HUD-VASH Efficiency and Effectiveness: Homelessness and Veterans' Housing Policy

Abstract

The research explores why federal funding targeted for vouchers for homeless veterans in the HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program (HUD-VASH) declined between 2009 and 2024. It compares funding for the expansion of the veteran homelessness program and the use of that funding for housing vouchers before and after implementation of Housing First in the Ending Veteran Homelessness Initiative. The study employs an exploratory, mixed quantitative and qualitative analysis. As coalitions to address homelessness among military veterans formed after HUD-VASH was authorized, different narratives about the causes of and possible remedies to veterans' underutilization of housing vouchers emerged as vehicles for policy entrepreneurs to promote different means for achieving the same ends for homeless veterans. Melding the Jenkins-Smith/Sabatier advocacy coalitions perspective with narrative, punctuated equilibrium, and multiple stream theories, the research highlights that limiting the program's funding evidently had little to do with its effectiveness at reducing homelessness. Instead, program efficiency and policy efficacy became the focus as coalition advocacy for implementation spanned partisan and ideological divides. Program efficiency, not effectiveness, emerged as the problem that policy entrepreneurs focused upon, building coalitions around opposing narratives of fiscal stewardship of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Over time, HUD-VASH effectiveness flourished, but funding increasingly languished under advocacy coalitions' control of congressional committees. These coalitions' identification of the Housing First policy strategy as the pre-eminent "cause" of and "cure" for the underutilization of vouchers became a point of contention, limiting growth. In the absence of systematic analysis by the VA of the efficiencies of HUD-VASH or its underwritten policies, a pro-Housing First Coalition formed around international empirical evidence of Housing First's improving program outcomes. At around the same time, due to over- reliance on a single metric, an anti-Housing First Coalition emerged that challenged Housing First's insistence on excluding other approaches to addressing homelessness. The amount of funding that congressional committees approved for additional HUD-VASH vouchers decreased, even as program effectiveness and need increased. This suggested declining congressional willingness to justify further program expansion amidst the contention and ambiguity over the Housing First strategy for addressing homelessness. The findings suggest that the policy disagreements have not been over whether the HUD-VASH program should remain sufficiently funded or about the actual underutilization of vouchers (the usage rate was more or less consistent between 2019 and 2024) since 2019. Rather, they revolved around whether to proceed programmatically as long as the Housing First policy strategy was linked to housing vouchers for veterans.