What do homeless people need? Homes.

In discussions of poverty’s ills and cures, it doesn’t take long for the subject of root causes to come up. Not everyone agrees what those root causes are, of course—or whose fault they are. But it’s often taken for granted that you can’t just tackle a presenting problem directly; you have to go for the root, whatever it is.

This certainly isn’t always wrong, but it does have a way of obscuring simple, obvious solutions. People don’t have enough money for basic expenses? Jobs are a huge part of the answer, of course, and subsidies for food, energy bills, and other essentials help a ton. But there’s also a strong case for just giving people money—if only it wasn’t so objectionable to our root-cause, spend-smart mindset. Money, after all, is the most straightforward answer to the question, “What do poor people need?”

Homeless people need homes. It’s often not the only thing they need, but it’s the most urgent one. By now there is more than 20 years of research that supports “housing first,” a model in which the homeless are first given a place to live and then offered additional services, but not as a condition for staying there. The Bush administration shifted the federal government’s efforts toward a housing first approach, an initiative furthered under Obama; numerous American cities have moved in the same direction.