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establishing the National Housing Trust Fund (described above) would be an
important step in this direction.

If universal strategies, or selected strategies directed at abjectly poor people or

those with worst-case housing needs, were employed nationwide, evaluation of
their discrete contributions to homelessness prevention would be difficult. If they
were applied in particular states or communities, evaluation might be possible
using time series designs to compare prevalence rates of homelessness in locales
with the programs to those without in nearby states or communities subject to the
same general economic or social trends.

In our opinion, we should study the impact of saturating several geographi-

cally dispersed communities with new Section 8 certificates available to those with
worst-case housing needs, possibly in conjunction with empowerment zones. But
Section 8 certificate holders need income as well as housing. In the wake of the
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and the
collapse of GA, we ought to test selected employment strategies modeled on the
Job Corps but modified to include single parents and those with impairments that
do not reach the level of a work disability, as evaluated by the Social Security
Administration. Such programs would address the failures of GA and the home-
lessness of poor, young parents whose transition from adolescence to adulthood,
from family of origin to independent household, historically was aided by welfare
and, in recent years, seems frequently to have incorporated stays in shelter.

To compare variations on such approaches, housing subsidies and income

subsidies, supported work, and public employment could be combined in some
places with social services (including representative payee or rent voucher provi-
sions) for substance abusers and people with a serious mental illness. As suggested
earlier, there is some evidence that direct rent payment may be an important predic-
tor of long-term stability in housing, and thus it warrants a separate experimental
condition. Both participants' access to housing and income supports and services
such as "case management" need to be carefully specified, however. To the extent
that case management provides access to housing and income, studies that find that
it contributes to housing stability, but leave its actual activities unexamined, may
obscure the most critical elements of case management's success.

Finally, Culhane et al.'s (1996) findings on the neighborhoods from which shel-

ter dwellers come suggest the relevance of selected prevention programs that both
provide services to individuals and families and utilize community development and
community organization methods to enhance the financial, human, and social capital
of such immiserated areas. Such programs deserve a test. We do not share Culhane

The Prevention of Homelessness Revisited

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the most affordable state in the nation, West Virginia, the "housing wage" needed to afford a two-
bedroom unit, $8.12, exceeds the minimum wage by nearly $3.00. (To view statistics for your commu-
nity, see Out of Reach 2000 at the National Low Income Housing Coalition's website <http://www.
nlihc.org>.)