• DOI:10.1007/S11138-016-0356-X
• Corpus ID: 157044332

Federal homelessness policy: A robust political economy approach

@article{Lucas2017FederalHP,
  title={Federal homelessness policy: A robust political economy approach},
  author={David S. Lucas},
  journal={The Review of Austrian Economics},
  year={2017},
  volume={30},
  pages={277-303}
}

• D. Lucas
• Published 1 September 2017
• Economics
• The Review of Austrian Economics

In the wake of the financial crisis, the United States government introduced a new large-scale initiative to address homelessness. The policy mandate is marked by both an unprecedented increase in federal funding and a dramatic reallocation of resources toward Housing First, a service model emphasizing immediate housing subsidization. Although this service paradigm has received support from a sizeable literature, our knowledge of its success to date has been limited. This paper sheds light on the unobservable or unmeasured costs of this new centralized approach to ending homelessness. I argue that federal homelessness policy under the Housing First approach 1) generates resource misallocation, 2) exacerbates the Samaritan’s dilemma, and 3) invites rent seeking.