Homeless In Hotels

"One of my favorite experiences is related to the homeless. We have a number of homeless in Masschusetts; we spend about $130 million to care for the homeless. I was looking through the list of costs associated with our homeless program and there was one down there for hotels and it was in the tens of millions of dollars. And I said, what's that? And they said, well you have to understand if someone comes to a homeless shelter and if the homeless shelter is full, we have to put them up at a hotel. And I thought well I bet the word gets around. Homeless shelter's full: you go to the hotel. So I said why don't we make a small change to the program. Let's do this. Let's say that when someone comes to a homeless shelter and it's full and we have a number of people who come in dire circumstances, let's tell them we're going to let you into the shelter, but the person who's been in the shelter the longest, they're the one that's now going to go to the hotel. That little change had a pretty profound effect. Incentives are pretty powerful. You know how many hotel rooms we rent now? We used to rent 600 rooms a night. Now we rent zero rooms a night. And the tens of millions of dollars we've saved we've been able to use to help people get into permanent housing."

• Governor Mitt Romney, NH Federation of Republican Women's Lilac Dinner, Radisson Center of New Hampshire, Manchester, NH, 06-03-2005