Toolkit for Developing and Operating Supportive Housing
Understanding Permanent Supportive Housing
Supportive housing is a successful, cost-effective combination of affordable housing with services that helps people live more stable, productive lives. Supportive Housing is permanent housing - people who live in supportive housing sign leases and pay rent, just like their neighbors. Further, supportive housing is a proven, cost-effective way to end homelessness for people who face the most complex challenges. By providing chronically homeless people with a way out of expensive emergency public services and back into their own homes and communities, supportive housing not only improves the lives of its residents but also generates significant public savings.
The documents in this section provide an overview of supportive housing, including identifying its defining features and exploring key principles and elements of successful supportive housing projects:
Tools for Understanding Permanent Supportive Housing:
About Supportive Housing: This document provides an overview of the definition of supportive housing, the need for supportive housing, and research that has documented its effectiveness.
What is Supportive Housing?: This document provides CSH’s perspective on the role of supportive housing in addressing homelessness, the priority on creating supportive housing for persons experiencing long-term homelessness, and the range of effective housing models.
Key Principles of Supportive Housing: This document reviews core principles that providers need to consider in order to provide high-quality housing that can address the housing stability and health and human service needs of their tenants. These principles include housing affordability, safety and comfort, and services that emphasize residential stability and empowering tenants to live independent lives.
Five Elements of Successful Supportive Housing: This document highlights the five elements without which supportive housing projects cannot succeed – People, Place, Support Services, Money, and Organization
Sample Goals for Supportive Housing: This document provides examples of goals and/or outcomes that supportive housing providers often establish for their housing projects - and measuring success in achieving such goals is an important strategy for demonstrating the benefits of supportive housing to the community.
Service Philosophies in Supportive Housing: This document briefly examines the philosophical approaches often found within successful supportive housing programs and informing all aspects of their operations, including philosophies emphasizing housing first, voluntary services, consumer-driven program design, and approaches to working with people with substance use issues.
Toolkit for Ending Long-Term Homelessness: This document provides a description of CSH’s Toolkit for Ending Long-Term Homelessness, which highlights the most promising practices for serving people who have been homeless for months and years on end, including profiles of supportive housing programs and projects across the country that are successfully housing people who have been homeless for the long term, interactive photo tours of eight of these projects, and sample documents.
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