strategies as well, although we recognize that the evidence for these strategies is
often indirect or speculative.
extreme poverty and that ending homelessness will, in the long run, require com-
bating poverty with "more opportunities for decent work, job training that leads
somewhere, necessary social services, better education, and affordable housing
[all as] components of comprehensive community planning and economic devel-
opment" (p. 84). The nearly 4,000 providers of homeless assistance, local officials,
and homeless and formerly homeless people it queried rated more affordable hous-
ing as the top priority (out of 15 options) for a federal plan to address homelessness
(p. 61). Such a plan exists, in the form of the National Housing Trust Fund bills
before both houses of Congress (http://www.nhtf.org). The bills provide for the
production, preservation, and rehabilitation by 2010 of 1.5 million rental units
targeted to low-income households. (See Jahiel, 1992, and Lindblom, 1991, for
additional proposals.)
from which large concentrations of homeless people come.
incomes below 50% of the area median who pay more than 50% of their income for
housing costs as having "worst-case" housing needs. These households may be at
substantial risk of homelessness. One way to estimate the costs of preventing
homelessness by attacking housing affordability directly is to calculate the differ-
ence between the amount that worst-case households can afford to pay and the
actual costs of their units (including rent and utilities other than telephone) per
annum. The total gap between 50% of the incomes of worst-case households and
housing costs was $14.3 billion in 1995. If we use the HUD standard that house-
holds should pay no more than 30% of their income for rent and utilities, the gap for
worst-case households was $22.5 billion in 1995. A more generous program to