Permanent Supportive Housing

What is it?

Permanent supportive housing is permanent community-based housing for individuals with “wrap-around” supportive services including case management for various facets of life. These can include health issues (including mental health and substance abuse), job preparation and search assistance, personal financial management, opportunities for socialization with peers and others.

Who is being served?

Chronically homeless individuals are being served. HUD, HHS and the VA all define a chronically homeless individual as "an unaccompanied homeless individual with a disabling condition who has either been continuously homeless for a year or more, or has had at least four episodes of homelessness in the past three years." The VA estimates that, of all homeless vets (not just chronically homeless), 45% suffer from mental illness and more than 70% have alcohol and other drug abuse issues.

According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, approximately 44,000 to 64,000 veterans were chronically homeless in 2005.

What resources are available and where are they coming from? Public resources? Private resources?

The vast majority of resources for permanent supportive housing for vets come from the federal government. The primary source of funding for chronically homeless veterans is through a joint HUD/VA program called HUD-VA Supportive Housing (HUD-VASH). The HUD-VASH program provides rental subsidies and tie those subsidies to wrap-around supportive case-management services. Ten thousand vouchers were approved and funded in FY 2008, and an additional ten thousand were approved and funded in FY 2009.

The vouchers are permanent housing subsidies, usually attached to the veteran, and the vouchers fund a portion of housing (generally, the portion of rent above 30% of income, capped by the fair market rent for the area) and a supportive case management services component provided by the VA. An additional ten thousand vouchers have been released for federal FY2009. No additional funding has been proposed in the President's FY2010 budget, but Congress may appropriate funds regardless. Each release of ten thousand vouchers costs $75M.

Who are the organizations providing these and related services?

New York: Albany Housing Coalition, Black Veterans for Social Justice, Jericho Project

Nationally: Swords-to-Plowshares, Corporation for Supportive Housing

What is not being done that should be done?

While vouchers have been distributed, veterans have run into significant problems in using the vouchers to access apartments. Of ten thousand vouchers distributed in 2008, less than four thousand veterans were able to use the vouchers in the first ten months of operation. Barriers include credit and employment history problems, discrimination, and insufficient inspectors to perform required apartment inspections prior to lease signing. A current push to "project-base" the vouchers could alleviate these problems by dedicating vouchers to buildings geared toward supportive housing for homeless veterans. Project-based vouchers are dedicated to a particular location and encourage developers to build or extensively rehabilitate buildings by eliminating the portability of the vouchers, thereby eliminating much of their risk.

Additionally, there are simply not enough HUD-VASH vouchers to house all chronically homeless veterans. Approximately twenty thousand new vouchers are in circulation to meet the needs of 44,000 to 64,000 chronically homeless veterans.

This is, to a large extent, a policy problem. At $75 million per year for every 10,000 vouchers, an additional $150-300 million annually would be needed to close the gap.

Where are the opportunities for innovation?

The “Housing First” model appears to have won the academic and policy debate as the preferred solution for housing the chronically homeless. For veterans, there tends to be a preference toward sober housing, which differs from the "Housing First" model.

The Housing First model is premised on the theory that chronically homeless individuals need housing before all else, and that mental health and substance abuse issues cannot effectively be addressed until an individual has a permanent, stable home.

What kinds of return on investment can we get?