Area of Expertise: Policy and Advocacy

Supportive housing is a proven approach to breaking the cycle of homelessness for people with serious mental illness and other disabilities. Supportive housing is a cost-effective approach that combines affordable housing with voluntary support services, enabling people to live with stability, autonomy, and dignity. While supportive housing is an effective approach for addressing homelessness, residents also need social support to live healthy lives and address loneliness, isolation, and barriers to maintaining their mental health.

Fountain House and CSH are exploring Community-Centered Housing (CCH), an innovative approach that integrates the clubhouse model’s social practice into supportive housing. Pioneered by Fountain House, social practice uses community engagement and social connection to help people recover from mental illness.

This policy brief illuminates early research findings from pilot programs, showing that Community-Centered Housing strengthens social connections, reduces loneliness, and enhances residents’ sense of purpose and wellbeing. To forge a path forward for expanding CCH, the brief recommends bringing the model to additional pilot sites, conducting rigorous evaluation, expanding workforce training, and educating the field about social practice and supportive housing integration.

This approach offers a chance to reimagine what housing can achieve. By embracing this model, we can drive meaningful transformation in the housing sector and create environments that support people living with serious mental illness and promote lasting recovery and stability.

Homelessness is rising nationwide, and recent policy proposals risk framing the issue through punitive measures rather than proven solutions. This resource provides evidence-based talking points to counter misconceptions, highlight effective strategies, and advocate for approaches that prioritize personal autonomy, fiscal responsibility, and long-term impact. Use these insights to promote community-based, voluntary support systems over costly, ineffective enforcement tactics.

A cost analysis developed by the Pennsylvania Supportive Housing Coalition

The Pennsylvania Supportive Housing Coalition’s Supportive Services workgroup has developed a new analysis using budget data from Pennsylvania providers to uncover how current funding structures impact service delivery.

This cost analysis identifies significant challenges that Pennsylvania providers face because of inadequate services funding. These challenges relate to provider wages, caseload size, administrative burdens, and other critical elements that must be addressed to provide high-quality services that keep people stably housed.

The growth of supportive housing over the last 30 years has been built on a foundation of research showing that it provides core benefits to people and communities. CSH compiled this list of selected literature on supportive housing from the last 20 years as a resource. Please review each source carefully to understand how to apply it to your work. Download a summary of outcomes in supportive housing including many of these listed sources by clicking here.

This one-pager provides five proven state actions to reduce unsheltered homelessness. In response to recent executive orders, these practical, evidence-based strategies for responding to unsheltered homelessness deliver measurable results.

This guide outlines five essential outcomes every successful supportive housing program should target, drawn from the larger CSH Quality Supportive Housing Standards. The Quality Standards provides a roadmap for creating and operating supportive housing that will best
achieve meaningful results. CSH encourages organizations to know their baseline performance regarding these outcomes and set ambitious goals to drive ongoing progress.

This critical resource will identify the need for the creation of 38,000 units of supportive housing, the anticipated cost of addressing this need, and recommendations for funding mechanisms that have been proven to expand the resources needed to create supportive housing opportunities.

H.R.1 is estimated to reduce federal spending on Medicaid by more than $1 trillion over ten years, and cause as many as ten million people to lose their health insurance.

The new law enacts policy and funding changes to key housing development financing tools: the Private Activity Bonds (PABs) and 4% Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) Program and the 9% LIHTC Program.

These recommendations encompass a statewide action plan to end homelessness and address Pennsylvania’s need for supportive housing. These recommendations incorporate feedback from the Pennsylvania Supportive Housing Coalition members along with core elements of other effective state plans on homelessness.