Inside SCC’s counterintuitive Housing First eligibility system

The SCC utilizes the Vulnerability Index–Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool (VI-SPDAT)—a survey on one’s risk factors—to decide where to place unhoused locals. The higher severity of issues, the more permanent housing they are awarded, according to the County. In City Journal, Judge Glock unpacks why subsidizing substance abuse and criminal behavior through the VI-SPDAT only exacerbates local homelessness crises.

The HUD mandates led a nonprofit group, OrgCode, to create the infelicitously named Vulnerability Index–Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool, or VI-SPDAT (pronounced vee-eye spi-dat), which local governments nationwide adopted. In a typical VI-SPDAT survey for single homeless adults, a homeless person can accumulate “points” toward free housing. He can get a point if he has “run drugs for someone” or “shared a needle.” He gets another point if his drug abuse got him evicted from an apartment. There’s another bonus point for taking medication other than “the way the doctor prescribed,” or selling the medication. For crime, the system awards a point if the homeless person has tried to harm someone in the last year, another for being the “alleged perpetrator of a crime,” and yet another for landing in a drunk tank, jail, or prison. If the person does enough drugs and commits enough crimes, he can get six total points. With enough time on the streets, he can get to the necessary eight points toward a free house, without showing any other issues, apart from criminal behavior and drug abuse.

For families—almost always, single mothers—the scoring system rewards both drug and child abuse. Beyond the usual substance-use points, mothers get a point if children are frequently truant. They get a bonus point if their child spends two or more hours per day without any responsible adult around. Incredibly, a mother can also get a bonus point if child protective services has removed one or more of her kids. Having “two or more planned activities each week,” such as going to the library or park, is a negative on their benefits score.

A benefits system that rewards drug abuse, crime, and child abuse should collapse after public exposure, right? Yet the system came under attack only after tenuous accusations of racism. Activists argued that not enough minorities were getting into housing. Earlier this year, the creator of VI-SPDAT issued a mea culpa, calling for an end to the putatively racist program and for accelerating “activities to improve approaches that further promote racial and gender equity.” Though the Fair Housing Act forbids rewarding housing based on race, HUD in 2020 had already said that cities should change their scoring system to “dismantle embedded racism in [scoring] and prioritization processes” and find ways to get more minorities enrolled.

Now, as a consequence, many states and cities provide their own scoring systems, often after adjusting the scoring to emphasize questions to which black people are, supposedly, more likely to answer yes. Under the Massachusetts “Vulnerability Assessment Tool,” a homeless individual gets four points for agreeing that “I am currently using alcohol or drugs and not in recovery” but only one point if he has “been in recovery for more than one year.” The individual gets an extra two points if he has had an overdose or alcohol poisoning in the past 12 months. In Tacoma, Washington, the government says that the scoring system should focus on getting housing for those with “active substance use,” “frequent criminal justice interactions,” and, ideally, a “felony.” San Francisco asks if applicants have “ever had to use violence to keep yourself safe”; answering affirmatively yields bonus points for a new house. In all these places, getting into recovery or refraining from violence is almost fatal for an applicant’s chances for housing and benefits.

This article originally appeared in City Journal. Read the whole thing here.

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