Beschreibung:
The federal government allocates a significant amount of money towards services that aim to provide resources for people experiencing homelessness, yet little is known about the efficacy and lasting impacts of this federal funding. Aggregate homelessness counts by age group, gender identification, and race were not available from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) until recently. This paper focuses on the relative effectiveness of federally-distributed funding for homeless assistance services by exploiting demographically disaggregated sheltered and unsheltered point-in-time homeless counts and data on homeless funding matched to relevant covariates drawn from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Census Bureau from 2015 to 2019. Results, from an instrumented variable technique utilized first by Popov (2016) and enhanced by Lucas (2017), suggest that greater levels of funding translate into increases in sub-groups of sheltered homeless populations, with the effect being strongest for African-American men entering emergency shelters and federally sponsored housing programs as individuals. Moreover, the findings show that it takes about $6,000 overall to admit one more individual into a shelter or housing program on average, though averages vary substantially by demographic groups. Funding appears to be less related to unsheltered homelessness, indicating a limited scope of relief towards how people in homeless conditions respond to federal aid. Since the 2020 CARES Act allocated more than 2000 percent of Congress’ previous funding allocation to the Emergency Solutions Grant, a primary source of federal homelessness funding, this paper provides a basis for early predictions of this funding’s impact