So if you give people money they'll endeavor to tell you precisely what they think you want to hear. I would be much more impressed if this wasn't based solely on self-reported results.
I know, right? She did all that just so she could give her social workers the feedback they wanted to hear! Those liberals are so dastardly!
The self reports might be totally true, but the study isn't as good as it might be.
They were going to get the money for the fixed period unconditionally. That was the point.
There is a kind of people that function by finding edge-cases, questioning the results and posing uneasy questions when presented with a situation. Some might call them "haters", or nit-pickers, but I think their way of thinking is useful to make sure we're not just being fed feel-good make-believe.
It's not good enough to prove that the solution to the problem works for one side. It could create a problem elsewhere, and easily a bigger problem than you had before.
It's definitely not a good enough answer to give people $1k and essentially ask them: did you like getting $1k?
That's not what happened. This is what they did:
> Oregon’s results confirm what we saw in New York: When you cover the real cost of shared housing directly for two years — and pair it with support — young people stay housed
That's very light on details.
I would hope we can assume with a non-trivial sample size that you will find at least some success cases.
That should not surprise anyone. It matters: how often did it pay off (not answered), how much did it pay off (housed after is a start, for how long, what other improvements would be good to know), was it worth it (presumably we could've given them $10M per month and got similar results, which clearly would not have been worth it), and how can you prove it doesn't create a worse problem elsewhere (the hard part).
People like to just assume that if you give people money there's no hidden side effects elsewhere. Giving money is good. Plain and simple. There can't be any bad involved. Well, there can.
Because, imo, that's the headline result - 94% is a great success rate.
But the real question for me is what happens 6 months to a year after the funding ends.