The Family Homelessness Systems Initiative was a $60 million comprehensive systems change initiative aimed at reducing family homelessness in King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties by improving the coordination, efficiency, and effectiveness of the family homeless housing and service delivery systems. The Initiative, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was launched in 2009 in response to the persistent number of families experiencing homelessness in the Puget Sound Area and the difficulty families experience in successfully exiting homelessness.

Westat, a national research organization, conducted an independent evaluation of the Initiative, including an examination of the effects of the systems changes on families’ experiences and outcomes. The evaluation included a Family Impact Study, a quasiexperimental examination of the effects of the systems changes on families served in the system over an 18-month period compared to families served prior to the systems reform. Results indicated that after systems reform, more families accessed housing, they accessed it more quickly, and they spent more nights in that housing over an 18-month period than families served prior to systems reform. Families served after reform spent less time in shelter, but more time in unsheltered situations. Returns to homelessness in both cohorts among families who entered housing was about 10 percent in a one-year period, and families in both cohorts moved approximately three times (Rog et al., 2021).

The current report provides a descriptive exploratory 30-month follow-up of a subset of families included in the 18-month study—those families assigned to rapid re-housing and those assigned to shelter for their initial assistance. Rapid re-housing is an intervention designed to help people experiencing homelessness move quickly from homelessness into permanent housing and to prevent future episodes of homelessness (U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness [USICH], 2016).

The study was conducted both to provide an indication of how families fared longer-term and to see if there were differences among families who were assigned to different interventions as their initial assistance. Because it is not a randomized study and families were selected for these interventions, differences in outcomes may be due to individual family differences, despite our efforts to statistically control for those differences. The findings nevertheless offer insights into the experiences families had and the supports that may help foster stability.