Journal Article #1
Harkness, Joseph, Sandra J. Newman, and David Salkever. “The cost-effectiveness of independent housing for the chronically mentally ill: do housing and neighborhood features matter?” Health Services Research, Oct. 2004.

This article analyzes the ways that housing affects persons with chronic mental illness, or CMI. The government and private sectors have very little information to use when deciding how to distribute housing resources to people with CMI. Because there are around 4.6 million people with CMI who live in the community, because of the harsh life that faces a mentally ill homeless person, and because of the high costs of mental health services for CMI patients, the way that the mentally ill is housed is an important topic. This article looks at 670 people with CMI that live in various types of independent housing within their community. The types vary by housing structure, the makeup of the other tenants, and the conditions of the neighborhood. The analysis focuses on the effects of various living conditions on mental health service costs and residential instability, with particular interest in discovering whether or not the investment in higher standards of living conditions pays for itself in terms of lower mental health service costs.

If there is a correlation between improved living conditions and decreased mental health costs, this correlation has been posited by the work of Earls and Nelson, who intimate that improved quality of housing can make it easier for long-term mental patients to meet “pain-avoidance needs.”

The results of the research indicated that improved building quality leads to a reduction in mental health services costs by reducing residential instability. Having other residents in the same building with CMI tended to have a small, but noticeably positive effect as well. However, poverty in the neighborhoods, or even in the same buildings, as patients with CMI did not have any negative effect on mental health service costs. Therefore, those looking to expend resources to house the mentally ill could find locations in poorer neighborhoods without hurting the patients (insert lecture/reading usability here).

Journal Article #2
Nichols, Laura, and Barbara Gault. “The implications of welfare reform for housing and school instability.” The Journal of Negro Education, Winter 2003.

This article discusses the results of studies on the housing outcomes of welfare recipients, with an eye towards determining the ways that welfare reform could affect housing instability – which has a domino effect on school instability. Because there is limited research on the effects of housing and child outcomes, and because there is a shortage of affordable housing for the poor, the authors suggest that housing instability will continue to plague poor families and the school systems as well. MORE…