“Prima la casa” introduces the Italian approach to Housing First approach, which proposes an innovative method to contrast poverty and severe adult marginalization. The approach, which arose in the early nineties in New York and then spread to Europe, was a fio.PSD  initiative and becomes the object of experimentation for a network of organizations belonging to the Housing First Italia network. Objectives and results of the experimentation, collected with a monitoring and evaluation activity that has accompanied the entire process, are here analysed combining research methods and tools that refer to the different disciplines of the Scientific Committee that has supervised the initiative.

The text is divided into three parts: the first describes the experience; the second presents the methodology and tools adopted for the evaluation; the third illustrates the main analysis activities carried out with reference to the impact of experimentation on beneficiaries, operators, places and institutional and territorial contexts of application.

This work is aimed at professionals, scholars, operators and politicians, students who are working on housing and opportunities to tackle innovation in policies to fight extreme poverty.

Paolo Molinari, sociologist, is a senior researcher at the Institute of Economic and Social Research of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Social Enterprise (IRES FVG) with decades of experience in research and teaching activities in sociological subjects. He dealt with social policies, social inclusion, planning and social evaluation of social information systems development.

Anna Zenarolla, PhD in Sociology, Social Service and Education Sciences, is a contract professor of Social Research Methodology at the University of Padua and of sociological subjects at the University of Udine and Trieste. He deals with issues related to the evaluation of services, poverty and social information systems.