Innovative measures of housing programs and services to help meet the goal of ending homelessness among Veterans

The National Center on Homelessness among Veterans was established by the Department of Veterans Affairs with academic partners to address Secretary Shinseki's stated objective to end Veteran homelessness in five years. The University of South Florida is working with the Center to determine best practices for housing and housing services for Veterans, developing models based on these practices and evaluating their effectiveness. One key element in this process has been the measurement of housing programs and services. This session presents the results of a two-year long measure development study to determine significant domains that characterize transitional and permanent housing programs for Veterans and to build definitions, anchors, and data sources for measuring these domains. Data sources included VA administrative data and in-depth interviews with Veterans, VA staff and community providers. The measure was used to develop basic descriptions and housing program typologies, e.g. high services and low demand type programs. Dr. M. Scott Young will talk about low demand housing and the challenges and opportunities of measuring these models. Jim Winarski will discuss the development of a measure for Community Resource and Referral Centers involving innovative use of VA data, HUD systems, and community providers' systems to track service usage. The field of homelessness research has generally been challenged by accurate descriptions and assessments of housing program models. This research seeks to fill in the “black box” between Veteran homelessness and satisfactory outcomes, and it has implications for matching homeless Veterans with the most appropriate housing programs and services.