Social Impact Evaluation of the project “Housing Plus!” to contrast adult homelessness in Rome

Title Evaluation of the project “Housing Plus! A home, a space of one’s own”

Location Rome, Italy

Duration September 2023 – September 2026

Client PsyPlus – Psicologia e Cooperazione ETS

 

Context

According to ISTAT 2021 data, about 22.000 people who are homeless or otherwise in housing distress live in the city of Rome, 23% of the national total. This is a sharp increase since the last census, and the number could be even higher given how difficult it is to identify the many homeless people who do not access local support services.

A plurality of studies confirms that the causes of homelessness are complex and multi-layered: poverty accompanied by inadequate support services and lack of easily accessible affordable housing; mental distress and/or pathological addictions (drugs and/or alcohol); fragile or absent social networks; stressful or traumatic events such as loss of relationships, family conflict, health problems, a history of foster care/adoption, major financial crises, unemployment or precarious employment; poor schooling; non-self-sufficiency; and experiences of deviance (risky behavior; post-prison).

The current approach to addressing severe adult marginalization – called “tiered model” – is limited to palliative, residual interventions from a purely welfare perspective and is mostly ineffective, as well as inefficient, in combating severe marginalization and overcoming homelessness. According to this model, housing is seen as the “rewarding outcome of a pathway for people who are considered deserving (if you stop drinking, stop using substances, if you behave well and according to the rules, if you undergo health and therapeutic treatments, etc., … then you will be rewarded).”

At present, the main public and private social services operating in the city of Rome follow this model and are treatment-centered, aiming almost exclusively at temporary accommodation, with limited lengths of stay, without the possibility of carrying out meaningful social and psychological support work with beneficiaries. Thus, such temporary accommodation is frequently abandoned in favour of a return to the street. It is difficult for people to undertake and continue therapeutic pathways also due to bureaucratic obstacles, lack of networking between local support organizations and poor integration between social and health services.

There is, however, an alternative model in the management of severe adult marginalization, based on empirical evidence, known as Housing First (HF). According to this approach, having a home is the basic condition for initiating a path of change. The model, which aims to overcome homelessness, prioritizes homeless people with mental distress and/or one or more pathological addictions. In this, too, it differs from the current model, eliminating barriers to entry and reaching precisely that population with complex and “chronic” needs (who have been living on the streets for a long time) that cannot find answers in the current system. The HF program reverses the current approach, not by offering predefined, standardized and homogenizing services, but by centering the intervention on respecting people’s subjectivity and real needs, providing them with a home and thus enabling them to focus their energies on rebuilding their lives.

 

General Objective

The Inclusive Development Unit was involved in conducting a social impact assessment study of the individualised care intervention envisaged by “Housing Plus!”, a project aimed at combating severe adult marginality and homelessness in the Municipality of Rome through the use of the Housing First model.

 

Our contribution

The evaluation covers the entire project duration and involves all stakeholders: direct beneficiaries, communities, project team and partners, as well as key stakeholders, with a focus on three aspects:

Learning
The information produced by the evaluation will allow the project experience to be capitalized into learnings and best practices, which can be used by partners to redesign the next cycles of activities.

Advocacy
Since Housing Plus! was also created with the intention of contributing to change the current approach to tackling homelessness, the impact evaluation is also seen as a potential source of data relevant to the advocacy work envisioned by the project. For this reason, the evaluation strategy includes methods designed to provide results that can be easily disseminated even to a generalist audience.

Empowerment
In line with the objectives of the project, the involvement of beneficiaries and stakeholders in evaluation activities will help strengthen their awareness of the key issues of “Housing Plus!”.

The evaluation design thus consists of two main strands of analysis, requiring the application of two distinct evaluation methods:

  • – A cost-effectiveness analysis, comparing the intervention model proposed by “Housing Plus!” with the alternative currently in place in the context of the City of Rome, in order to identify the most efficient approach to address the social inclusion of homeless people.
  • – A study of the project’s impact on beneficiaries’ multidimensional well-being, through periodic interviews with all beneficiaries, conducted using the Life Course method. The repetition of the interviews through time allows for an in-depth study of the peculiar experience of each individual beneficiary and a close observation of the evolution of their well-being over the course of the project.

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