Not sure why the article touts this as a new idea, unless the details are missed in its brevity. HUD provides funds to most cities to do this very thing already, though they may cater more toward families than to to chronically homeless individuals, which is a whole weird definition in itself http://ochmis.org/documents/Chronically%20Homeless%20Flowcha... Most people will recognize it as section 8, which has negative connotations. HUD-VASH http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/pub... provides the same thing for homeless veterans, case management included. It's easy to make the statistics look good when you narrow your definition of homeless to a small group and can afford to give them all housing. My experience with individuals who are classified as chronically homeless is that there is only a small chance of rehabilitating them into a "successful" member of society. edit: links are messing up, adding a close parenthesis to the end...
Or, failing that, you can afford to give them one-way bus tickets to send them somewhere else and make them someone else's problem. I can't recall any states doing that, but there are at least a handful of cities that have. People find many ways to make graphs slope the right way if graphs sloping the right way is what they're judged by. Also, here is how those graphs get made, and if you can follow it you're better off than anyone actually implementing it.t's easy to make the statistics look good when you narrow your definition of homeless to a small group and can afford to give them all housing.