(Photo by Levi Meir Clancy / Unsplash+)
Year after year, homelessness continues to rise in the United States. Last year, over 650,000 people experienced homelessness on a given night, 28% of whom resided in California. Not surprisingly, homelessness is ballooning in and around San Francisco. The Bay Area’s steep cost of living and competitive housing market are challenging for low-income families, who often spend an unsustainable share of their income on rent and are left vulnerable to losing their housing.
These alarming trends highlight the urgent need for new, effective pathways to help low-income families maintain stable housing. Collaboration between researchers and practitioners — like in our recent basic income project, It All Adds Up — is key to identifying and scaling these pathways.
Productive research partnerships involve directly connecting service providers who have expertise in supporting clients and leveraging data, with researchers who can execute rigorous studies designed to measure how well different service interventions work.
It All Adds Up, also known as the Bay Area Thriving Families study, is an ambitious, Google.org-funded randomized evaluation (also known as an RCT) providing 450 families who recently experienced homelessness with either $50 or $1,000 in unrestricted cash assistance each month for one year. Currently underway in the Bay Area, the project is a collaboration between our teams at Compass Family Services, Hamilton Families and New York University’s Furman Center Housing Solutions Lab to study the impact of cash assistance on housing stability for families exiting housing services.
Our partnership is a direct response to two trends we’ve observed in our work as homeless service providers and housing researchers. First, while research has shown that programs like rapid re-housing can successfully house families, we know that some families reenter the shelter system after their subsidies — which are often intended to be short-term — end. Second, a growing body of research suggests that direct cash transfers (sometimes known as “basic income”) can positively affect myriad outcomes for low-income families, ranging from child brain development to emergency room visits.
This evidence is promising, but very little is known specifically about cash transfers’ impact on housing stability or for people experiencing homelessness. Policymakers, researchers, and practitioners, including our own organizations, posit that providing cash assistance may help families maintain housing stability when their time-limited subsidies expire.
Our trio of organizations was convened to address this critical question and provide decision-makers with new evidence to invest in and scale effective solutions.
Randomized evaluations and robust research partnerships like ours require a combination of technical research skills and a firm understanding of the practical, ethical and equity considerations essential to any policy intervention. Collaborations between providers and researchers therefore enable us to answer policy-relevant research questions using methods that are simultaneously rigorous, equitable and inclusive.
But these partnerships can be challenging to launch and sustain. Our team has identified several strategies that have helped us foster a successful research collaboration over the past few years, which we hope others may find useful:
Find the right partners. While it can be difficult to identify prospective partners, there are resources out there to help. Many academic labs, like The Housing Solutions Lab, provide technical assistance and research support to local government and practitioner partners to help design, launch, and evaluate local policy efforts. Some organizations, such as J-PAL North America, connect providers and researchers with similar research questions and a shared commitment to understanding impact. Funders can also aid in partnership development.
Upon entering a partnership, it’s important to know what you’re looking for. The Housing Solutions Lab seeks partners who truly want to understand the impact of their program and learn from the results, and where research findings have national policy relevance; at Compass and Hamilton, we were looking for researchers who could build upon our internal evaluation and practice expertise to carry out a randomized evaluation.
Identify complementary capacities. Researcher-practitioner partnerships offer unique opportunities to build teams that complement each other’s constraints. For example, while we have internal evaluation staff at Hamilton and Compass, we didn’t have experience running randomized evaluations. Partnering with researchers allowed us to learn about rigorous evaluation methodologies and share project responsibilities. Likewise, at the Housing Solutions Lab, our study designs benefit tremendously from our work with local partners who know the context on the ground and can elevate the most pertinent research questions.
Respect each other’s expertise. Service providers are experts in their program model, their context and the communities they serve. Many providers, such as Compass and Hamilton, also have robust data infrastructures. Researchers are experts in designing and running high-quality evaluations, such as RCTs. Rigorous, policy-relevant studies can only occur when both of these knowledge bases are leveraged and celebrated equitably. For example, the Hamilton team initially believed it was essential to work with researchers based in San Francisco because of the unique housing market and cost of living. However, we quickly realized the benefits of partnering with the Housing Solutions Lab, which has complementary knowledge of another high-cost living area — New York City.
Stay focused on common goals and priorities. Despite approaching a project with different lenses, it’s important for researchers and practitioners to share a big-picture vision for their work together. When conflicting priorities have arisen, our team has been able to work through them with mutual respect by returning to the primary reason we came together: to learn the best way to support families in staying housed after short-term subsidies end.
For Compass and Hamilton, understanding the impact of our cash transfer programs is essential for best serving our families, advancing our organizational missions and advocating for effective policy change within the state. For the Housing Solutions Lab, we know that partnering with practitioners to design and rigorously test innovative practices is key to solving homelessness. Because of the productive partnership between our organizations, we’re both closer to our goals.
This article is part of Backyard, a newsletter exploring scalable solutions to make housing fairer, more affordable and more environmentally sustainable. Subscribe to our weekly Backyard newsletter.