Corporation for Supportive Housing

The Supportive Housing Concept

Supportive housing is a successful, cost-effective combination of affordable housing with support services that help people live more stable, independent, and productive lives. Supportive housing works well for people who face the most complex challenges—individuals and families who are not only homeless, but who also have very low incomes and serious, persistent issues that may include substance use, mental illness, and HIV/AIDS.

One of supportive housing's most important features is that it is permanent housing. People who live in supportive housing sign leases and pay rent, just like their neighbors. Unlike shelters, which work well for emergencies and short-term situations, supportive housing aims to provide long-term housing solutions.

By providing tenants with stable housing—along with accessible and voluntary mental health, substance addiction, employment and other support services—supportive housing helps people find strength, dignity, and community. Formerly homeless tenants have testified to the success of supportive housing. As one supportive housing tenant summed [Page 86]it up as she accepted the first CSH Julie Sandorf award, “I’ve never won anything in my life before. No, wait, I did. I won my life back.”

Research sponsored by CSH and others has backed up these anecdotes. Studies have shown that supportive housing reduces tenants’ use of expensive, emergency health services; helps tenants find employment and reduces their dependence on entitlements; and provides needed stability for the treatment of mental illness.

For example, an evaluation of California's Health, Housing and Integrated Services initiative (Proscio 2000) found that once participants had lived in supportive housing for a year, their use of the costliest health and mental health systems decreased significantly. In examining tenants’ records one year prior to move-in and one year after, the study found a 57 percent reduction in emergency room visits; a 58 percent drop in the number of inpatient days; and a 100 percent decrease in the usage of public residential mental health program facilities.

CSH and its partner organizations have also proven that ending long-term homelessness is as fiscally responsible as it is humane. A University of Pennsylvania analysis of supportive housing for mentally ill homeless individuals in New York City (Culhane et al. 2002) that CSH helped to facilitate concluded that supportive and transitional housing created an average annual public savings of $16,282 by reducing the use of public services: 72 percent of savings resulted from a decline in the use of public health services; 23 percent from a decline in shelter use; and 5 percent from reduced incarceration of the homeless mentally ill. Researchers found that it costs essentially the same amount of money to house someone in stable, supportive housing as it does to keep that person homeless and stuck in the revolving door of high-cost crisis care and emergency housing.

...