Padgett's Approach Of Ending Homelessness

One of the most prevalent ideas in recent literature on homelessness is the Housing First method. Padgett et al. (2016) wrote an entire book on Housing First, in which they explore the history of the approach in the United States and internationally. Padgett et al. (2016) trace this model back New York in 1992, when Dr. Sam Tsembris founded Pathways to Housing, Inc. after listening to homeless people continually tell him that they needed a place to live more than they needed a shelter or to be hospitalized. The basic idea behind the approach is “to provide immediate access to housing—most often an independent apartment—and support services to individuals with mental illness living on the streets” (p. viii). This approach has three major components:

Since this research is assessing communities that have claimed to end homelessness—or at least a subset of homelessness—it is important to consider what ending homelessness actually means. Turner at el. (2017) explore the tensions between the ideas of “absolute zero” and “functional zero” for ending homelessness. On the one hand, absolute zero refers to a literal end to homelessness, where no one ever experiences homelessness, even for a night. The goal of functional zero, on the other hand, is to have enough services, shelters, and housing to provide to everyone who needs them. Under the idea of functional zero, it is assumed that there will always be homelessness to some extent, but that when people do experience homelessness, their experience is brief, they get permanent housing, and they do not return to homelessness again (Turner et al.,

Turner et al. (2017) studied various plans for ending homelessness in Canada, the U.S., Europe, and Australia, and found little consistency in the definitions even within individual countries. In Canada, some definitions of ending homelessness focused on having enough available services and housing to meet the demand of homeless people (falling under the functional zero approach), while many aligned more with the idea of absolute zero.

In the U.S., USICH provided a federal definition for ending homelessness in 2015 that aligns more with the idea of functional zero: “An end to homelessness means that every community will have a systematic response in place that ensures homelessness is prevented whenever possible or is otherwise a rare, brief, and non-recurring experience” (United States Interagency Council on Homelessness,