in a year, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, I don't think I heard Greg talk much about how potential measurement error potential differences between some kind of real homelessness population in a city or county and the numbers that he has at his disposal might bias some results in any particular direction. I think when you're looking at whether there's a strong connection to poverty or finding that there is a strong connection to housing characteristics like to me The the bias is okay there because it's like, alright, if we have all this measurement error, and yet we're still finding something that seems like a real correlation here. On the other hand, if you don't find some strong correlation between, I don't know mental health and substance use prevalence, which itself probably has challenging measurement issues, or any other number of things that he doesn't find a strong correlation, it's like, Well, one possibility there is that measurement error is going to bias you away from finding some kind of strong relationship between a couple of things there. So I know he addresses that in the book. But I don't know how we think about like what we do in the Face of Big Data uncertainties?

Janey Rountree  20:48  
Well, I have to say, for my part, I'm, I'm very persuaded that housing is the root cause of homelessness, and that it explains the variation in homelessness among different regions that may have higher or lower rates of substance use disorder, or serious mental illness. So I don't want my remark to be misconstrued at all. And I also think there's very strong evidence that if you have an individual on the street, who has substance use disorder, who has serious mental illness, they can be successfully housed. That is by far the most evidence based solution for exiting homelessness. So there is evidence to support that I think from a clinicians tend to think about individuals and how to help them a government official in LA has to face the terrible fact that we can only put 4% of people experiencing homelessness into those types of housing placements. Yeah, we need to broaden the set of solutions that we're willing to test and study and evaluate for effectiveness in that kind of environment, right, because just saying housing is the only evidence really solution really leaves, you know, 90% of individuals without any, any exit any immediate exit from homelessness. So and I think you can say that and hold that fact, and still believe that housing is the root cause of homelessness, and housing is the best solution and that people deserve housing. But we also have to think, you know, in this, I'm putting myself in the shoes of government officials who are responsible for taking action in really difficult circumstances, they have to make decisions and are very resource constrained environment. And I think what Greg is doing with his book is helping the general public understand why it's so crucial to support housing development changes to zoning practices, pay attention to housing policies at the state and federal level, that that's really what's gonna get us out of this. And really try to help people understand why only addressing substance use or only addressing serious mental illness won't. Right, you know, if we only do that, we will have the same housing crisis and homelessness crisis that we have now many, many years in the future. And

Shane Phillips  22:51  
pulling on that thread a little bit. I think, you know, one important aspect of making that argument that things like zoning reform and other things to just increase the housing supply overall, is there complementary. So we need to spend a lot of money we need to do housing. First, we need to do housing vouchers and shelters and services, to help people out of homelessness, we also need to do these things to increase the housing supply, many of which actually don't cost us money. And so it's not like we have to take money from one thing to give it to another. I do want to bring up one more thing before we move on on the same subject, which is, I think, in the conversation we had with Greg but also in his book, I think it's possible for someone to hear or read what he wrote and imagine that what he's really advocating for is, you know, a lot of investment in like supportive housing and deed restricted, affordable housing for lower income and extremely low income households. And unquestionably, he is in support of those things. I know we are all in support of those things. But I think the bigger point is just like housing, generally, a lot of which is going to be market rate, because subsidizing housing is expensive. And so I think just putting that out there and making that clear, and I don't think I'm, I'm really putting words in his mouth to say that that is a really key part of this. And if if you're thinking, it's just all about supportive housing, and affordable housing, that's not going to be enough. And there's not gonna be enough resources to build as much as we would need, if that's the only thing that we were trying to build.

Janey Rountree  24:24  
That's such a great point, Shane, as far as I understand, and you all are the experts, but market rate housing tends to age over time into affordable housing. I don't know if that's always the case or in what circumstances right. But you can imagine a needed investment in housing across the board of all types, you know, with a heavy investment in affordable housing would certainly help.

Shane Phillips  24:47  
Yeah, there's the filtering down that occurs over time, assuming you're building enough housing, that it can filter down and it has been kind of replaced, not replaced, but out competed by even newer housing over time. But then there's all sort of the more immediate impact of you're creating new homes, that people who live in older homes are moving, they're leaving to move into these newer homes. And that is actually more immediately creating vacancies that cascade down the housing market down into lower income units, lower income communities. And so there's sort of a long term and a short term impact there. Yeah.

Michael Lens  25:22  
And hopefully, if you create enough vacancy, then that should also make subsidies go farther, whether it's housing vouchers, usually. And if you make it easier to build one type of housing, you're probably making it easier to build, right? Lower income, Housing Tax Credit housing, or supportive housing or something like that. Shane,

Mike Manville  25:45  
and to your original point, I mean, I think if you look at those two key variables, Greg identifies, they don't really make any differentiation between the type of housing, right, it's rents and vacancy rates. And if I'm remembering correctly, and I may not be, I don't even think he really analyzes the share of supportive housing or deed restricted housing in these cities. It's just a, it's the housing market, you know. So the, the the firmest evidence that comes from that study is about just how much housing Do you have? And how much does it cost? Yeah,

Shane Phillips  26:15  
I think there is a little bit of analysis, not just of median rents, which is the sort of main association that he focuses on, but think he looks at maybe the 25th percentile, a little more affordable units, lower cost units, and it's really just kind of the same result rather than finding a stronger association. Yeah,

Mike Manville  26:31  
I think there's a metropolitan area in the country that has so much deed restricted, affordable housing, that it would alter the 25th percentile of brands that would not quit something. Yes.

Janey Rountree  26:40  
And Shane, just thinking ahead to solutions and what to pull out of these discussions. One of the things that Greg said to me that I cannot get out of my head is shifting our attitude towards housing as a private good toward a public infrastructure, and comparing investments and other infrastructure like transportation, to investments in housing, and the huge gap between those two numbers. I think he told an anecdote where that framing really helped a policymaker in a southern state, change the way they think about preparing for economic mobility in their region, that housing needed to be a piece of infrastructure to support that really compelling. It's just taking all the same information, but just changing the vocabulary or the lens on how we think about it as a society.

Shane Phillips  27:27  
I remember that. And that definitely stood out to me this comparison of how much we spend on transportation in particular, compared to housing. And you know, just as an example, here in Los Angeles, so this is Los Angeles County, so it's two and a half times as large as the city of LA. But our most recent ballot initiative to fund transit projects and services and everything else was around $100 billion over over a 30 year period or so. And our supportive housing proposition in 2016 was $1.2 billion, over 10 years. And that was just for the city of LA, which is 4 million instead of the county, which is 10 million people, but still just were almost an order of magnitude, if they were adjusted for the same amount of time. And that's just kind of accepted as the way things work. And it definitely got me thinking like, how this is not a funding priority, it is still very much a private issue. For the most part. I want to make sure we keep things moving. So let's spend a little bit of time on who experiences homelessness. And we can base this mostly on our conversation with Margo, and the 3200 unhoused single adults in California that her team surveyed, including 365, in depth interviews, there was so much here, I really don't know where to start, but I'll just share some memorable figures and observations first, that nearly half of the people surveyed were 50 years or older. And 41% of those older adults had never been homeless before age 50 That really struck me because someone who lives at least 50 years before becoming homeless, really defies the stereotype that homelessness is primarily a problem of, of laziness or drug use, or you know, pick your personal failing. This came up in our conversation with Greg and Margo and I think in later episodes to this idea of drug use being not just a cause of homelessness in some cases, or a coping mechanism to deal with the trauma of living on the street, but also really an adaptive response. How a drug like meth keeps you warm, keeps you from being hungry, keeps you alert, and how, despite the terrible toll it takes on your body. These are all like immediate survival needs for people living on the streets. Coming back to prevention, the different circumstances of leaseholders and non leaseholders was also memorable for me. People who were on a lease in their last housing situation before becoming homeless tended to have higher incomes, and they had about 10 days of notice on average before losing their house. housing. Whereas people who were not on a lease had a day, one day, on average, there's just no time to prepare for homelessness or prepare for another housing situation in those circumstances. So it seems like an at risk population that really demands the attention of policymakers and researchers. I'll stop there. What do you all want to add? Just

Janey Rountree  30:21  
to pick up on your thread around prevention? There's a chapter of the study focused on pathways. How do people move from their current situation into homelessness? And it was really designed I think, to help think about prevention. How could you interrupt those pathways before someone experiences homelessness? You mentioned how different it is for people in leaseholder situations, the timeline, I also just want to emphasize that only I think 32% of people that they surveyed entered homelessness from a leaseholder situation, right. So that is really, really important because it means that eviction prevention is necessary, but not sufficient to prevent homelessness, we need to have prevention at the point of eviction. But we also need prevention that is more flexible and is not tied to that specific legal proceeding. And that can reach people who are not the former lease holder. This is an issue that the California Policy Lab has been working on. Prevention typically looks like one time cash assistance. So you help that person at a specific moment change cascading events that are usually compounding each other, maybe someone's injured on the job, they lose their job, they incur medical debt, they are couchsurfing, they start to owe other debt, you know, these things, these issues can cause other issues. And the trajectory into homelessness can happen pretty rapidly. There's evidence to support one time cash assistance as effective at stopping that trajectory and keeping people out of emergency shelters or street outreach services. It's really, really hard to target. So for context, you know, in LA, millions of people living below the poverty line on public assistance, only one to 2% of them are going to experience homelessness for the first time in any given year. Right. So if you're running one of these programs, and you're optimistic it will work, you have to figure out who is going to become homeless, if they don't get that assistance. And

Shane Phillips  32:20  
the more the more that you have to spread it out, the less effective it's going to be for the people that are actually going to become homeless or most likely to become homeless, if you have a million dollars to spread around. You know, you can give 1000 people $1,000 You can give 100 People $10,000, etc. $100. Yeah, that's, that's an easy one.

Janey Rountree  32:40  
No, no, that's right. That's right. And if you get that wrong, you run the risk of running a prevention program that has no impact at all on inflow to shelters and emergency services. So we've tried to solve this two different ways, your classic prevention program, people raise their hand and say, Hey, I need help. And they call a hotline, or they go to a website, or they go to a nonprofit organization, and they get screened in to the program. And one thing that Beth shin and Margo in our lab would all advocate for is make sure those programs are going to people at 30%, area median income are lower. And this This goes back to that income equation. A lot of times programs want to set this at 80%, ami, they want to serve a wider group of people. Or it's easier to run a program with looser criteria, that you really want to get assistance into the hands of people who are very high risk. And then you can use different surveys to try to further narrow down risk. We're also experimenting in Los Angeles with using big data, predictive analytics to do this. So running predictive algorithms on administrative data in LA on who's already enrolled in county services and predicting who's going to be at high risk of homelessness. So we've been running that pilot with the county for a couple of years now. And that's subject to a randomized control trial. So we'll have evidence from that probably in a couple of years. But it's really important to do prevention, it's important to have it be defined as broader than eviction prevention. And then I just think we need to test these different strategies for reaching the right people and evaluate them. This is a space where we really need a lot more research on what works. 

Shane Phillips  34:21  
Janey and Mike Manville you probably have not heard this episode because it just came out yesterday as of the time of this recording, but our interview with the folks at the VA, one thing that really stood out to me something I took away from that conversation was how much easier it is for a Veteran who is experiencing some crisis to have someone to talk to to ask questions. They have a hotline where you can call about like literally anything. This is not just you know, for homelessness, this is just literally anything and they can direct you to they have some kind of support service or connect you to some other agency if that's necessary. That's not As a resource that most people have, or at least that most people are aware of how to access. And so I think building up that kind of resource somehow for non veterans as well can be an important part of the solution here. Yeah,

Michael Lens  35:14  
I mean, you know, my dad was in the Army during the Vietnam War, the later years of Vietnam War, and, you know, never sniffed combat whatsoever. But a, he did more in the army than I did, obviously. And the last decade of his life, he had free health care, free hospitalization from the VA, various services are taken care of all that sort of stuff, like, I've seen that inaction and can't imagine what his options would have been in his circumstances, like, and so yeah, I that's what I was thinking of, you know, of course, just kind of personally, when, when we were having that conversation, Shane is like, you can really see the difference when there's an entire health care infrastructure supporting you, even if the VA services over the years have surely had its criticisms. It's something that the rest of us are, you know, people without health insurance clearly just don't.

Janey Rountree  36:14  
Shane, this is such a fascinating point. And I heard an echo of this in the episode about the Chez Soi study in Canada, right, where they found the role of the primary care doctor, if I recall, was really important and a big protective factor just having if someone had a doctor, and in the Canadian healthcare system, that Dr. unlocks a lot of resources, including non medical social services, we've tried to include the role of that human connector into the pilot, we're running that I mentioned, for prevention. So when people are enrolled in that pilot, they get a dedicated person who's responsible for navigating them through every possible county service system for four to six months. So they handle benefits registration, they handle re enrollment and medical care or behavioral health care. I think at a place like Los Angeles where there are so many different forms of government providing help having that person who's your advocate, and you can just focus on your circumstances could be critically important. So I think that's a really interesting and important insight, something

Shane Phillips  37:16  
that Margo brought up about. And I think Tim, in our housing first conversation said the same thing about how people who voluntarily seek help are much more likely to, you know, succeed, to get to where we want them to go where they want to go. And it just makes me think about how there are conversations happening in California. And there have been for several years about, you know, whether we need to commit some people into mental health treatment or into some kind of involuntary treatment system. And I don't know, I struggle with this, because there seems to be some level of need for that. And my hesitation is, is not that we shouldn't have this at all. But I think this is the hesitation of a lot of people who are concerned about other approach that it just opens the door to just locking away a bunch of people. That's the fear.

Mike Manville  38:11  
Why don't you ask a controversial question?

Michael Lens  38:15  
Are you having me committed?

Mike Manville  38:17  
I mean, that, for me this this is something that I mean, I just purely have no expertise on its. But I think you've identified the crux of the problem is that involuntary commitment has a really bad history in the US, you know, that there was a reason a lot of mental hospitals were closed in the late 70s, early 80s. And, you know, people can say, Oh, the reforms went too far or whatever. But like, there were some abuses, and it you had given a series of state agents, the right to place people and lock up and confined them against their will. And that's a really serious power to give someone and the potential for it to go wrong is not small. So I mean, the I think that the trepidation people approach this with is incredibly understandable. And you know, just to be balanced here, the need that some people see for it, and oftentimes, this is people who have family members, who they feel are simply beyond help is also very understandable. The testimonies you hear from people who say, Look, I have a brother, I have a father, they're unreachable right now. You know, it's hard to dismiss that as totally out of hand no matter how much of a civil libertarian you may be. I think it's just a very difficult issue. Yeah.

Shane Phillips  39:33  
I think that is well said.

Mike Manville  39:34  
I do think also the the fact of people you know, we learn things go better for people who who come in voluntarily. There's going to be an awkward transition maybe but we should remember that to about how we learn about homeless people to that the homeless people who sit for an interview with UCSF may well be systematically different from the homeless population. And that's just something we want to keep in mind the share of pee poll that that study reported as being the median age is 47. And, you know, a lot of them are over age 50. I mean, that's obviously for California, which is different. But that is that does not align very well with what we find when we do the demographic counts in Los Angeles. Right? These are sort of, we just have to be careful about saying that we have a representative survey of the homeless population, we just don't know the universe. Yeah, and

Michael Lens  40:25  
I mean, this is I wanted to get here a little bit, because again, I think that data on people experiencing homelessness is absolutely essential. And we should try to collect it as much as, as best we can. And to analyze it for policy again, as best we can. But as Mike said, we don't know the universe, there might be the baseline characteristics that I'm sure Margo and her amazing team tried to match up against might themselves be flawed, or they're kind of unknowable, right? We don't know exactly the demographic characteristics of people experiencing homelessness in this state or elsewhere, without some kind of magic data tool that doesn't quite exist. They did a whole lot better than I'll ever do. Oh, for sure, measuring these things. But for sure, it is. It is challenging, you know, some of these questions don't, to me require representation. But when you're just talking about baseline characteristics, and what that says, for policy, that does matter. Well,

Janey Rountree  41:27  
and I just wanted to chime in to say it's my understanding from reading this study, and from listening to her talk about it, that she was aiming for a representative sample of adults, and that they did not they are not suggesting their surveys representative of transition age youth, so they don't report the findings as relevant to that population at all. So the overall demographic breakdown in a place like Los Angeles will look very different from what they're reporting for that reason. And that has to do with their sampling frame and statistical Jackson. Yeah, their processes that they were using. Youth are very hard to find. They don't want to be interviewed. So well known issue, I think, for people who work in this field. So anyway, yeah.

Mike Manville  42:07  
Yeah. Although if the youth are hard to find, then the estimates are even further away from the LA count. So it's, I mean, I think in general, is just we want to be cautious about saying we have a representative sample of the homeless, this is a population that I think it's just very hard to, to measure with great confidence. We want to reach out to as many as we can, we want to use different approaches to try and get a snapshot of a try and get a dynamic picture of it. The Statistician in me gets a little uncomfortable with someone just saying they've got that Representative count. Absolutely.

Janey Rountree  42:37  
And I think it's worth pointing out here that in cities on the east coast, where there is a right to shelter, the administrative data generated from services tends to be a better or more reliable census of the population. Oh, absolutely. This is a much, much more challenging statistical measurement issue on the west coast where we have so many people who are disconnected from services.

Mike Manville  42:59  
Yeah, yep. Not just a right to shelter, but in some cities, they they want to go around and get you into it every night. That's that's a huge boost to data collection right there.

Shane Phillips  43:08  
I think that's a good transition Janey to talking a little bit about the difference between sheltered and unsheltered homelessness. As you mentioned, you've worked and lived in New York City where they have a right to shelter. We certainly have nothing like that anywhere here on the West Coast, I think. But what can you tell us about the different experiences in places with those kinds of regulations, protections, whatever we want to call them, those rights, versus somewhere like Los Angeles, where as such a large share, the vast majority of people experiencing homelessness are doing so in an unsheltered setting.

Janey Rountree  43:44  
So as you mentioned, many places, particularly on the East Coast, I can think of Washington DC or New York, for example, have a right to shelter. So there's a large infrastructure to provide shelter. It looks a little bit different for unaccompanied adults than it does for families, family shelters tend to look a little bit more like what you would expect housing to look like because they have minor children with them. There's a long history, including lawsuits that generated those conditions for that public policy in New York, in particular, on the west coast, that that has not been our history. And as you probably know, 70 plus percent of our population every year in the PIT count are unsheltered meaning they're counted on the street or and not in an interim housing setting or emergency shelter setting. The real thorny issue here is, what are the consequences of that? And what is the right amount of shelter because building shelter or leasing shelter is very, very expensive on the order of magnitude of building housing. So if you're if you're in government in Los Angeles, and you're faced with the question, do I expand access to interim housing? It's a very difficult question to answer because often the answer is if especially for our capital construction project, you might as well be building housing, because why not increase the access to permanent supportive housing that people need, you know, in lieu of shelter?

Mike Manville  45:11  
So, as a clarifying question, I think I'm curious. And I imagine some of our listeners will be too Why is it so expensive? It just intuitively, it seems like it might not be. I

Janey Rountree  45:21  
think, I don't know the answer to that. And it feels in some ways, like a not thoroughly examined question. You hear this a lot. And I have the same question. Is that really the case? Could there be less expensive, faster ways to provide more access to interim housing. One thing that's been really interesting over the last year, Mayor bass, and now the county homelessness initiative, and the board of supervisors have started doing something completely new. And they started doing it after Margo finished her interviews in the region. And they're doing two initiatives called inside safe and pathway home, where they're going out. And for an entire encampment, let's say, 80 to 100 individuals, they're offering an immediate access to interim housing for everyone. So they're taking a whole group of people, not one by one, but the whole community and saying you can move in, and here is where you're going to move in, here's the address of the motel, you're going to be fed three meals a day, you're going to have access to resources do you want to move in, there's a very high rate of acceptance, and they are leasing motels to do this. So what's interesting about that is that they're not building shelters from the ground up or renovating other buildings to releasing motels, which means that they can scale up and down the shelter portfolio by executing or dropping leases for these motel rooms. I think it's been a really important development in our region, it's getting people off the street and into into these motel rooms, but it is expensive. You're paying for the lease you're paying for services. And the challenge that they have now a year into this is where are those people going? Now? The answer is some new permanent supportive housing buildings are coming online, some people will get connected to a subsidy that they can take on the private market, the uptake of those types of subsidies is usually around 60 to 70%. So not everyone has a subsidy can use it. But many people can right. And just

Shane Phillips  47:15  
to be clear, that's essentially they cannot find someone who will take it. Right. Yeah. And

Janey Rountree  47:20  
that that goes to the vacancy rates in the housing shortage in LA. So there are a couple of things about this that are unique. One is that approach where everyone moves in and they exit as immediately, you're not doing what we've had to do in the past, which is say fill out this form, I may be able to help you. It may take months, I'm not entirely sure where you're going to go. Not surprisingly, that doesn't instill a lot of confidence or trust in the system. And we're getting we're getting people off the street. I'm not going to try to draw a causal line between these two points. But you ask what's different here than in New York, in 2021, we had over 2000 people die on the street while they were experiencing homelessness. That's a significantly higher mortality rate among people experiencing homelessness in New York. Again, I'm not trying to say that being unsheltered is the direct cause the causes reported in the reports by the county are drug overdose, cardiac arrest traffic accidents, but common sense would tell you that if we had more people inside fewer people would die.

Shane Phillips  48:17  
Yep. So since we got to keep moving, I want to make sure we spend a good amount of time talking about solutions, parts four, five and six of the pathways Home Series, along with a little bit of part three, we're all really focused on solutions to homelessness, four, five and six were also all randomized controlled trials RCTs. That was not actually deliberate, but I think it might reflect an unconscious desire to share research that's as bulletproof as possible, particularly since homelessness policy is such a contested area. Even RCTs can and do have their flaws, but it is really the best approach we've got for testing the efficacy of different solutions. To summarize a bit here. In part four, Beth Shin shared findings from the family options study, which looked at the effectiveness of different interventions for addressing family homelessness. She and her colleagues found that long term housing subsidies, basically housing vouchers, were quite a bit more effective than Rapid Rehousing, transitional housing, and treatment as usual or control essentially interventions. This is something that overlaps a great deal with recent work by the California Policy Lab. So Janey, I definitely want to hear your thoughts on that once I get through this summary. In part five, we talked to JZ Zhao, about a much more recent study of large unconditional cash transfers to assist relatively high functioning single adults experiencing homelessness. The idea there was that if you give people a bunch of money all at once, instead of providing more of a trickle of funds month to month, they may be able to get out of survival mode and do more long term planning and that may lead to better outcomes on housing, health, employment and so forth. The results there were certainly positive. And in addition to reducing shelter use by 99 days in the first year on average per person, and increasing days in stable housing by 55 days on average, I think maybe the headline finding in that one was just that giving unhoused people a bunch of money does not necessarily lead to increased spending on drugs and alcohol, as many people that they surveyed in this study had expected. One thing I'd really like to see in a future study is a comparison to something like housing vouchers, since the comparison group in this case was just usual services. There are or were plenty of skeptics of this approach. So I understand first, just wanting to show that this helps rather than hurts. But the next question for me is whether it's better than other solutions that we also know do work, like recurring, smaller dollar housing assistance. And finally, Part Six was with Tim Aubrey, who worked on a massive $110 million study of housing first in Canada, a model that is intended for chronically homeless people with serious mental illness. The idea behind Housing First is that you don't place preconditions on getting people into housing, or very few anyway, you get them into housing as quickly as possible, and then you work on the other challenges in their life. In this case, the results were really striking at least in terms of housing outcomes, housing, first participants were stably housed at twice the rate of the control group at the end of two years. And the control group was three times as likely to not be housed at all, during the last six months of that study, self reported quality of life was much higher for housing first, folks, at least by some or many metrics, but health and substance use were pretty equal between them and the control group. And that actually seems to be a pretty consistent finding for housing first studies, good results on housing outcomes, but limited impact in other domains. And I think that raises important questions about what we want to see from these programs and how we define success. So that is my summary. Maybe Janey you can kick it off. Since the first one I summarized was Beth shins study on family homelessness and how she found that housing vouchers were more effective. You studied time limited subsidies, and you found that they're actually quite effective. So can you tell us just what that program actually did and what you found there and maybe how it contrasts with Beth's findings. So

Janey Rountree  52:32  
the study that Beth talked about the Family Option study, lifted families and separated them into families who received the vouchers versus time limited subsidies versus other, I believe transitional housing, right. There isn't a lot of evidence or research looking at adults, which was the focus of our study. So we did a non experimental impact evaluation of adults enrolled in Rapid Rehousing are also called time limited subsidies. And they're designed to get cash in the hands of a person to take it out on the private rental market find a place to live and subsidize their rent for a time limited period, usually no more than two years. Some people will use that money to move in and pay it first month, some people will use it over the whole two year period. So really important unanswered questions around the effectiveness of this for adults, but also in a really tight market like Los Angeles, our method was to use a non experimental matching strategy, not going to talk a lot about that now, but we did find that it reduced homelessness by 25%, across the board, and we found positive impacts across three different risk levels. So adults that were really high risk for chronic homelessness, moderate risk and low risk. So that's a really important finding to support continued use of time limited subsidies in Los Angeles, I always say that in a situation like we're in in California, there should be no form of housing that's off the table, we need to keep trying things and testing them and seeing if they're effective, including subsidies for private market rentals, housing vouchers, permanent supportive housing, all of the above, we need to try everything that we can and not take a form of subsidy off the table, unless we're really certain that it's not working. One

Shane Phillips  54:16  
of my takeaways from all of these conversations was just how different solutions are effective for different people. Every study has people who it just didn't work for housing, first time limited subsidies, cash transfers, like in all cases, most people turned out pretty well with the sort of preferred solution, but there were always a significant minority who had just did not seem to work for. That's

Janey Rountree  54:40  
absolutely right. That's absolutely right. We need to keep figuring out what works for whom. The other key finding is that it's really hard to take these limited subsidies, these housing subsidies and find a place to live in Los Angeles. So we had low uptake of the subsidy. So I think a really important policy question is how do we increase uptake of subsidies? How do we get more landlords to except that as a form of payment, trying master leasing strategies, the Los Angeles government officials have a lot of interesting ideas about how to do that. But that That, to me is the next step here.

Shane Phillips  55:10  
Do we have any other reflections that we want to share on these interventions and the conversations that we had about them, I might just

Janey Rountree  55:17  
want to say that the evidence for Housing First is very strong. So many studies support the idea that we should not put up barriers to people accessing housing, that people can be successful in housing immediately, we may not be able to put them in housing immediately. But they can be successful, even if they have a lot of barriers to housing. And so the CHE SWAT study just reinforced that, I think what's really interesting set of questions to grapple with is, is how is the housing and the services combined for different people? So how do we build on this evidence base to really figure out the right combination for the right people? That feels like the next set of really important questions? Yeah,

Michael Lens  55:58  
I think a lot of criticism of housing first just seems to me is often based on people finding flaws or weak results from programs that aren't really Housing First. That's

Janey Rountree  56:11  
right, anyone will tell you that we never implemented it here in California. If you look at the model that was studied in Canada, it's scattered site, housing subsidy, plus assertive community treatment and intensive services. What we call in California is a wide variety of housing situations and service intensity levels. So and many of those are working, by the way. So it's not that they're all there that they're not working. But we have to recognize that most people are not accessing housing at all. And they're accessing housing in a variety of different settings.

Shane Phillips  56:43  
I'd like to make just a couple more observations here. And they're kind of related. One is that throughout these different interventions, convergence between the treatment population and the control population was very common. What I mean by that is the people who received the intervention being tested, let's take Housing First, as an example, their housing and quality of life would quickly leap ahead of those who only received usual services that control. But as the months and years went on, the control group would start to catch up. In the case of Housing First, the treatment group was still well ahead of the control at the end of two years, with the long term subsidies in the Family Option study, and the lump sum cash transfer in Vancouver, the lives of the treatment and control groups were in very similar places after a year or two, I think that can be interpreted negatively. And frankly, I had a fairly critical reaction to that realization at first to like, if we go to all this trouble, and a year or two later, you may not even be able to tell the difference between the people who received supplemental assistance and those who didn't, then what was the point, right. But we missed something important when we only look at that endpoint, because of course, people are living their lives in the time between the beginning and the end of the studies. And we see very consistently that the lives of people who got that extra help were dramatically better on average than those who didn't. They spent less time homeless, whether sheltered or unsheltered, they spent more time in stable housing, they recorded higher quality of life. In some cases, they spent more money on food and transit and rent or on their children. In others, they had fewer emergency room and outpatient visits. The cost of achieving these better outcomes wasn't double or triple what we're already spending on services or unhoused people, but more like 10% More 20% More, in some cases, it was even cost saving. I should also clarify that the convergence is mostly happening in a positive direction, with the control groups moving toward the treatment groups, rather than the treatment groups completely reverting back to the same level as the control. To me this point highlights how homelessness, or at least the worst kinds of homelessness experiences are for many people a temporary thing with or without more intensive interventions, many people will eventually get to a better place, not necessarily not homeless, but a better place. And I want to also be clear that that's not true for all people, it just is for many. For those people, what the stronger interventions are doing is more quickly getting them out of the worst, most unstable, most traumatic circumstances, that in itself is extremely important and valuable. There shouldn't be some quota of suffering that you need to endure before we offer you meaningful help for the people who need that extra support to make any kind of recovery at all, implementing and expanding these programs makes sure that they get that help. I don't want to overstate the case here and imply that there are no costs to any of this or that these interventions can solve every problem in the lives of people experiencing homelessness. But from what I've learned of these interventions, the benefits seem to so clearly outweigh the costs. So I just wanted to make that point about convergence and how I interpret it at least. Finally, I want to talk about something that came up in different ways throughout all of our conversations these past few months, but we never really emphasized, which is what's keeping us from doing the things that have been shown to work, or at least doing them on the necessary scale. Whether it's long term housing needs, or the short term housing needs of people experiencing homelessness right now, acting at the appropriate scale seems to be really a central problem. I do see a lot of progress being made, at least in some ways, but it feels painfully slow. It's clearly insufficient. It's promising, and maybe hints that we're moving in the right direction. But it's not it's not the thing itself. We're just very far from where we need to be. So, you know, given what we've heard over these past seven episodes, what we've seen from these randomized controlled trials, what we've seen in the success of the VA and reducing veteran homelessness, why does it feel like we still have so far to go, and we're still only incrementally implementing these programs and making progress.

Mike Manville  1:01:06  
I mean, I think part of it goes back to what we started the podcast talking about, which is there's this difference between, you know, the sources of new people becoming homeless, and what we do about folks who are currently on the street. I think that as Janey has pointed out, and as there is a lot of literature suggesting, and here in LA our own data suggests, like, we do manage to rehouse people, in one way or another, you know, we get people into supportive housing, we get people as Jenny points out into motel rooms. And part of the issues, we don't get enough, right. And there's there's reasons why people resist the kind of investment in this sort of like really intensive housing, that would be effective. But also, we don't do anything to stop the flow, or we don't do enough to stop the flow. And that disconnect between understanding that, you know, you have the stock of people who are currently homeless, and a flow of people who if you don't do something in the broader housing market will be homeless means that even if you become extremely effective at getting people currently on the street off the street, and we are not right now, extremely effective, although I mean, there's a lot of very hardworking people who do a lot of very good work, you're not going to make progress. And I think that you get a feedback, right, which is that as you don't make progress, you lose the faith and the trust of the public, right? They, they lose patience. And you I mean, I think we've all seen this happen, where in a good liberal city like Los Angeles, you can start out with your neighbors thinking that this is a human tragedy and a social problem. And fast forward four years, and they just want it out of their sight, and they're very willing to see it as a crime. And so if you if you don't act quickly, and effectively, it just, it just gets harder.

Michael Lens  1:02:45  
Yeah, I think that captures this this way that I've been feeling over the last two or three years, as you know, we get to a point where we can see where we're, the state of California and the city of Los Angeles are along this continuum of getting to a point where we feel like we might have some success or some glimmers of hope. And it's very hard for me to kind of have both the thought in my head that we have done quite a lot. And we have made quite a lot of progress in getting a state and city apparatus to really pay attention to the plight of people living on the street. And like not just the state and city apparatus. But the people that Mike mentions, you know, some of whom are completely fed up with homelessness in their midst, but who, you know, are generally electing people and voting for bonds and propositions and whatnot that are getting us to spend more, do more and think more about this. So there's that I hold on one hand with, you know, much of what Mike said, which is like, we are not looking at what feels like success because of the flow of people entering homelessness. And so then, of course, you go all the way back upstream to various broken housing markets that, but again, I see like, glimmers of hope and housing policy and land use policy where, you know, we're starting to do the right thing in more places, but it's slow going. And so people will be frustrated when they don't see everything fixed.

Janey Rountree  1:04:22  
Fundamentally, I don't think enough people understand the connection between housing and homelessness. The more people understand that, the more they will vote for the right policies, the right people, the more they'll understand the level of investment that's needed. We're talking about rolling back 5070 years of federal state and local housing policy. And we need to feel an urgency around those solutions and to feel that urgency people need to know that that is the issue that that is really the root cause. So it's one of the reasons why I'm such a big fan of what Gregg is doing. It's what Greg is doing is research but it's also communications It's making that fact accessible to people and helping them understand how urgent those solutions are. And then the second reason is even if you do understand that those solutions take a long time. To Mike's point, they take a really long time, even here in LA, the housing bond that people might recall voting on years ago, those units are coming online now. And that's a big success story, a lot of people are going to be housed. But there are many years passed between the moment of civic action and the result in terms of how long it takes to get these buildings financed and built. So I think those are two reasons, I will add a third, which is in California, and Los Angeles, government is very complicated, and hard to coordinate. So it adds a layer of complexity or difficulty that you're not going to have in a place like New York City with a highly centralized, streamlined, local government that can make decisions across budgets policy pretty quickly compared to LA, where you're coordinating at least five different forms of government to respond to the crisis. So they're talking about that there are new governance plans, it's not a problem that's unrecognized, and people are trying to work on that. But it is something I think we need to understand how important it is to get people to coordinate around the solutions.

Shane Phillips  1:06:17  
And I do I do just want to throw out there, there's just this issue of who deserves our help. And a lot of people feel like some people deserve it. And other people don't just definitely came up in our conversation with the folks at the VA. But I think that's always the challenge, really, with any kind of social service. And the problem of not addressing the inflow is really what is undermining that support and heightening these feelings of, well, these people don't deserve it. Look at all the money we've spent, and homelessness is just getting worse. So it's not to you know, put this all on any one thing, but I think until that problem is addressed, until we do the things required to reduce the inflow, which is direct assistance, you know, prevention in the in the targeted way that you talked about Janey, but also the larger, making sure that rents don't keep climbing, that housing, there's actually housing available and vacant for people to move into. All those kinds of things are central as well. If

Janey Rountree  1:07:20  
there's a glimmer of hope, we are definitely seeing action at the state level on housing policy. And we also saw during COVID We could house a lot of people really quickly. And we're using many of those same strategies. Now I mentioned them before the mayor's inside safe and the county's pathway. Home strategies are in some ways, building off of lessons learned during the pandemic around how to get people quickly off the streets. So there's a reason to be hopeful.

Shane Phillips  1:07:44  
All right, Janey Rountree, thank you for joining us on the Housing Voice podcast.

Janey Rountree  1:07:48  
Thank you for having me.

Shane Phillips  1:07:52  
You can read more about Janey's and the California Policy Lab's research on our website, lewis.ucla.edu. Show notes and a transcript of the interview are there too. You can find the Pathways Home series, and share it with others — which we hope you'll do — at lewis.ucla.edu/pathways-home. I can be reached at shanephillips@ucla.edu. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks when we're back to regular programming.