Research

Homeless services play a critical role in addressing homelessness in the United States. Research has shown that unaffordable housing costs and poverty in a community are key predictors of homelessness. Yet, nonprofit organizations and social service providers also respond to other community factors such as diversity and urban setting. However, there is little research on the distribution of services and whether they overlap with the geographic distribution of community needs, housing needs, community diversity, and urbanicity, which undermines our understanding of the linkage between social services and communities and ability to tailor services to specific communities and populations. Thus, this paper aims to explore the distribution of homeless services, particularly their relations to common predictors of homelessness, and the extent to which these relationships vary by service types. By linking HUD's housing-inventory-count dataset with the 5-year samples of the American Community Surveys and using the zip code as the geographic unit, we found that housing needs in a community have a persistently strong relationship with the presence of services, even after controlling for other community characteristics. Additionally, while most zip codes with services are in central cities, suburbs also have a sizeable share of services.

Background

Neglect is a common form of child maltreatment and profoundly affects children's mental health globally. Self-compassion may help children cope with neglect but the role of self-compassion in neglect context has been understudied. This study identifies distinct patterns of self-compassion and child neglect and explores how neglect and self-compassion profiles correlate with child mental health.

Methods

The sample includes 3342 children aged 8–16 (49.6 % female) from a national survey of 29 provinces in China using a multistage sampling method. We used latent profile analysis to identify distinct profiles of self-compassion and neglect and examine their combined effects on child mental health, including both positive indicators (hope, resilience) and negative indicators (anxiety, depression, academic burnout, and peer problems).

Results

We identified four neglect/self-compassion profiles: Adaptable Self-Carers (average neglect/high self-compassion), Vulnerable Languishers (high neglect/low self-compassion), Stable Self-Soothers (low neglect/average self-compassion), and Opportune Thrivers (low neglect/high self-compassion). The Vulnerable Languishers group exhibited the poorest mental health outcomes, whereas the Opportune Thrivers showed the best outcomes. Adaptable Self-Carers, although experiencing more neglect than Stable Self-Soothers, had better mental health than the latter, possibly due to their greater self-compassion.

Limitations

The cross-sectional design limits our ability to determine causality, and the use of self-reported measures increases response bias risk.

Conclusions

More self-compassion and less neglect are associated with more positive mental health outcomes. Moreover, self-compassion is a potential protective factor against the adverse effects of neglect on child mental health. Fostering self-compassion may boost positive adjustment in children who have experienced neglect.

Mandated collaboration forces a tension, where organizations must work together to create a strong collaboration while pursuing their organizational missions. Merging these mandated collaborations can increase collaboration, but at the cost of local responsiveness. We ask whether merging mandated collaborations improves performance at the community, collaboration, and organization levels in the case of homeless services. We find merging CoCs did not significantly decrease homelessness or increase service provision, although collaboration increased. Additionally, chronic homelessness increased by an average of 30%. Our findings suggest merging mandated collaborations differentially affects performance depending on the level examined.

To synthesize and examine the growing literature on mandated collaboration, we conducted a critical literature review of the growing literature on mandated collaboration, asking what the field of public administration knows about its purposes, mechanisms, contexts, and performances. Mandated collaboration occurs when a third-party requires and enforces collaboration among other potential collaborators. We find four takeaways: 1) mandators require collaboration to address complex problems; 2) mandators enforce collaboration through hierarchical authority and market-based incentives; 3) mandated collaboration occurs across several policy contexts; 4) the context surrounding the collaboration affects its success. We conclude with three unknowns, regarding how mandated collaboration achieves policy goals, if mandators are collaborators, and the willingness of participants required to collaborate. Our review enhances public administration’s understanding of collaborative governance by offering insight into the governance tool of mandating collaboration, contexts under which it succeeds, and steps for future research.

Some scholars argue that equity cannot be a separate pillar of public management; it must intersect with its core theories and elements. By using mixed-methods in studying racial equity in homelessness, we forge connections between public management – leadership, planning, collaboration, budgeting, implementation, and evaluation – and social equity – representation, procedural fairness, access, quality, and outcomes – to develop the Social Equity for Wicked Problems (SEWP) framework. We find variation in how communities connect public management to equity. SEWP can help communities respond to systemic inequality and create equitable solutions when implementing policy to respond to wicked problems. 

While prior studies note that interlocal collaborations sometimes change their mem- ber composition, the relationship between membership changes and the community- level performance of interlocal collaborations is unclear. This study attempts toprovide evidence by exploring the impact of entrants on the performance of Illinois enterprise zones. We conducted event study analyses to estimate the plausibly causal relationship between entrants and community-level performance. We find that entrants improve the enterprise zones’ reported job creation, but the improvement takes effect over time. We also find that the positive effects are stronger for enterprise zones with fewer participants or located in rural areas

Collaborative governance has become prevalent in public service provision as both government and nonprofit sectors face pressure to solve multidimensional social problems in communities while improving performance. Drawing on collaborative governance and homeless services literature, this article explores how providing services in a collaborative governance network through government and nonprofit service providers differentially relates to multiple dimensions of performance — effectiveness, internal efficiency, social efficiency, and service heterogeneity — at the community level. By using a two-way fixed effects estimator and a unique nonprofit and homeless services dataset, the findings indicate that collaborative governance between government-nonprofit service providers relates to increased effectiveness (e.g., homelessness), and mixed results for service heterogeneity relative to using one sector. The composition of collaborative governance networks matters for performance, but its precise relationship with community-level performance depends on the specific aspect of performance.

The ways in which school districts measure homelessness among their students has implications for accountability and funding, as well as for supporting student success. Yet, measuring homelessness among high school students is challenging because students move in and out of experiencing it. Using administrative student-level data from a mid-sized public school district in the Southern United States, we show that different commonly used procedures to measure which students are considered homeless can yield markedly different estimates of high school graduation rates for these students. This is largely because of differences in how districts classify students who experience homelessness but later become housed. In order to address potentially negative effects of housing insecurity on academic achievement, it is important to first identify a common way to diagnose the problem.

What happens to local services’ performance when service-provider density increases in a community? The answer is difficult. To explore how density relates to multiple aspects of performance, this study aims to examine the effects of service-providers’ density on service outputs and policy outcomes. Using a panel dataset of local homeless service planning bodies, the Continuum of Care Programme, we found that service outputs improved; however, the prevalence of homelessness did not decrease. Drawing upon organizational density theory, our findings contribute to the extant knowledge on public management by exploring how service-provider density relates to service outputs and policy outcomes separately.

Government agencies use varying criteria in defining homelessness. While scholars debate over and use different definitions of homelessness, little research has explored the impacts the definition has on perceived problem severity and the types of communities receiving aid. I first explore four definitions of child and youth homelessness used by United States’ federal agencies. I then use panel data for school districts, which report homelessness by subgroup, to analyze how the definition of homelessness changes its prevalence and leads to disparate impacts. I find the definition of homelessness including students living doubled-up leads to a higher growth rate. Definitions also change which districts have high rates of homelessness and characteristics of these districts, suggesting resources following students experiencing homelessness go to different types of communities. Scholars should consider how a problem is defined, differences in the measurement used between studies, and how the definition affects where resources go.

What drives collaborating participants to leave collaborative arrangements? Collaboration is a dynamic and emergent process rather than a static condition. Previous studies focus on collaboration’s emergence and performance; few empirical studies examine why participants stop collaborating. We address this question by studying how the history and structure of the Illinois enterprise zone program relate to local governments’ renewing enterprise zone arrangements. Using probit models, we provide evidence that collaboration participants are less likely to drop out if the previous performance has been good when controlling for observable factors. Collaboration’s resource balance, stability, and participant similarity also relate to a lower likelihood of a participant’s dropping out of a collaboration.

Interjurisdictional spillovers can compromise the effectiveness of homeless assistance policy and service provision; individuals that become homeless in service deserts are forced to move to nearby communities with services. Specifically, the migration of people experiencing homelessness causes difficulties in accurately measuring the effectiveness of homeless assistance policies and hinders the establishment of measures aimed at ending homelessness at a local level. The present investigation helps fill this gap by exploring how local community effort aided by government-funded and nonprofit organizations relates to interjurisdictional outcomes. Our findings indicate that an increase in homeless services offered by nonprofit organizations in a community results in worse service outcomes (i.e., total beds per homeless person and homelessness) in neighboring communities, whereas simultaneously increasing the number of both government-funded and nonprofit organizations negates some of the negative spillovers. These findings augment the results yielded by previous research in this field, as they indicate that cross-sector collaboration can benefit the broader community and is more effective in reaching the vulnerable populations and reducing homelessness than only investing in government-funded and nonprofit-led efforts.   

How do homeless service deserts in rural communities relate to how people experience homelessness and migration to communities with services? We explore this relationship using a mixed-methods case study of Kentucky and a rich dataset with county-level data. The data include information on unsheltered homelessness and the number of people whose homelessness originated in each county which other data on homelessness typically do not publicly report. Combined with U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data on shelters and services, we find that people experiencing homelessness migrate to counties with more shelters. We show the importance of county-level data and data on originating homelessness for understanding homelessness and where to provide services to end it most effectively. Other states and homeless Continuums of Care can also provide public county-level data to clarify the geographic sources of homelessness and the relationship between services and migration.

Governments use multiple policies targeting different severities of housing insecurity to address multidimensional urban problems like homelessness, where poverty and unaffordable housing intertwine with many causes and contexts. Previous studies have focused on the determinants of housing insecurity or using affordable housing alone but not on how using multiple policies jointly reduces homelessness. We explore if affordable housing created by the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) complements homeless services through the housing security network in decreasing homelessness in communities. Utilizing a first-differenced model with panel data from 2007 to 2015, results indicate that LIHTC unit developments complement homeless services in moderately reducing homelessness when both policies are used relative to only using homeless services. Studying multiple policies addressing homelessness creates a useful application of theory on complementary policies to see how affordable housing with homeless services affects homelessness at the community level.