A/HRC/31/54 numbers may perpetuate exclusion and invisibility and fail to identify changes in the nature or experience of homelessness. 72. For this reason, the Special Rapporteur underlines the critical importance of qualitative evidence, including, for example, oral testimony, photographs or videos. A human rights-based measurement of homelessness should focus on prevention and on addressing underlying causes, and qualitative information capturing actual experiences often reveals more about how to prevent or solve it than numbers alone. 65 It is also vital to understand the trajectories into and out of homelessness, with longitudinal analysis of how people become homeless, how long they are homeless and how they escape from it to supplement point-in-time counts. 73. A human rights approach to effective measurement must involve genuine consultation with stakeholders. For some groups, statistical invisibility or being excluded from a census is experienced as marginalization and likely to lead to neglected needs in programmes and legislation. For other groups, however, such as street-connected young people or irregular migrants, being identified by government authorities may be threatening. Homeless people are best placed to ensure that methods of measurement are accurate and inclusive and at the same time sensitive to their circumstances. VIII. Strategic policy responses to homelessness 74. The Special Rapporteur’s consultations suggested that, while effective policy responses depend on particular circumstances, effective strategies must always be multipronged, engage a range of policies and programmes and address simultaneously social exclusion and housing deprivation. Most importantly, strategies must be led by stakeholders, combining social mobilization with legislative and policy reform. 75. The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has focused on the need for comprehensive housing strategies to address homelessness, framed around the right to housing and ensuring monitoring and accountability with goals, timelines and complaints procedures. Similarly, in the case of street children, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights advocates a holistic approach that recognizes rights as interdependent and interconnected, through a coordinated approach across government departments and with the involvement of family and community. 66 76. Housing First has recently emerged as a dominant model for responses to homelessness in countries such as Belgium, Denmark, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The model is straightforward, providing chronically homeless people, for example, those with psychosocial disabilities, with housing and support as needed.67 There are obvious benefits of keeping people in their communities as opposed to providing treatment services without housing, and this model offers easily measured outcomes. At the same time, concerns have been raised that Housing First may not serve as a generalized model as it tends to focus on 65 66 67 18 Institute of Global Homelessness, “A global framework for understanding and measuring homelessness” (2015), available from http://works.bepress.com/dennis_culhane/188/. See A/HRC/19/35, para. 30. Lars Benjaminsen, “Policy review update: results from the Housing First-based Danish homelessness strategy”, European Journal of Homelessness, vol. 7, No. 2 (December 2013), available from www.feantsaresearch.org/IMG/pdf/lb_review.pdf.