MDHI Response to Common Sense Institute Newest Report
FOR RELEASE ON: October 21, 2022
CSI REPORT ON HOMELESSNESS INACCURATE AND PURPOSEFULLY MISLEADING
Report Overestimates Per Person Costs and Continues Misrepresentation on Spending in Region, Purposefully Misleading the Public
[Denver, CO – October 21, 2022]: The report issued by the Common Sense Institute (CSI) is an inaccurate and misleading look at the region’s spending on homelessness.
The report issued today by the Common Sense Institute once again misrepresents spending on homelessness. “MDHI identified several key inaccuracies to CSI during the creation of this report,” said Dr. Jamie Rife, Executive Director of the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative (MDHI). “However, the researchers chose to release the report and include these inaccuracies, knowing they would lead to inflated per person spending and misinformation in the public,” added Rife.
The following are some of the most glaring inaccuracies contained within the report:
The report, by the authors’ own admission, includes spending and costs related to people in housing and other programs unrelated to homelessness. This leads to the report not being about homelessness, but rather the cost of poverty, housing instability, food insecurity, healthcare costs, and homelessness in the region. Naming the report “Homelessness in Metro Denver” is purposefully misleading and inaccurate.
To obtain the cost per person, the authors added the costs of permanent housing, homelessness services, healthcare, and programs related to housing and food insecurity over several different years, added them up and divided by the number of people experiencing homelessness and those housed in permanent housing on a single night. Again, this is misleading. The report, once again, fails to define an actual population for the calculations.
Spending is still counted twice or three times as in past reports, leading to inflated costs. The authors failed to account for how funds flow between the federal, state, local governments, and nonprofits. MDHI’s own budget, included in the report, is evidence of this as our organization serves as a pass through for funding. The revenue and expenditures are included in our 990s as well as the organizations we fund.
The report also overestimates the number of employees and volunteers operating in the homelessness system. This is harmful to the providers and organizations that work diligently each day, in the face of incredible challenges, to serve those experiencing homelessness.
“It is incredibly disappointing that even after several conversations with CSI to attempt to strengthen the methodology in this report, they chose to continue to mislead the public with false information,” said Rife. “Homelessness is complex with individuals having a variety of needs at varying costs. For example, our data show that in the third quarter of this year, the average assistance via our Housing Stability Flexible Fund was a mere $975 to either prevent homelessness or rehouse a household in our region. This is a sharp contrast to the numbers included in this report and demonstrates the wide range of costs, depending on the need of the inviduals and families.”
The public deserves information that is accurate. MDHI suggests the following resources to gain an accurate picture of homelessness in our region as well as solutions that work:
MDHI’s State of Homelessness Report
DOLA’s Making Homelessness History Playbook
###
About The Organization
MDHI is the Metro Denver Continuum of Care, the regional system that coordinates services and housing for people experiencing homelessness. This includes prevention/diversion, street outreach, emergency shelter, transitional housing, rapid rehousing, and permanent supportive housing. MDHI works closely with each county in its continuum (Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas, and Jefferson) to build a homeless crisis response system that gets people back into housing as quickly as possible.