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What housing and service interventions work best to reduce homelessness for families in the United States? The FamilyOptions Study randomly assigned 2,282 families recruited in homeless shelters across 12 sites to priority access to one of three active interventions or to usual care in their communities. The interventions were long-term rent subsidies, short-term rent subsidies, and transitional housing in supervised programs with intensive psychosocial services. In two waves of follow-up data collected 20 and 37 months later, priority access to long-term rent subsidies reduced homelessness and food insecurity and improved other aspects of adult and child well-being relative to usual care, at a cost 9 percent higher. The other interventions had little effect. The study provides support for the view that homelessness for most families is an economic problem that long-term rent subsidies resolve and does not support the view that families must address psychosocial problems to succeed in housing. It has implications for focusing government resources on this important social problem. C 2018 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

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Family break-up is common in families experiencing homelessness. This paper examines the extent of separations of children from parents and of partners from each other and whether housing and service interventions reduced separations and their precursors among 1,857 families across 12 sites who participated in the Family Options Study. Families in shelters were randomized to offers of one of three interventions: permanent housing subsidies that reduce expenditures for rent to 30% of families' income, temporary rapid re-housing subsidies with some services directed at housing and employment, and transitional housing in supervised facilities with extensive psychosocial services. Each group was compared to usual care families who were eligible for that intervention but received no special offer. Twenty months later, permanent housing subsidies almost halved rates of child separation and more than halved rates of foster care placements; the other interventions did not affect separations significantly. Predictors of separation were primarily homelessness and drug abuse (all comparisons), and alcohol dependence (one comparison). Although housing subsidies reduced homelessness, alcohol dependence, intimate partner violence, and economic stressors, the last three variables had no association with child separations in the subsidy comparison; thus subsidies had indirect effects via reductions in homelessness. No intervention reduced partner separations.

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A randomized experiment that measures the impact of a social policy in a sample of the population reveals whether the policy will work on average with universal application. An experiment that includes only the subset of the population that volunteers for the intervention generates narrower “proof-of-concept” evidence of whether the policy can work for motivated individuals. Both forms of learning carry value, yet evaluations rarely combine the two designs. The U.S. Social Security Administration conducted an exception, the Benefit Offset National Demonstration (BOND). This article uses BOND to examine the statistical power implications and potential gains in policy learning—relative to costs—from combining volunteer and population-representative experiments. It finds that minimum detectable effects of volunteer experiments rise little when one adds a population-representative experiment, but those of a population-representative experiment double or quadruple with the addition of a volunteer experiment.