For the past 2 decades, advocates for the homeless have maintained that homelessness is fundamentally a housing problem. However, the published literature on homelessness overwhelmingly focuses on the individual characteristics, vulnerabilities, and behavioral disorders associated with people who experience homelessness. Correspondingly, the field of practice was until recently dominated by service delivery programs that function as the primary interventions to address homelessness; most of these attempt to treat the myriad health and social problems that beset people who present as homeless. Hence, the arenas of homelessness research and practice have long been oddly dissonant with the claims of professional advocates, including claims by one of their early voices, Robert Hayes, who famously asserted that the problem was about three things: housing, housing, and housing (“Hope for New York City’s Homeless? The Issue Is Housing,” New York Times, November 27, 1986, A25). This discordance can be partly traced to the beginnings of the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 (101 Stat. 482; later renamed the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act). In that legislation, advocates had their first opportunity to establish a formal federal policy around homelessness. Although they publicly argued for a solution centered on housing, the actual legislation focused on expanding emergency assistance to the homeless, especially on expanding emergency shelters. More service-enriched transitional shelters were soon to follow and now comprise about half of the nation’s total shelter capacity. The Continuum of Care policy promoted by the Clinton administration in 1993 formalized this emphasis on services and transitional shelter by encouraging a staircase model of services through which people who were homeless would be made progressively “housing ready” (Naomi Gerstel, Cynthia J. Bogard, J. Jeff McConnell, and Michael Schwartz, “The Therapeutic Incarceration of Homeless Families,” Social Service Review 70, no. 4 [1996]: 551). By the end of the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the federal agency charged with addressing America’s housing problems, was spending 60 percent of the McKinney-Vento Act resources on service programs for people who were homeless; much of that support was spent on transitional housing (HUD, Bridging the Gap: Homelessness Policy, report in the series, Insights into Housing and Community Development Policy [Washington, DC: HUD, 2010]).