The conventional approach to homelessness starts with services. But starting with permanent housing instead costs less and works better. The equation for ending people’s homelessness has traditionally been to move them through a continuum of temporary housing and services until they are “ready” for permanent housing. But surprisingly—given that it’s a problem defined by housing—the housing part of the equation has often been neglected. What’s Missing Is Housing While homeless people certainly have service needs, it is the lack of housing that defines them as homeless. However, when homelessness first emerged in the early 1980s, the system that was created to address it paid little attention to getting people back into housing. Early approaches emphasized crisis intervention, resulting in shelters and soup kitchens that could address people’s immediate needs. Over time, these programs began to offer a variety of services, but they had little access to resources that could help people find or afford housing. Eventually, by the mid-1990s, there were over 40,000 programs addressing homelessness; very few of them focused on housing. However, as early as the late 1980s, the concept that became known as Housing First began to emerge for homeless families, and in the early 1990s a similar approach surfaced for homeless adults with severe mental illness. The idea was to focus on the housing—to get homeless people as quickly as possible into a permanent, stable place to live—and then to provide them with the services that they need. Housing First says something that is fairly intuitive—that people do better when they are stabilized in housing as soon as possible. Unstable housing impedes the effectiveness of interventions to address people’s problems. Homeless people themselves recognize this and generally identify housing to be their first priority. While housing people to end homelessness may seem self-evident, the services-first approach persisted, in good part because of the considerable public and private infrastructure that was built up around it. Even those organizations that wanted to focus more on housing had a difficult time as resources for rent assistance were few and targeted.