Case Study Boston Homeless Care

Problem Statement: Lyndia Downie, Director of Pine Street Inn in Boston, Ma., faced with ever decreasing budgetary constraints, is tasked with facilitating a paradigm shift in the future of operations within the Boston Homeless care industry. She must convince the Board of Directors that the corporation can best accomplish its mission of helping the homeless in Boston by providing less of the more expensive emergency shelter beds and more of the slightly more cost effective longer term less concentrated housing facilities. (Varley, 2013, pp. 1-17)
Hypothesis: A majority of those utilizing the Boston Pines facility are being serviced in the most expensive manner and redirecting the service model to address this population will allow the facility
These costs are presented in the form of annualized numbers with percentage breakdowns by organizational unit. The annual budget at the end of 2004 was $27.5MM. This was comprised of 46% Shelter bed cost, 18% transitional bed cost, and 16% permanent housing cost/bed. Assigning an annualized per bed cost is required to complete this analysis. The breakdown of beds available in 2004 is 715 shelter beds (450 emergency and 265 transitional) and 280 beds in permanent housing. Taking the weighted average of shelter bed cost against the amount of annual budget spent per shelter bed leaves $24,615.38/shelter bed cost per year and $15,714.29/housing bed per year. An alternate cost per bed calculation can be made that would probably be more deterministic of actual operational costs, by assessing the overall utilization data provided in the study (Varley, 2013, p. 9) indicating that of the 75% of total shelter bed population reviewed only 44% were used over the two year period. (171905/2)/(((450+265)*365)*.75) Weighting this calculation out on a per bed bases gives you a more realistic $56,054.22/shelter bed used cost. Now that a base cost per type of bed has been calculated and regardless of which bed cost you use, the projected savings incurred by increasing the housing beds
15) the utilization rates must be examined closely. After moving 80% of long term occupants into long term housing and reducing the shelter bed population to 420, Pines still has 153,300 bed nights for emergency shelter needs. If the study occupancy is used as a model of usage approx. 107,500/year ((171,905/2)*1.25), a calculation can be made using an optimistic estimate of 21,500 homeless that will arrive on annual basis with short term needs (107.500*.2) or using a more pessimistic 43,000 (107,500*.4) as demand on nightly emergency shelter beds, still leaves Pine with an excess annual capacity of 110,000/bed nights