‘Supportive housing’ hailed as key to helping homeless
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – In the 90 years since a Methodist philanthropist founded the Mary Elizabeth Inn as a rooming house for the city’s single women, the 88-room hotel has lodged immigrants and tourists, widows and retirees, students and victims of domestic violence. Today, the genteel, Edwardian-style residence club welcomes a new sort of guest: 25 homeless women, most with persistent mental health and substance abuse problems. Along with a room of their own and a shared bath, they get a case manager and access to computer training, fitness classes, a health clinic, and other intensive aid designed to keep them from slipping back onto the streets.
“I don’t think women should be in our shelter system,” said Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose administration is paying to move the women from a notorious basement dormitory in the city’s largest homeless shelter to the inn’s sorority-like setting. “A shelter isn’t the place to build community.”
The Mary Elizabeth’s new incarnation reflects the latest approach to reducing chronic homelessness. Coupling permanent rental units with on-site services from job counseling to child care, “supportive housing” is being embraced by the conservative Republican in the White House as well as San Francisco’s liberal Democratic mayor.
The Bush Administration is so enthused that it dedicated $200 million to the housing-plus-social services model in its latest budget proposal. A new charitable partnership has pledged $37 million toward creating 150,000 units of specialized, service-intensive housing for the chronically homeless; currently, there are about 75,000 units nationwide, according to the nonprofit Corporation for Supportive Housing.
Carla, 27, is exactly the type of person these programs target.
A former sex worker and crack user with diabetes and mental illness, she’s been staying in an emergency shelter while social workers prepare her to move into her own studio apartment in a building with on-site services, not far from a new clinic designed to provide for all the medical and psychiatric needs of 2,500 people in supportive housing.
But such transitions aren’t easy. Carla is reluctant to leave the shelter – she’s comfortable there and an apartment is new to her, unknown and scary, her nurse practitioner Tae-Wol Stanley explains while checking her blood sugar and bandaging up a wound.
“I got all my knowledge on the streets,” she says, describing a childhood spent turning tricks and selling drugs.
Introduced about a decade ago and given momentum by research showing it to be a cost-effective way to keep homeless people off the streets and out of jails and hospitals, supportive housing already has gained a foothold in New York, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Philadelphia, Seattle and Atlanta. Residents typically pay 30 to 50 percent of their social security or disability income on rent and are allowed to stay as long as they aren’t violent or destructive. Drug and alcohol use is discouraged, but usually not grounds for eviction.
Some units are in Single Room Occupancy hotels, others in public housing complexes or private apartment buildings. In Minneapolis, a group home offers counseling to 40 American Indians who were homeless due to severe alcoholism. In rural Allegan County, Mich., seven towns collaborate to provide support and home visits to 87 homeless, disabled and mentally ill residents.
San Francisco is swapping shelter beds and large cash handouts for supportive housing. By reducing the $460 monthly cash grants the city used to give to homeless adults to $59, and using much of that money for services, Newsom’s administration has secured more than 700 units of supportive housing since last spring, nearly the same number the city had created in the previous five years.
Supportive housing costs $30.88 a day on average, compared with $28.63 a night for a shelter, according to a nine-city survey conducted for the Corporation for Supportive Housing. In San Francisco, it cost $42.10 for supportive housing, compared to $28 in a shelter, $94 in jail and $2,030 in a hospital.
“It’s fiscally sound and it’s compassionate,” said Dariush Kayhan, San Francisco’s director of housing and homeless programs.
In the past, the chronically homeless had to be clean, sober and mentally stable before they were placed in housing, said Carol Wilkins, a policy director for the Corporation for Supportive Housing. Now, cities have the federal government’s blessing to use a “come-as-you-are” approach that puts a premium on getting the homeless into stable housing first, and working on their complex problems later.
“That you could actually take people who are visibly disturbed, living on the streets, house those folks and keep them safe and make them decent, responsible neighbors – that is a pretty new idea,” Wilkins said.
Stanley promises to buy headphones for Carla’s radio if she agrees to the move, and reminds her about her next appointment.
“Thanks, Doc,” she says. And then she’s back out on the street.