Benefits of Supportive Housing: Changes in Residents' Use of Public Housing. Draft Report
Description:
In California, as across the United States, homelessness is both a complex and expensive social problem. Nonprofit and government agencies have been experimenting for over 20 years on ways to respond to the needs of "long-term" homeless individuals: those who cannot, on the whole, find their way out of homelessness with routine or short-term help. Frequently mentally ill, using drugs and alcohol, and living with chronic health conditions, these individuals eke out a marginal existence on the streets, cycling through hospitals, jails and the lives of anxious relatives and friends. The long-term homeless population incurs significant public expense, while receiving services that are often costly crisis responses rather than long term solutions. In 1994, the Corporation for Supportive Housing (CSH), a national nonprofit organization that now has offices throughout California, convened a group of housing agencies and local public health officials in San Francisco, to look for solutions to long-term homelessness and its crushing effect on public health costs. They agreed that permanent supportive housing - affordable, long-term rental housing linked with flexible social and health services – can offer a way of reaching people with recurrent substance use issues and those reluctant or unready to participate consistently in mental health treatment. At a minimum, such housing can provide a safer place for homeless individuals to live, with constant exposure to opportunities for better health and recovery. Moreover, the group theorized that this model of housing could reduce, if not eliminate, high public costs associated with ineffectual treatment and re-treatment, arrest and release, hospitalization and discharge, and on and on.(abstract from the document)
Type of Resource:
Report
Publication Date:
2004
Location:
Sacramento