Outcomes Associated with Providing Secure, Stable, and Permanent Housing for People Who Have Been Homeless: An International Scoping Review

Abstract

As governments and service agencies across the world grapple with chronic rates of homelessness and housing instability, there is a growing need to understand the value that providing secure, stable housing brings to the lives of people who are homeless and the broader community. The complex nature of homelessness is revealed across a variety of academic fields including planning, pharmacology, urban affairs, housing policy, nutrition, psychiatry, sociology, public health, urban health, and criminology. We undertook a scoping review according to PRISMA-P (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analysis) that mapped the breadth and scale of the evidence-base and identified themes and gaps. We identified 476 reports and after excluding duplicates and ones that did not relate to our criteria, were left with 100 studies from eight countries. Each of them identified benefits and/or changes that occurred when people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity transitioned into a secure, stable home. Outcomes measured were distributed across a range of domains including physical and mental health, well-being, mortality rates, criminal justice interaction, service use, and cost-effectiveness. Findings varied by degree but overwhelmingly found improvements in all domains once people were permanently housed. Housing provided a foundation for people to envisage a better life and make plans for the future. As one woman who had fled a violent home was quoted as saying: “housing made everything else possible.” The research identified savings for taxpayers and the wider community once people left homelessness for the stability of a permanent home, even after factoring in the cost of housing and rental help. We found numerous gaps. For example, there was a prevalence of studies that focused on those who are visibly homeless, in particular chronically homeless men with mental illness and/or substance use issues. Much less research looked at women whose patterns of homelessness are more varied and even less at homelessness involving children and families. Women who had left domestic and family violence were investigated in a very small number of studies and sample sizes were small. Few reports undertook the complex task of quantifying and comparing cost savings. Other notable gaps were older women, older people more generally, refugees, recent migrants, veterans, Indigenous people and those with a disability.

Supportive Housing for the Vulnerable: Assessing the Health and Socio-economic Outcome of the Beneficiaries and Non-Beneficiaries in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria

“…Other socio-economic outcomes; 'improved self-esteem' (t (93) = 6.57, P < 0.05); "respect from neighbors" (t (93) = 6.10, P < 0.05); "social connection with the people" (t (93) = 4.28, P < 0.05); "improve income" (t (93) = 4.47, P < 0.05); and "happiness/fulfillment" (t (93) = 6.33, P < 0.05); were found to differ significantly between the two groups. These finding are inconsonance with those of Carremolla and Skinner (2021); Campo (2022); and Aubry and Pottte (2020) whom found significant improvement in the health and socio-economic outcome of the vulnerable groups that benefited from supporting housing schemes.…”

Indicators of job quality in the Australian aged care workforce: A scoping review

“…A scoping review was considered the most appropriate way to search and synthesise the relatively large collection of diverse studies published across a number of research fields as they relate to the residential aged care workforce. This systematic and rigorous approach to collating, mapping and visualising a high number of heterogeneous studies has been applied and described in publications reporting across a range of research fields 14,15 …”

“…The counts of studies in each job quality indicator can be visualised and compared as a stackable bar chart (Figure 1). This visualisation device has been applied in other scoping reviews where studies are heterogeneous and originate from a range of research fields and include relatively large numbers of studies 14,15 . In this paper, the colour‐coded stacking bar chart provides a useful visual representation of the spread and quantity of studies reporting across the suite of QuInnE job quality indicators.…”

Sustainability Assessment of a Low-Income Building: A BIM-LCSA-FAHP-Based Analysis

“…Despite the sector's relevance in the international economy, the United Nations (UN) estimates that about one billion people globally still live in inadequate buildings or do not have a place to live [6]. Access to adequate housing is an internationally recognized basic human right that plays an important role in society, providing citizens with dignity and security [7,8]. In Brazil, the housing deficit is approximately 6.2 million dwellings, which mainly affects low-income families [9][10][11].…”