ABSTRACT
High-rate shelter users are known as "frequent flyers", people who are in the shelters night after night after night. Probably no single line of research in the past thirty years has been so immediately consequential for national, state, and local policy with respect to homelessness as Dennis Culhane's studies of shelter utilization. This chapter reviews the original studies, their methodology, findings, and implications and earlier research by numerous scholars that anticipated the Culhane results but failed to see clearly the policy implications. It presents data from Central Florida that confirm the original findings in all important particulars and focuses on the homelessness policy that has emanated from this line of research, namely, "Housing First". Housing First could be considered a "low demand" permanent housing program. Chronically homeless people are placed in decent accommodations with wrap-around "on-demand" social services and are only required to behave themselves—they can even drink and do drugs so long as they are reasonably discreet about it.
