Homelessness, systems thinking & the PRS

The Week in Housing 08/05/26

Huge thanks to Eriazel Makanhiwa and Gareth Redmond of Threshold for putting together today’s guest post, a very thoughtful take on the role of systems thinking in homelessness prevention. I’m also very excited to announce I’ll be launching my book later this month. I’m even more excited to announce that the launch will feature myself and Rory Hearne in conversation, facilitated by the wonderful Kitty Holland (Irish Times). It should be a great evening. It will take place in MOLI on the evening of Tuesday May 26th (I’ll share registration link here asap). Finally, I’ll be taking a break for the next couple of weeks to focus on end-of-term grading.

---

The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage are in the midst of developing Ireland’s first Homeless Prevention Framework. There is a very welcome commitment to use the Five-Stage typology of a homelessness Prevention in the Framework. Of course, Threshold as a national housing charity dedicated to preventing homelessness, has some additional thoughts and recommendations.

We have spent a lot of time thinking through the processes and mechanisms of what this framework might look like and we were particularly inspired by two papers. The first being a paper focused on the prioritisation of prevention by the UK based Institute for Government and the Centre for Homelessness Impact. The second being a paper on utilising systems thinking in homelessness policy by Ireland’s own Bob Jordan.

One of the particular points emphasised by Bob Jordan is that systems thinking is a learning practice rather than a technical fix, especially in policy environments under pressure.

He notes that systems thinking is successful when not tied to short-term thinking political cycles, siloed governance, performance targets that are focused on outputs not outcomes, and when it is resilient to media pressure.

Keeping the above in mind, Threshold believe that an effective homelessness prevention framework must move the policy focus from crisis response to upstream, preventative action. Homelessness, particularly among families, is not the result of a single event, but of interacting structural, administrative and social failures. A systems thinking approach provides the framework needed to address these failures in a coordinated, durable way.

The following are Threshold’s recommendations to move a systems thinking approach off the page and into real life action.

Prevention as a Systemic Objective

Homelessness prevention must be treated as a core outcome of the housing system, not an activity of secondary importance. This requires a clear, statutory definition of both homelessness and risk of homelessness that capture precrisis instability and hidden homelessness. Such definitions will ensure that early warning signals, rent arrears or eviction notices for example, trigger prevention interventions by the relevant bodies or authorities.

Without shared definitions and objectives, prevention policy will forever remain fragmented and reactive.

Understanding Pathways & Feedback Loops

Current data systems largely measure homelessness after it occurs, offering limited visibility into how households move from risk to crisis. A prevention‑led strategy must instead focus on flows, pathways, and feedback loops. What this means is collecting and analysing the necessary data to understand how insecurity in the private rental sector, inadequate income supports, and administrative barriers, for example, interact to bring about homelessness.

Systems thinking emphasises that missed early interventions compound over time, placing greater pressure on emergency accommodation, social services, and child welfare systems.

Data, Metrics & Learning Systems

Prevention cannot be managed or improved without meaningful measurement. A national prevention metrics framework should track outcomes such as tenancies sustained, evictions prevented, and housing stability following intervention, with data disaggregated by household type and need.

Importantly, data should support learning, not just accountability. Essentially, embedding feedback and feedforward loops that allow services and policymakers to adapt in real time as patterns of risk emerge.

Feedback loops are about learning from past and current performance and improving practice. Feedforward loops go a step further. They use emerging patterns and early warning signals to act before problems occur.

A hypothetical example of this would be that available data shows a rise in rent arrears in a specific area. So, before evictions spike, local authorities, statutory bodies and NGO’s could increase outreach or provide early financial advice. These types of interventions would prevent worse outcomes before they happen.

Upstream Intervention in the Private Rental Sector

For families, eviction from the private rental sector remains the primary pathway into homelessness. A prevention strategy must therefore prioritise security, affordability and stability in this sector.

A systems thinking approach shows that policy decisions can either support or weaken prevention efforts. Achieving alignment across Government Departments, as well as statutory and non-statutory organisations, is essential. This coordination should extend beyond housing and homelessness to include other sectors such as Social Protection, Health, and related areas.

For example, where a family loses employment and must transition onto social welfare and HAP, delays in accessing these supports can disrupt their ability to pay rent, leading to arrears, tenancy termination, and an increased risk of homelessness, highlighting how misalignment between systems can undermine prevention efforts.

Accessible Advice & Early Support

Independent housing advice and advocacy services function as critical leverage points within the system, intercepting risk before crisis occurs. These services translate complex rules into actionable pathways for households and help coordinate responses across agencies.

Sustained, long-term funding, combined with embedding referral pathways into the routine practices of key agencies, including schools, health services, Tusla, and community-based services such as GPs and Family Resource Centres, is essential to ensure that early engagement is deliberate and systematic, rather than left to chance.

Inter‑Agency Coordination & Local Authority Leadership

People at risk often navigate multiple systems simultaneously, yet responsibility for prevention is frequently fragmented. A systems approach requires clear ownership at local level through named prevention leads, standardised prevention protocols, and structured interagency case conferencing.

Local authorities are best placed to play this pivotal role as system integrators, aligning housing, welfare, family support and community services around a shared prevention goal.

Child‑Centred Decision‑Making

Housing instability harms children long before homelessness occurs. A child impact lens should be embedded across all housing and prevention decisions, recognising that education, health, and wellbeing systems absorb the downstream costs of housing failure.

From a systems perspective, protecting housing stability for children generates benefits across multiple policy domains and over the life course.

Cultural Shift Toward Prevention

Prevention requires more than new measures; it requires a cultural shift.

Systems thinking shines on light on how the discretion exercised by frontline workers, organisational incentives, and performance frameworks shape the behaviour of practitioners who encounter people who are at risk of homelessness. This can lead to varied responses and delays in interventions resulting people at risk of homelessness “falling through the net”. In practice, this can mean missed opportunities to build trust, respond early, and stabilise housing situations before crisis escalates.

Embedding prevention targets, learning loops, and accountability mechanisms can help shift practice away from gatekeeping and crisis management toward early, supportive engagement.

Example

A great example of systems thinking in homelessness prevention is the work presented by Erin Dalton, Director of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, at the Centre for Homelessness Impact’s Impact Forum 2025.

Dalton described how Allegheny County uses an integrated human services data warehouse, linking housing, child welfare, mental health, substance use, justice, employment and income‑support data, to identify households at heightened risk of eviction and homelessness before they enter the crisis stage.

Rather than relying on single indicators or point‑in‑time counts, the model focuses on patterns of interaction across systems, recognising homelessness risk as an emergent outcome of interacting structural pressures. Crucially, the aim of predictive analytics is not prediction for its own sake, but earlier, better‑targeted intervention, allowing scarce prevention resources (such as rental assistance and wrap‑around supports) to be directed where they are most likely to stabilise housing outcomes.

What distinguishes the Allegheny County approach as exemplary systems practice is its operational discipline and ethical governance. Predictive models are embedded in everyday decision‑making, not run in parallel to it, and are subject to external methodological and fairness reviews, transparency about assumptions, and continual refinement through learning loops.

Dalton emphasises that the data often reveals where financial assistance alone is insufficient, prompting different system responses for households facing complex needs, demonstrating that systems thinking can prevent simplistic or one‑size‑fits‑all interventions.

This use of data as a lever for learning, rather than a deterministic gatekeeping tool, illustrates how systems thinking can shift public services from reactive crisis response toward anticipatory, prevention‑led design, a lesson directly transferable to homelessness prevention strategies in other jurisdictions.

Summary

By aligning data, funding, legislation, and practice around early intervention and shared responsibility, a prevention strategy can reduce family homelessness, protect children, and deliver better outcomes at lower long term cost to the State.