Policymaking and Caseload Dynamics: Homeless Shelters

Abstract

Many social problems can be understood as “conceptual caseloads”, e.g., people in poverty, and actual programmatic caseloads are a major, specific concern for policymakers and public administrators. Thus, a crucial and fairly general concern is how caseloads—whether conceptual or programmatic—can be reduced. To address this concern, officials often fall back on politically or intuitively attractive ideas—preventing people from entering caseloads, for example. Failure to incorporate caseload dynamics, however, may mean prevention and other caseload reduction policies will deliver much less than promised, and may cause caseloads to grow. In this paper, we first show how caseload size depends only on the number of entrants to a caseload and the rate at which people leave a caseload. With this framework in mind, we then address two common, seemingly appropriate policy responses: preventing entrants and hastening leaving. However, we show how too little is now known about homeless prevention to pin high hopes on its utility and that some social welfare problems, like homelessness, may be too inhospitable for prevention's logic. We then explain how allocating resources to hasten leaving is not as straightforward as policymakers have assumed but rather must recognize caseload dynamics to avoid unintended growth. We conclude by explaining some limits and opportunities in using caseload dynamics for policymaking.