Over the last 15 years there has been a radical change in the way that cities approach homelessness. For decades, cities had dealt with the issue by using geographic isolation and criminalization. Although these practices have not entirely been eradicated, they are joined by efforts to provide compassionate, comprehensive services with the goal of ending, not just ameliorating, homelessness. In general, policy change is slow but in the case of homelessness there has been a dramatic and fairly rapid shift in municipal policy, prompting the question of why cities have changed their approach. Through historical analysis, the dissertation suggests that cities have changed their approach to homelessness in response to federal incentives to develop 10-year plans to end homelessness. These plans require cities to engage in long-term, comprehensive planning with the goal of ending homelessness or chronic homelessness within the city over a ten year period. By developing a plan, cities can increase their scores for competitive federal homelessness funding; however, doing so has been entirely voluntary and not all cities have responded to the incentive. The diversity in responses to the 10-year plan incentive raises two questions that are at the heart of the dissertation: 1. What encourages cities to respond to federal incentives? 2. Do incentives to engage in relatively symbolic behaviors encourage cities to adopt the tangible policy changes that promote federal goals? I empirically evaluate these questions using a novel dataset of over 300 cities.In chapter 2 I suggest responses to federal incentives result from the interaction between local attention, capacity, and need. I test this idea in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 explores what encourages cities to respond to federal incentives. It argues that incentives are a form of cooperative federalism and as a result cities should respond to them when they receive a benefit from doing so; this benefit is most likely when the incentive helps meet local needs. As a result, cities should be most likely to respond to federal incentives by developing a 10-year plan when doing so helps them meet a fiscal, political or problem-based need. Analysis 10-year plan adoption finds that cities are most likely to develop plans when they are fiscally and legally dependent on higher level governments, when local ideology is consistent with compassionate care for the homeless, and when they face a more severe homelessness problem. Chapter 5 asks whether the act of developing a 10-year plan increases the likelihood that cities adopt three approaches shown to reduce homelessness: increasing supportive permanent housing, using conventional public housing services for the homeless, and adopting a housing first approach. The chapter suggests that planning can be a largely symbolic act and uses the symbolic policy literature to suggest that cities with increased long-term attention, more extensive capacity and increased oversight would be more likely to move beyond 10-year plan development to engage in substantive policy. The results are mixed but one consistent finding emerges: cities that adopt a 10-year plan are no more likely to engage in substantive practices than their counterparts without a plan. Despite the finding that 10-year plans are largely symbolic documents, the dissertation suggests that federal incentives have been successful in that they have helped change the conversation around homelessness and increased attention to the issue. Further, it suggests opportunities to improve the effectiveness of federal homelessness incentives for the future.
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