How government and business are tackling the global housing crisis on government’s future frontiers

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Homelessness and housing insecurity are growing issues across the globe. And the statistics are staggering: According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than 500,000 Americans experienced homelessness in 2022.¹ At least 895,000 people experience homelessness on any given night across the European Union, according to a report from the Federation of National Organizations Working with the Homeless.² According to the United Nations, 1.6 billion people worldwide live in inadequate housing conditions.³

But there are a few bright spots in the fight against housing insecurity. Government programs, not-for-profit services, and new private sector offerings are making a measurable difference in the lives of people experiencing homelessness.

In this episode, we speak with Josh Hjartarson and Lydia Murray about on-the-ground realities and the programs that are moving the needle. Hjartarson is global leader for Human Services at Deloitte Canada. In addition to serving as Managing Director for Government & Public Services for Deloitte Consulting LLP, Murray took a leave of absence to lead a homeless services organization in Chicago during the pandemic.

There’s no single cause of homelessness—hence, there’s no single, easy, one-size-fits-all solution. “Needs will vary across cities, across neighborhoods, and empowering communities to get together to determine what the needs are in their community and how best to serve those needs is critical,” Hjartarson said. “When I talk to governments and policymakers, they’re often worried about their internal machinations and they’ll set up new departments and new programs. And that just layers new obligations onto the community. I challenge them on that thinking. These problems aren’t necessarily solved in cabinet offices—they’re solved at the local level. So, the answer to the question has to be, how do we enable?”

We look at one country’s approach, which is on track to eliminate homelessness in the next five years, an innovative offering from a major bank that serves clients with no permanent address, and a program that’s making a measurable difference for families in the United Kingdom. Finally, we take a look why spending money to provide these solutions pays dividends into government coffers.

Q: Take a tour around any of the planet’s largest cities and you may find people living in tents, beneath underpasses, and simply on the streets. And while it’s not as visible, you’ll find more couch-surfing, moving between temporary accommodations, trying to find an affordable place to stay—and many people who are a paycheck away from missing rent.

What you’re about to hear is the reality for some of the 150 million people worldwide experiencing homelessness.⁴

Speaker 1: Well, I lost my job and my apartment within two weeks of each other, two years ago.

Speaker 2: Well, day to day, I just try to earn enough money to eat, a little extra money if I can. I'm trying to get a room. I have a plan to learn how to drive big trucks. I'm disabled and homeless.

Speaker 3: I'm living on nothing right now. I have US$0.39 on my food stamp card and gas.

Speaker 4: I panhandle for money for food. We do odd jobs here and there through three people that I met here, just struggling day to day. Well, I do sometimes I try and that gets I know of people and go in another store where you get an evening meal, a shower, they wash your clothes, a bed. That's all I begged for. I'm not an alcoholic. I'm not a drug addict.

Speaker 5: Homelessness is very degrading, embarrassing, self-loathing. People shout all kinds of names. People look at you like you’re dirty. People look at you like you're a bomb, that you're an addict, that you're drunk, that you use all kinds of drugs.

Speaker 6: People think that we are [addicts]. They treat us that way. Then they don't have to see the problem. You don't have to recognize the problem for what it is.

Speaker 7: We’re homeless, but we’re not stupid. We’re not uneducated. Some of these people out here have degrees. And it’s just crazy how intelligent and how hardworking some of these people truly are. My bachelor’s degree is in special education and elementary education. My master’s degree is in adult education. I was en route to completing my second master’s in clinical mental health therapy. I'm 60 years old. I worked 35 years. I’m a college graduate. I have no record. I have never been arrested or accused of anything. And I sleep on the sidewalk. We are not bad people. We’re human, too. And we deserve the same amount of respect and the same amount of love and opportunities that somebody who isn’t on the streets [has]. You know what I mean? We are human. That’s the number one thing I want people to know is that we’re human.

Speaker 8: Hope to make enough money for beer and cigarettes. I eat food entirely out of dumpsters. That’s why you caught me coming out of here. What’s the future going to be? …. It does get to the stage where you think, “Well, what's the point? Is there any worth of life?”

Q: The voices of Michelle, Anthony, Cynthia, John, Serenity, Larry, Ed, Sean, Dennis and Brenda

Their voices have been recorded and documented by Mark Hovarth, the man behind Invisible People. He tells the stories of those living off the radar, those who feel invisible. He was inspired to start this because he experienced homelessness himself.

Mark Hovarth: Many years ago, I had a great job in the television industry, and I ended up homeless on Hollywood Boulevard.

I want to tell you that I started Invisible People because I wanted to make the world a better place. But the truth is, I was just giving myself a purpose to get up in the morning.

It was a really scary time. I grabbed a camera, and I went out and started interviewing homeless people. And there was some strategy behind it, because as somebody that was experiencing homelessness, I saw how there was a disconnect from what the general public knew about homelessness and homeless people, and also service providers, the people that are working to help homeless people. Now, obviously, your frontline outreach workers have direct [contact], but your executives and mid-level management and people making the decisions that affect homeless people’s lives go without any direct contact with the people that they're trying to help. And it just didn't make sense to me.

Q: The world is facing a crisis of homelessness and housing insecurity that has been growing for decades. It’s a manifestations of poverty, discrimination, and inequality. It affects people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds. And, according to United Nations figures, globally, 1.6 billion people worldwide live in inadequate housing conditions. The United Nations has also noted an alarming rise in homelessness in the last 10 years.

And because there’s no single cause, so there’s no single solution. This issue of housing insecurity is a textbook wicked problem that’s too big for any one entity to solve.

But here at Government’s Future Frontiers—that’s just the kind of problem we like to tackle.

I’m your host, Tanya Ott, and in this episode, we’re discussing approaches and programs that have made a measurable difference in the fight against housing precarity.

I am joined by two guests with a wealth of experience from working in this area. First, Josh Hjartarson is global leader for the Human Services at Deloitte Canada, based in Toronto. I asked if addressing housing insecurity and homelessness was simply a moral issue.

Josh Hjartarson: There’s a very human dimension to this. [There’s a] moral imperative around doing a better job in helping these individuals. There’s also—it’s becoming clearer and clearer—a resounding economic imperative. There are hundreds of studies now, which validate the fact that addressing root causes and helping these individuals find sustained housing, sustained employment integration in their community, saves hundreds of millions of dollars.

Q: Those savings come from health care costs, judicial system costs, [and] social services costs. But mapping out those savings may be difficult.

Hjartarson: Every situation and every family is different. And actually, I think that’s one of the challenges in our society: We make a whole lot of assumptions about the causes of homelessness and assume everyone fits into a bucket of root causes that we can serve [with] particular program prescriptions, if you want to call it that. But really, the situation for every single individual out there, every single family, is different. For some people, it’s addiction. Their inability to find and keep sustain employment. For others, it’s issues related to domestic violence and the fact that they’re forced out of their homes. Every individual’s experience is different, and we need to respond in terms of addressing those root causes relative to those individual needs—and that’s one of the underlying challenges here. The causes are multiple, but they’re very different depending on each person in each family’s situation.

The problem is compounded by the fact that you probably have a program budget for addiction. You’ll have a program budget for homelessness. You’ll have a program budget for children experiencing precarity in the home. Then you’ll have a separate program budget for family violence. And you have bureaucracies that sit on top of all of these.

Q: And those bureaucracies may not share data on costs—and those savings Hjartarson mentioned earlier.

Hjartarson: A lot of the savings are highly dispersed. They don’t roll back into a single department. And so that the business case at a very individual and programmatic level is very hard to make. But if we take a whole-of-government or a whole-of-human-services or a whole program approach and begin to integrate those better, we get better outcomes at the moral individual level, but also at the at the Treasury level right now.

Q: My second guest has a unique dual perspective on the issue of housing insecurity and the fight against homelessness. Lydia Murray is managing director for Government & Public Services for Deloitte Consulting LLP, based in Chicago. But she also has been deeply involved with Lincoln Park Community Services, a homeless services organization in Chicago, for about 20 years. In fact, she took a sabbatical from Deloitte to serve as interim executive director—just as COVID was shutting down the city.

I asked Murray to give me an idea of how the organization was funded.

Lydia Murray: [The United States has] a Federal Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) that spends about US$7 billion a year on homeless services. They give those directly mostly to big cities, and they set up these things called continuum of care. So, there’s 400 continuums of care across the country that they fund directly and then they fund the states for handling rural areas and nonurban areas.

When I was running the shelter in Chicago, I had direct funding from HUD to me. I had funding from the city. I had funding from lots of foundations that I had to go get money from. I had funding from private donors. And I had all sorts of different reports that I’d report out on different cycles like how I’m doing. And it was a challenge to piece together all of those streams for all the different beds and which bed got which dollar was a real challenge.

Q: That’s what it looked like for one organization in one city. How does it look at a state[wide] level?

Murray: So [for] the Commonwealth of Kentucky, for example, there are three continuums of care: Louisville, and they have a nonprofit that [they] delegated to that gets the funding; Lexington, [which] the county, Fayette County, runs; and then, Kentucky gets the rest of the funding for everyone else. And they patchwork that in with other nonprofits and with corporate donations to try to piece together how they solve homelessness. It’s really a mixed way to approach it.

Q: This mixed approach can cause some confusion. Hjartarson has what may seem like a counterintuitive suggestion to address this.

Hjartarson: Sometimes government just has to get out of the way. There are various models globally around, for example, pooled budgets where you say, we as program areas are actually going to pool the funding, devolve it, and allow the community to decide how to allocate so we don’t get into the problems of supply and demand dispatches.

Q: It’s a problem Murray knows well.

Murray: One of the programs that we had was permanent supportive housing. Getting somebody into a unit and then providing wraparound services. And those are really a scarce commodity. Every community in the United States has a list of who is the neediest and wants to give those units to them, which is a worthy objective. But my experience, even in a pandemic, was I would have vacant, permanent supportive housing units come available and it would take me weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks to get that filled, even though there was a pandemic going on, because of the inspection. And then we couldn’t find the top person on the list, and we wanted to be fair and make sure that they have it and try to find the next person. And just getting someone in the unit was an incredibly bureaucratic and painful process that I think there are times when the government can get out of the way, and it can help the situation.

Q: Permanent supportive housing is the hallmark of an approach called Housing First. Murray says that’s the principal HUD is working on, but to really see Housing First in action on a large scale, we need to go overseas.

Juha Kaakinen: We had a national program since 2008 where the Housing First [approach] is in the core of all the work.

Q: That’s Juha Kaakinen, chief executive officer of Y-Foundation, a Finnish NGO that buys apartments to provide social housing for those experiencing homelessness.

Before 2008, Finland followed a common approach to the problems of homelessness and housing insecurity.

Kaakinen: If you end up being homeless and you have some kind of mental-health or substance-abuse issues, then you should first take care of those before you can even dream about getting a home of your own.

Q: Now?

Kaakinen: First, people need [a] home as a foundation to take care of other challenges in their lives and that’s how it goes.

For some people, they want to work with their mental-health Issues. And they want to work with their substance-misuse issues, and those kinds of things. And some people, they might have a clear plan that at some point in their life, in the future, they want to get back to school or start working again.

Q: Finland transitioned shelters and temporary accommodations into permanent housing.

Kaakinen: That is one of the main differences between Finland and many other countries.

I think for many years, we were the only country in the whole world—at least in Europe—where the number of homeless people actually went down. But of course, now we have another good example as well, like Denmark and Austria. And of course, we are really happy about that.

Q: This wasn’t necessarily an easy transition.

Kaakinen: At some point during the last 20 [or] 40 years, [the government had] privatized a lot of the affordable housing [available] and then they haven’t built more. And then, I think now we are seeing the consequences of those actions.

Q: That’s where Y-Foundation comes in.

Kaakinen: We own around 20,000 apartments around Finland, and we build affordable housing and then we also buy individual apartments from the free market and then rent them to the people in need.

Seeing someone getting the home and the support they need, and they can start their life again that sort of […] feels great and that’s why we are doing this, and we are not done until everyone has that opportunity.

Q: And the results?

Kaakinen: In Helsinki, there are under 900 homeless persons and then out of those 900 around I would say 80% are living with their friends and relatives.

Overall, in Finland, the total number of homeless people is 3,686. It has been decreasing for the past many, many years. But one homeless person is one too many.

We would like to end homelessness in Finland by the end of 2027.

Q: Josh, what’s your view of what Finland has done?

Hjartarson: I’m not surprised that your case study came from Finland. The Scandinavian countries are better at what we call the “social return on investment” approach—understanding that getting someone into stable housing will save money in the long run.

What I like about the model that you just described is the fact that you don’t have to solve people’s problems prior to putting them into sustainable housing. [It’s] the first step in the path to stability and reintegration into the community. I’m a huge fan of the approach and I wish it was more common than it is.

Murray: In the United States, Housing First has been the standard that HUD has been shifting dollars towards for a couple of decades now. It is supported by decades of research that [asking the most vulnerable to] earn their way to get an apartment by swearing themselves off drugs or completing a 12-step program or finding a job or being worthy of getting housing is not the right approach. It is getting housing first [and] putting in wraparound supportive services [after that] that gets people stable and has long-term impacts.

The challenge is that it is more expensive than emergency shelters or congregate care. And to actually do Housing First in the United States, you have to tackle the challenges that have been made over decades and decades and decades of the supply of affordable housing.

Q: A broader approach to housing insecurity incorporates ... well, I’ll let Michelle Flynn tell you.

Michelle Flynn: The work that we do every day, all day—24 hours a day—is to be a place where people can come when they have nowhere else to go. We operate crisis programs. We operate street outreach for families. We operate crisis shelters with support services are what we call our homeless resource centers for families, for single men, and for single women, to make sure that we have that resource available.

Q: Flynn is executive director of The Road Home in Salt Lake City, Utah. And she has a sobering report from the front lines in the fight against housing insecurity.

Flynn: I think it’s the most challenging time in my 28 years of doing this work that we’ve seen around homelessness.

What we’re seeing now is a spike that’s been going on at unprecedented levels in the cost of rental housing. So, we’re not only struggling to help people get into a place they can afford. We’re also seeing a big increase of people knocking on our doors, looking for help, being afraid that they need to come in for shelter because they can’t make it anymore in housing because their rents are increasing hundreds of dollars a month. Cost of food is very high. The inflation of daily living expenses has continued and people who aren’t making a lot of money are hit the hardest when that happens.

By the time people show up at our front doors, they’ve been through crises, they’ve been through traumatic events, they’ve used every single support they have out their friends, families, any savings they may have had, and their needs are tremendous.

Speaker 1: Can you please help us? We just need a place to stay. This is priceless to me. Okay. You’re all set. Do you have any questions? When can we move in? While we can get your things. The road home provides some supplies for you to move in, and we can go over there right now. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Homelessness doesn’t discriminate. It can happen to anyone.

Q: That’s from a short produced to bring home the scope of the issue.

Flynn: The first thing that needs to change is for people to understand that helping each other out in the community is essential to all of us. And so, moving away from judging people or assuming things about people that may led to the fact that they don’t happen to have a roof over their heads, but they might be exactly like you and me or your neighbor at that time. They just don’t have a roof over their heads because what led them to that was different than what's happened in your life.

There is a lot of judging of people or assuming things about people who are experiencing homelessness. That needs to change so that people understand why it’s important to get together and help.

And we have a real shortage of long-term housing that has rental assistance in some way associated with it. The waitlists for that kind of housing are years long in our community and people really need to have some help. We provide some help. We have some funding that helps people pay a deposit or pay some utilities, help them with the first couple of months of rent. But with the rents as high as they are now, those dollars are not going as far. So that’s kind of the state that we’re in right now.

We have about a thousand people that we provide shelter to last night. We would love to see that number go down and we would love to see it go down because our community’s doing a better job of keeping people in their homes so that when they do reach that point, it’s not as if they’re calling, but they have somewhere else where they can go and get help. And therefore, we don’t need as many shelter beds and that the housing is affordable so that we can help people up move out more quickly and our facilities really can be used for that short term that for which they are intended. And that is the place where only people have nowhere else to go can come, and that we really are able to help them quickly get back into their own home.

And then for a small number, particularly those individuals who have been chronically homeless, have been homeless for a long time, have disabilities, mental health disabilities, physical disabilities and others, we do operate some housing programs that have intensive on-site support services for the long term, but we’re very targeted in the type of housing we provide.

The goal for most people who are experiencing homelessness is to move back into the community in some kind of housing that they can continue and be connected with those other agencies out there who can help them with affordable day care or transportation so they can get to work and not lose their job and still be able to stay in their home.

Our hope when the people leave us from our crisis shelters is that we’re helping them weave that support around them and they’re just like every other community member and they don’t look back and they’re not connected with the road home anymore. You know, that was a brief blip in their lives, and they’re now integrated in the community. They know where to go to get help. They don’t have to come back into a shelter. That’s our ultimate goal.

Q: Lydia, have you heard about the Road Home?

Murray: I have not. But I am familiar with organizations like Road Home. There is another one in Washington—Washington, D.C.—called Home Stretch. And it really is meeting the person where they’re at and what their needs are.

And it’s not one-size-fits-all in the organization that I’m involved with in Chicago. We do have permanent supportive housing. We also have interim-shelter housing. And one of the things Home Stretch does, I think the program in Utah does, as well as letting people stay as long as they need to get stable. That’s one of the things that’s key. You definitely need to meet somebody where there are with the barriers that they have and have wraparound services in place and the time to get stable.

Q: Success stories based on the Housing First model are emerging in the United States. Take, for example, the city of Houston and its surrounding counties. I asked Sylvester Turner, the outgoing mayor of Houston, what advice he had for leaders in other metropolitan areas.

Sylvester Turner: Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. No one group can do this by itself.

Q: In 2011, Houston had the fifth largest homeless population in the US.

Turner: We had as many as 18,000 homeless. We decided that we needed to be more holistic and more collaborative in our approach. Since 2011, the city of Houston has reduced homelessness by 60 to 65 percent.

When I came in in 2016, [we were] pulling together all of the NGOs, about 100 of them, [under] one umbrella, the Coalition for the Homeless, what we refer to as The Way Home. I doubled down on those strategies that we had put in place, and that number has continued to go down. 

The last count that we had—and we do [a count] every January—that number was about 3,000.

Q: Other cities in the United States have taken notice.

Turner: In the last two years, we have had a number of mayors from across the country that have come to the city of Houston to look at what we are doing. The mayors, for example, of Chicago, Los Angeles [and] Denver have all been to the city of Houston just in this year.  

Q: It’s easy to see why.  

Turner: What we have found is when we placed people in housing with wraparound services, two years after the fact, 90 percent of those persons are still effectively housed.

Q: But Turner says it’s important not to get lost in statistics.

Turner: When we are dealing with those who are homeless and living on our streets, we describe them based on numbers. These are persons with names. They are someone's father, mother, sister, brother.

Mayors know how to fill a pothole. [We] have people on our streets for whatever reasons, [experiencing] potholes in their lives. And the question is, what can we do to fill those potholes, address their needs, stand them up so that they can live very productive, dignified lives?

It’s not just about addressing people that are on our streets today. It’s about addressing transitioning them to a better place, but also reducing the number of people who are coming to the pipeline, falling through the cracks and ending up on our streets.

Q: Josh, once again that word collaboration has come up. But it’s not just between the NGOs.

Hjartarson: More and more, we’re hearing or seeing examples of what they call coproduction, meaning that the individual and/or the family are really at the center of what’s happening around them and the services that they need and the help that they get. What’s common across many of these successful [organizations] shows is that the individual and the family are actually at the center of what their so-called care plan is or what their planned stability or plan to reintegration is. They are the best-positioned to understand what their needs are.

More and more, we’re seeing examples where the front line of service delivery are people with lived experience or so-called experts by experience. And there’s this great organization out of the United Kingdom called the National Expert Citizens Group, which participates [not only] in the design of these programs, but also in the delivery and then the evaluation and the continuous improvement. I think that’s empathy and dignity where the individual or the family has a critical role in the planning [and] execution of the services around them.

The UK government [is] sponsoring some of the most innovative approaches to this problem. I tell everyone that I know about the program called Fulfilling Lives and Changing Futures, which is designed to wrap around an individual and address the root causes. It shows real success in actually helping people off the streets, but also in the amount of money that can be saved by supporting individuals in getting them off the street and wrapping supports around them.

Q: The next example we have of a groundbreaking step that has been made to assist those living in housing poverty originated in the United Kingdom and was first tried out in the city of Liverpool. It’s especially notable because it’s an example for the private sector of a company using its strengths to address one of the factors contributing to housing insecurity.

HSBC is a multinational bank based in the United Kingdom that has designed a bank account specifically for those caught in the vicious cycle of not being able to claim benefits or work because they have no bank account, and not being able to have a bank account because they don’t have a permanent place to live.

It’s a small idea, but it could be a huge step change. Here’s a clip from their promotional ad …

Speaker 1: No address. No address. No bank account. No bank account. No job. No job. No home. No home. No address. No address. No bank account. No bank account. No job. No job. No home.

Speaker 2: While working with charities like Shelter to provide a bank account for people who are homeless, together we can build a new different search. HSBC, UK. No fixed address.

Q: We spoke with Maxine Pritchard, who heads the Financial Inclusion and Vulnerability team at HSBC, to learn more about the program.

Maxine Pritchard: Having access to a bank account is absolutely fundamental in today’s society. Not only you need a bank account for receiving benefits and salary, but it's also a building block for that sort of long-term financial security and financial independence.

Traditionally in the United Kingdom, certainly banks would require documentation from any prospective customer to prove who they are, perhaps in the form of a passport or driving license, [to prove] where they live. So that might be in the form of an energy bill, the council tax bill, documents that if you're homeless, are very difficult to keep hold of if you're moving from temporary accommodation to temporary accommodation.

We worked closely with Shelter, who are a housing and homelessness charity in the United Kingdom  along with a number of other charity partners to identify what we could do to solve to solve the problem.

The important thing that we learned from working with Shelter is rough sleeping is the tip of the iceberg of the homelessness problem. There is a much bigger population of people that are in temporary accommodation and moving between temporary accommodation. That’s probably actually where we’re more focused with this account.

Q: Pritchard emphasizes that partnerships with not-for-profit service organizations are key to making the program a success.

Pritchard: You don’t have all the knowledge in one place. We understand the banking sector. We understand the rules and regulations that are part of the banking sector. We needed Shelter’s insight and Shelter’s support to really understand the barriers and the reality that homeless people are facing and then work together to find the solution.

Q: HSBC has created a standardized approach to opening accounts—an approach they want to share.

Pritchard: We worked with Shelter to set up the scheme so that other financial institutions can also use the same service so that you’re giving consumers [the] choice. It shouldn’t just be the only place that you can get an account is HSBC. We want to see that people have the opportunity to choose a bank that works for them. And that’s really important to us. So that service scheme is open to all providers.

Since we started the pilot in 2019. We’ve opened over 5,500 accounts. And then, we also have a very similar service that supports survivors of modern slavery and human trafficking, and that has also seen that we’ve opened almost 3,000 accounts. It’s incredible.

Q: How important are programs like this?

Hjartarson: More and more governments are moving to electronic delivery of benefits, which necessitates a bank account. Providing banking services to the otherwise[-banked], under[banked], or nonbanked is a critical aspect of a person’s journey back to just build stability for sure.

Q: What are some of the other initiatives that you find notable?

Murray: In my experience, working at a homeless shelter in Chicago, when I would sit and listen and hear people’s stories, there is definitely a connection between health and homelessness. And often the root cause was something related to health care. Whether it was an addiction or just that one health condition that put them [on] the downward spiral.

One of the things that I’m excited about in the United States is some of the moves of we have a system called Medicaid that 1 in 5 Americans received their health benefits. In the state of Oregon, they have a waiver and a pilot program to use those Medicaid dollars for housing and rents for people who are homeless and in danger. So, the Housing and Urban Development, spends about US$7 billion on homelessness. The Medicaid is about a US$700 billion program. And so, if we use some of those dollars accounted allocated for medical costs for housing, we will actually lower our overall medical costs.

Q: Josh, are there pilot programs you’re watching?

Hjartarson: The Changing Futures program was based on a UK pilot program. Coproduction, as they call it, was critical and the government of the United Kingdom has actually scaled that program. They’ve invested several hundred million pounds in scaling this across the country. I always point to that program as a good example, and they’ve done something similar for at the family level. They started a program called Troubled Families, again, designed to provide, wraparound supports for families who are at risk of losing their children to address root causes. And that has been scaled as well. [That is] a great example of an evidence-based approach, evidence generated at the pilot prototype, and then scaled. Again, [there are] fantastic impacts and outcomes at the individual and the family level, but also a recognition from the Treasury that this is actually a good return.

We’ve seen all sorts of virtuous pilots all over the world that are demonstrating the impact [but] for some reason they don't scale. We’re working on what we’re calling the architecture of these approaches, how government can actually move towards scaling them. And at the foundation is really understanding and creating what are called social return on investment approaches so that you collect the data so that you actually measure and assess the impact both at the individual, moral level, but also in the aggregate on the Treasury level. And once there’s popular understanding or common understanding of the case for these types of approaches, I think that’s going to be a critical success for success factor as well. Otherwise, we’ll be condemned to just pilot after pilot after pilot and I can point to dozens and dozens and dozens of pilots that are showing the same impact. We need to do a better job of broadcasting the business cases for us for these programs.

Q: We started the episode talking about the business case, as it were, for tackling homelessness and housing insecurity—so we’ve come full circle. But should we have to make a business case? Should helping others need justification?

Murray: You ask a big, big philosophical question, so I’m [going to get] philosophical with you. My dad’s a pastor. He says, when you pass someone on the street and you don’t make eye contact with them, it’s out of guilt and shame. And you’re taking away the last piece of humanity that someone has when you don’t make eye contact. Knowing someone’s name and knowing their story gives them humanity.

The best way to get help and to end the encampments [is] by knowing people’s names, knowing their stories and knowing their humanity, not just clearing people out. The way communities are going to solve this is, one, by knowing people’s names, [and two], to Josh’s point, having data around knowing what the problem is, where people are succeeding, where they’re stuck. That’s really going to be the two things that I think can help us both big things— scaling, knowing data— and little things —knowing somebody’s name.

Hjartarson: I truly believe that a critical success factor is community-based decision-making. Needs will vary across cities, across neighborhoods, and empowering communities to get together to determine what the needs are in their community and how best to serve those needs is critical. When I talk to governments and policymakers, they’re often worried about their internal machinations and they’ll set up new departments and new programs. And that just layers new obligations onto the community. I challenge them on that thinking. These problems aren’t necessarily solved in cabinet offices—they’re solved at the local level. So, the answer to the question has to be, how do we enable?

I’d like to say a big thank you to Deloitte’s Josh Hjartarson and Lydia Murray for joining me today. I’d also like to thank those other contributors: Juha Kaakinen in Finland, Michelle Flynn from The Road Home, Maxine Pritchard MBE from HSBC, Mayor of Houston Sylvester Turner, and most of all those voices we heard from those living without a home: The voices of Michelle, Anthony, Cynthia, John, Serenity, Larry, Ed, Sean, Dennis and Brenda. There’s some good news: Brenda has since moved into a new home.

Thank you for listening to Government’s Future Frontiers from Deloitte Insights. Remember to follow and subscribe, so that you don’t miss an episode.

Next time we’re talking about cyberthreats. Just about everything we rely on—energy grids, communications systems, transport networks, banking systems, and most other things that we interact with on a daily basis—relies on connectivity. But that same connectivity can put all of those things we rely on at risk.

The world of cyberthreats blurs boundaries between the public and private sectors, and between personal misfortunes and potential societal disasters. So, it’s fitting that the public and private sectors are working together to confront these threats. From sharing information to training up the next generation of cyber protectors, governments, educational institutions and for-profit companies combine forces to face new threats head on.

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