Supportive housing is a great way to help people who are struggling with serious challenges like mental illness, addiction, or chronic health problems. It combines affordable housing with helpful services to assist people in staying housed and healthy.
Who Can Benefit from Supportive Housing?
Supportive housing is particularly beneficial for individuals struggling with mental illness, substance abuse disorders, and other chronic health issues. These conditions can make it challenging to maintain stable housing without additional support.
Homelessness can exacerbate these problems, making it difficult to access adequate treatment and move toward recovery. Supportive housing has also shown promise in helping other vulnerable groups, such as:
- Seniors trying to age in place and avoid nursing homes
- Families at risk of having their children placed in foster care
- Youth aging out of the foster system
- People with developmental disabilities
How Does Supportive Housing Work?
Supportive housing is more than just affordable housing. Its success lies in the combination of permanence, affordability, a core set of supportive services, and an emphasis on client choice–
- Housing is permanent and affordable, with tenants typically paying no more than 30% of their income toward rent. They have the same rights and responsibilities as other renters.
- A multidisciplinary team of professionals, such as mental health specialists, nurses, and case managers, provides comprehensive services tailored to each tenant’s needs. Services are aimed at helping tenants remain stably housed.
- Services are voluntary but assertive. While participation is not a condition of staying housed, providers proactively engage with clients to offer support.
- Tenants live independently in the community with full access to amenities, and their choice is prioritised in both housing and services.
- Supportive housing has low barriers to entry and does not require treatment or sobriety as a precondition.
Supportive Housing Gets Results
Numerous studies have found that supportive housing:
- Helps people with disabilities maintain stable housing. Even among those who have been homeless for long periods, at least 75-85% of tenants remained housed after 1-2 years.
- Reduces the use of costly crisis services. With stable housing and support, people have fewer ER visits, hospitalisations, and incarceration, often offsetting the cost of providing supportive housing.
- May improve health outcomes. Limited research suggests supportive housing can increase survival rates for people with HIV/AIDS and may reduce substance use and psychiatric symptoms.
- Can keep vulnerable families together. For homeless families involved in the child welfare system, supportive housing has been shown to help reunify children in foster care with their families.
We Need More Supportive Housing
Despite its proven effectiveness, the supply of supportive housing falls far short of the need. Policymakers could expand it through several strategies:
- Increasing rental assistance and development resources. This could include expanding the Housing Choice Voucher program, with a portion targeted to supportive housing, growing smaller programs like homeless assistance grants, and directing more housing development subsidies to supportive housing projects.
- Reinvesting the savings generated by supportive housing. By carefully targeting high-cost users of crisis services, states and localities may be able to reinvest the resulting savings into additional rental subsidies to create more supportive housing.
- Leveraging Medicaid to fund supportive services. Many services are reimbursable under Medicaid, but few states have fully tapped this potential. Expanding Medicaid in states that haven’t yet done so, covering a broader set of housing-related services, and better using managed care could boost services funding.
- Accurately targeting supportive housing for those who truly need it. Standardised assessments can help match people with the right level of support and create flow in the system by moving tenants to less intensive options if their needs decline.
By expanding the availability of supportive housing, we can ensure that some of the most vulnerable members of society get the help they need to lead stable, healthy lives in the community. The evidence is clear that it works – now we need to scale up this proven solution.