Federal Incentives and Urban Realities: The role of politics and planning capacity in local homelessness governance

This paper investigates policy responses to homelessness across cities in the United States. As levels of unsheltered homelessness have continued to rise and new vulnerabilities to homelessness emerge amidst multiple crises facing major U.S. cities, the treatment of persons experiencing homelessness and the policy responses of cities to this crisis have gained renewed attention in the United States and beyond. The perceived inability of cities to adequately address rising levels of homelessness raises larger questions about inequality in wealthy economies and the ability of local governments to respond to urgent social needs. However, while the local level is responsible for the provision and management of homelessness services, policy choices are shaped by actors at different levels of government, with the federal government increasingly positioning itself as a strategic planning entity. Conceptualizing the urban environment as a site of governance, this paper studies the role of external pressures, particularly federal policy incentives, in shaping municipal policymaking. Using an original dataset on local adoption of three federal policy incentives, this paper suggests that cities generally follow federal policy impetus in this policy field, but vary with regard to adoption speed. To understand what drives this variation, this paper uses a multi-method approach– event history analysis and qualitative case studies–to analyze the political, institutional, and contextual factors affecting the speed of adoption at the local level. The focus on policymaking at the municipal level fills an important gap in the academic literature on homelessness, which thus far neglects the complex policy processes at play and an assessment of patterns of policy responses across the United States. Further, understanding the political, institutional, and contextual factors affecting the speed of policy adoption allows for an analysis of the local conditions enabling intergovernmental cooperation more broadly. Centering the city in investigating the dynamics of policy development and adoption in multi-level systems of governance contributes insights for a variety of policy fields, and allows for a nuanced understanding of the complexity of policy making at the municipal level and the role of individual actors, local conditions, and intergovernmental pressures in determining policy choice.