Patrick Marquis

It's worked in Houston, Texas.

It's worked in, you know, New York City.

And it has been incredibly successful in reducing homelessness, street homelessness in many of those cities because this is a model that really, really works for some of our most vulnerable folks, our unsheltered homeless population, folks sleeping on the streets or in parks or homes.

in subways, this approach gets them out of street homelessness into housing and keeps them in housing.

The other thing is that we've seen now multiple studies of this approach over decades that have shown that the sort of incidence of homelessness among this group, so after they've been providing with Housing First, very few, if any, end up going back into homelessness.

Their physical and mental health improves dramatically, especially when you compare all of these sorts of outcomes with the treatment first approach.

You see how successful housing first is.

Housing first leads to better health outcomes, leads to better housing stability, leads to lower rates of homelessness.

All of that is true when you compare it to the treatment first approach.

And then to make matters, you know, it's almost like, you know, the exclamation point is that it turns out that it's actually cheaper.

So one of the remarkable things that we learned about supportive housing and the Housing First approach is that if you analyze the total cost sort of to taxpayers of providing this subsidized housing apartment with support services, and then you compare it to the cost of leaving the person homeless, it's actually cheaper to provide supportive housing and a Housing First apartment.

Well, actually, I'll just tell the story of the memorial service for one of them.

There was a guy, Jose, that had lived in the tunnel.

I got to know him only briefly because he had just started to move out of the tunnel when I was beginning my work there.

And then he had been somebody who had...

It worked in a factory in Manhattan and then the factory closed down.

I think actually they moved a few of their jobs over to New Jersey.

So he lost his work, just ended up in hard times, ended up on the streets, ended up found his way to the tunnel and was in the tunnel for a long period of time.

And then he was able to obtain one of these federal housing vouchers that allowed him to rent an apartment in the Bronx.

And then he lived in that apartment